Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (review)

This book falls self-consciously within an established tradition of assessments that detail Freud’s reception by a particular culture, often in a moment of interesting stress and ferment. Gallo’s explicit models are Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-85 (1990), Alexander Etkind’s Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (1997), and Mariano Ben Plotkin’s Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina (2001), but one could well add Christiane Hartnack’s Psychoanalysis in Colonial India (2001), particularly in connection with Gallo’s interests. As a scholar of Mexican modernism (see his previous work, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution [2005]), Gallo is certainly well situated to write a cultural history of the general reception of Freud’s works in Mexico, which were absorbed in the midst of a debate on “Mexicanness” that tended to dominate Mexican literary culture after the Revolution of 1910–20. Broad in scope yet rich in detail, Freud’s Mexico is an eye-opening and vigorous book that is well worth a reading.

The first part of the book, “Freud in Mexico,” consists of chapters dedicated to individual receptors of Freud’s work: Salvador Novo, a “Mexican Oscar Wilde”; Samuel Ramos, a conservative philosopher; Octavio Paz, the Nobel-laureate poet and essayist; and the Benedictine monk Gregorio Lemercier. Clearly, Gallo’s is not an institutional history of psychoanalysis, but an assessment of its initial cultural impact, and the eclectic array of these figures reflects the spotty foothold of psychoanalysis in Mexico. As Gallo contends,

This motley crew devised some of the most original, elaborate, and influential applications of psychoanalytic theory anywhere in the world. Novo used Freud to vindicate marginal sexual identities; Ramos, to diagnose the collective neuroses afflicting the country; Paz launched a psychoanalytic inquiry into the origins of Mexican culture; and Lemercier attempted to reconcile psychoanalysis and monastic life. Had Freud lived to see these experiments, he might have concluded that in this country, psychoanalysis had gone completely wild.

(7)

As is often the case in such studies, Gallo’s close examination of Freud’s initial reception demonstrates the liberating and creative uses to which psychoanalytic theory could be put, challenging the well-worn assumption that psychoanalysis ossified quickly into a new orthodoxy. The book’s refracted focus thus enriches our understanding of how varied psychoanalysis’ inroads can be.

The virtues of the first part of the work are Gallo’s clear exposition and specificity, which detail how Freud served people’s needs in quite different—even antithetical—ways. Novo was looking for a way to understand his homosexuality and individual lifestyle, and the Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality were the main focus of his interest. Ramos sought to analyze the condition of the Mexican character, and gravitated toward the Adlerian theory of the inferiority complex and shied away from sexual etiologies. Octavio Paz (along with Frida Kahlo) engaged with Freud’s late work Moses and Monotheism, and Gallo’s comparison of The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) with that work will doubtless remain a very helpful contribution for understanding Paz’s reading of Mexican cultural history as a dialogue with Freud as well as for highlighting Mexico’s unique early interest in Freud’s controversial opus ultimum. Lemercier sought to bring psychoanalysis into practice through the introduction of analysis into monastic life, creating a famous/infamous experiment that had repercussions in Mexican cultural life into the 1970s. Each chapter ends with a conclusion that helps to unify the book’s progress, thus mitigating the effects of the varying focus and tying loose ends together. This is thus a book that truly reads like a book, and not a collection of disparate studies.

But Gallo’s sketch of Freud’s reception in Mexico is only part of his project, as he has also provided us with a part 2: “Freud’s Mexico,” a...