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

Rubén Gallo’s study of Mexico’s Freud and of Freud’s Mexico begins, as the author recounts, at a Mexican museum’s exhibition of Freud’s collection of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Chinese antiquities. Symptomatically absent, for Gallo, are Freud’s Mexican and Latin American artifacts. This omission (or repression) serves as point of departure for the book. Freud’s Mexico is divided into two parts, each containing four chapters and four “free associations.” The first part reads a series of Freud-inflected interventions in Mexican art, politics, letters, history, and theology. The second part, much more speculative in nature, gives the book its title. Here, the reader travels through Freud’s own archive—his correspondence, his books, his antiquities, his dreams, his house and city—in search of its Mexican residues. Coleccionista, the book’s endeavor, like its subject, because throughout the work we follow Gallo in the accumulation of what the author calls “scant traces,” their reunion, their association, always towards an elusive Freudian Mexico, in the name of an impossible Mexican Freud. Each chapter grasps, speculatively, at some close encounter, a possibility, an opening to and of the archive. Unlike Gallo’s Mexican Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), a book on the material constitution of Mexico’s incipient modernity in the first half of the twentieth century, this new study largely invokes the Mexico of Freud—the Mexico of someone who neither lived in nor traveled to Mexico. And this procedure is, in a sense, mutual; the book’s encounter with Freud goes beyond the expected scholarly engagement with his thought, productively tarrying with the “wild analysis” of a certain unorthodox reception in Mexico.

The book’s first part, “Freud in Mexico,” already announces an irony that will only completely unveil itself in the text’s last “free association,” on Freud’s missed chance at a Mexican exile following the Anschluss: Freud was never in Mexico. Indeed, the “Freud” who made it to Mexico remains only the name of the author on the texts of the early psychoanalytic movement. Gallo here relates a cultural history of certain key moments of Freud’s reception in Mexico and the wild analysis that was so often its outcome; one finds the more anticipated readers of Freud treated alongside such unlikely figures as Gregorio Lemercier. The first chapter begins with the lone exception to the “cool” reception of Freud among early-twentieth-century writers and artists, the poet Salvador Novo, and studies Novo’s personal archive, reading carefully his marginalia in order to reconstruct this first reading of Freud in Mexico. The second chapter centers on the philosopher Samuel Ramos and his deployment of psychoanalysis “to diagnose the collective neuroses afflicting the Mexican nation” (57) and reads as symptomatic Ramos’s privileging of Freud’s “dissident disciple” Alfred Adler over the master himself. The book’s third chapter reads Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) as a kind of return to Freud, as a kind of Mexican translation of Moses and Monotheism. Part I of the book ends with a chapter on Gregorio Lemercier, whose “monastery in psychoanalysis”—a community that should be understood as part of the radical social and political experiments of the sixties and seventies—opens a space not to merely rethink “Mexicanness,” but to transform it by radically “reforming” Mexican Catholicism.

Part II, “Freud’s Mexico,” covers an even broader territory. Its first chapter establishes Freud’s own intriguingly “wild” study of the Spanish language with a Vienna boyfriend, Eduard Silberstein; it would become their secret language. In the sixth chapter, on “Freud’s Mexican Books”—ironically plural, this title, as we soon learn that Freud only had one—we return to Mexico from Vienna by way of trying to explain the peculiar singularity of Freud’s Mexican book, a textbook on Mexican criminal law, Derecho penal mexicano (1937), by Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, a judge that employed psychoanalysis to elucidate the cases before him...