Freud's Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis by Rubén Gallo (review)

"Freud loved girls in Spanish and boys in German," writes the author of this rigorously disciplined yet wildly exuberant book. The epitaph phrase about love in Freud's "Bisexual" or "Bi-curious" manner amounts to a post mortem signature in whose traces proper names outlive their own signatories, who are thus transformed into actors entwined in their mutual afterlives (192). Entwined "doggie style" (192) by canine signature in this case are Sigmund Freud (as Cipión) and his adolescent pen-lover-in-Spanish (or castellano/germano: "No mano otra toque esta carta"), Eduard Silberstein (as Berganza); a couple who in Gallo's Eros-biased book is bonded as never before. In a book as remotely intimate with deconstruction as Venus and Mars are with the gender biases in control of planet Earth, Gallo has composed, illustrated, and scripted a Carte postale on how to do things with Mexico upon Freud's analytical altar of love.

One such altar concerns Freud's Moses as acclimated in Mexico through the work of Frida Kahlo and Octavio Paz. Influenced by Freud's speculations on the dialectics between Eros and Thanatos, Paz would fix the birth of the nation of Mexico on the indelible injury caused by native colonized rebirth through rape. Instead of the murdered and unbearable primal father Egyptian Moses being replaced by a newer and bearable and Jewish-cloned Moses, as in Freud, the raped native mother Malinche becomes a single wound never healed in its injured sustenance of religion as endurable obsession.

Paz returned to the scene of original maternal guilt created in El laberinto de la soledad (1950) when he argued in Posdata's"Crítica de la pirámide" (1970) that the iconic love altar in Mexico takes a pyramid shape as the site of human sacrifice. Gallo reexamines the Mexican fate of Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1937) through the hitherto unexplored relationship between Frida Kahlo, Freud, and Octavio Paz. Kahlo read Freud's book in 1943 and painted her small mural-like Moses in 1945. The Freud Moses material was further illustrated in Kahlo's Diary by means of sketches and graffiti-style captions in which the European fixation upon monogamous Akhenaton and Nefertiti is refashioned: "Pareja extraña del país del punto y la raya. Ojo-Único casó con la bellísima Neferisis [ . . . ] nacióles un hijo de rara faz y llamóse Neferúnico. Siendo éste el fundador de la ciudad comúnmente llamada Lokura" (87). Kahlo added brother "Neferdós" to her polymorphous Akhenaton cluster of dynastic self-portraits and captions. Gallo regards as avant la lettre "postcolonial" and "multiculturalist" Frida's alteration of Freud's Oedipal account of monotheism's birth: "Can the subaltern gods speak?" asks Rubén looking at Frida's painting. Indeed, signatures in first name may come into play, when, in polymorphous shapes, gods and goddesses multiply and twist patriarchies into compromising positions. For there is nothing farther from Freud's celebration of Akhenaton's austere or imageless iconoclasm: nothing ostensibly more alien to "I am that I am" Yahweh—yet more uncannily and neighborly rooted in Hebraic Judaism—than Frida's plural and Malinche-like self-enshrinement in Mexico's Imperial Egypt, beyond Freud's grasp and Octavio Paz's, and under Rubén's scribal rubric.

The book's two-part design begins with "Freud in Mexico," in which Gallo examines the appropriation of psychoanalysis by various Mexican intellectuals and institutions. Each of four chapters (on Salvador Novo, Kahlo, Paz, Samuel Ramos, and the Benedictine monk Gregorio Lemercier) is followed by a "Free Association" pendant in which salient aspects of the preceding chapter are remixed, capped, and yet in provocative ways uncapped for prolonged further reflection. The chapter on Salvador Novo's taxicab and Freud-authenticated don Juanism as "a 1920s poster boy of metrosexual aesthetics" represents a virtuoso piece of queering the already queer of such persuasion that by the time one gazes at Manuel...