F R E U D’S M E X I CO

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s i
F R E U D’S
M EX ICO
Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis

RU BÉ N G A L L O

The MIT Press | Cambridge, Massachusetts | London, England

© 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gallo, Rubén.
Freud’s Mexico : into the wilds of psychoanalysis / Rubén Gallo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01442-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Freud, Sigmund, 1856–1939—
Knowledge—Mexico. 2. Psychoanalysis—Mexico. I. Title.
bf175.g325 2010
150.19′52092—dc22
2009048454

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For J U L I A J OYAU X , who taught me Freud
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Missing Pieces 1

pa r t i : f r e u d i n m e x i c o
1 Perversions 13
Free Association: Taxi
2 Complexes 57
Free Association: Academy
3 Monotheisms 81
Free Association: Plastic Surgery
4 Illusions 117
Free Association: Hotel

pa r t i i : f r e u d ’s m e x i c o
5 Freud’s Spanish 157
Free Association: India
6 Freud’s Mexican Books 199
Free Association: Marx
7 Freud’s Mexican Antiquities 237
Free Association: Rockefeller
8 Freud’s Mexican Dreams 285
Free Association: Electricians
Epilogue: Freud’s Mexican Vienna 331

Notes 339
Index 379
 AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

As I researched this book I came in contact with a worldwide community of

Freudian scholars. Many of them were kind enough to read and comment on
the manuscript. I am especially grateful to the participants in the “Freud and
Archaeology” exploratory seminar, held at Princeton University in the spring
of 2008: Michael Molnar, then director of the Freud Museum London, opened
many doors and granted me access to the Museum’s collections; Janine Burke
shared her expertise on the antiquities collection and accompanied me along
my Freudian odyssey; Richard Townsend offered invaluable help on reading
the West Mexican pieces; Christian Feest helped me secure images of Vienna’s
Mexican treasures and gave me many ideas about Austro–Mexican relations;
Thomas Glick shared his unpublished research on Freud’s Mexican reception;
Gannit Ankori helped me secure images and rights for Frida Kahlo’s paint-
ings; Fray Gabriel Chávez de la Mora provided images of his architectural proj-
ects; and Raúl Carrancá y Rivas sent me archival material on the trial of
Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin.
I am grateful to Marjorie Perloff for her continued support of my work,
and to Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht for an enriching intellectual dialogue that has
lasted many years and has led us from Heidegger’s typewriter to Freud’s Mexi-
can Vienna.

ix
 I’d like to thank other colleagues who read individual chapters and of-
fered many excellent suggestions, including Bryan Just, Louise Paradis, Viviane
Mahieux, and Anke Birkenmaier.
I would like to acknowledge the generous financial support from
Princeton University: the Committee on Research in the Humanities and So-
cial Sciences and the Program in Latin American Studies provided grants to
cover the costs of including images in the book, and the Princeton Institute
for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) funded an exploratory seminar
on “Freud’s Mexican Antiquities.” My colleagues in the Department of Spanish
and Portuguese Languages and Cultures—especially Arcadio Díaz Quiñones,
Ricardo Piglia, and Gabriela Nouzeilles—read the manuscript and provided
valuable input.
A Fulbright-Freud fellowship allowed me to spend a semester in Vienna
working in Berggasse 19. I am especially grateful to Lonnie Johnson, Executive
Director of the Austrian-American Educational Commission and Inge Scholz-
Strasser, Director of the Freud Museum, for making this unique experience pos-
sible. I also thank Peter Noemaier for his invaluable help in navigating Freud’s
Vienna.
Jay D. Thornton proofread the manuscript; Emily Woodman-Maynard
traveled to Columbia University’s Health Sciences Library to photograph
Freud’s Mexican book and she also edited the chapters; Lorna Scott Fox pro-
vided expert translations of French and Spanish passages.
I am grateful to Roger Conover, my editor at the MIT Press, for his in-
tellectual complicity and continued support of my work.
This book is dedicated to Julia Joyaux, who introduced me to Freud in
her seminar on “The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt,” given at Columbia Uni-
versity in 1996. I can’t think of a better introduction to the world of psycho-
analysis than this course, which stands out in my memory as the most enriching
of my graduate studies. Since then, her work—and her acute intelligence and
passion for the life of the mind—has continued to inspire me. Freud’s Mexico
is the culmination of the rich intellectual dialogue we have sustained over the
years, from Philosophy Hall to Île de Ré, and it owes much to her friendship
and support.
I could not have written this book without Terence Gower, who has a
Freudian gift for listening and who over the years helped me develop many of
the ideas and interpretations found in these pages. With him I’ve learned to
“work better and love better,” as Freud once said of a successful analysis.

x
INTRODUCTION:
THE MISSING PIECES

In the spring of 2000, a blockbuster exhibition opened at San Ildefonso, one of

Mexico City’s grandest museums, housed in a colonial palace across the street
from the Templo Mayor, the Great Pyramid of the Aztecs: it was called “Sig-
mund Freud coleccionista” (Sigmund Freud collector), and presented a selec-
tion of the analyst’s famous collection of antiquities: several hundred Greek,
Roman, Egyptian, and Chinese pieces that were on loan from the Freud Mu-
seum in London and were seen, for the first time, in Mexico. The show was one
of the most popular events of the year: thousands of visitors poured in, and the
museum organized a series of lectures, panel discussions, and workshops on
psychoanalysis. For several months, Freud was the talk of the town: high school
students, spiral notebooks in hand, roamed the hallways of the colonial palace
housing the exhibit, taking notes and penning sketches; newspapers published
lengthy articles on the father of psychoanalysis and his legacy; and the city’s
small psychoanalytic community received a fresh influx of patients.1
As I toured the exhibition, something caught my eye: there seemed to
be a missing piece in one of the display cases. It had been replaced by a color
photograph showing a pre- Columbian piece, described as a “kneeling figure
from West Mexico.” Nearby, a second missing object was identified as an “an-
thropomorphic idol from Mezcala.” It was easy to explain these omissions: local
law prohibits the export of archaeological objects, and had the Freud Museum
loaned these works to the Mexican museum, it risked seeing them confiscated

1
by customs. What irony, I thought: Freud’s Mexican pieces are missing from
the first exhibition of his collection in Mexico.
Intrigued by this absence, I made some inquiries: how did these pieces
travel from Mexico to Vienna? Did Freud purchase them or were they given
to him? How do they fit into a collection devoted almost exclusively to the
Mediterranean world? Did he ever acquire other Mexican objects? What was
his perception of Mexico, Mexican culture, and Mexican history? Answers to
these questions were nowhere to be found: the catalog made no mention of the
Mexican pieces, neither did the books devoted to Freud’s collection of antiqui-
ties. None of the Freudian enthusiasts in Mexico City had ever heard of these
objects, and none of the scholars of psychoanalysis had ever explored a Mexi-
can connection. As I sought answers to these problems, I found myself writing
a book about Freud’s Mexico.
The quest for the missing pieces soon led me to other unexpected ad-
ventures: I discovered that Freud owned a Mexican book, and his library con-
tained other works on Mexican history; I found dreams about human sacrifice
and the pre- Columbian past in The Interpretation of Dreams; I unearthed a
lost letter from Freud to a Mexican disciple; I traveled to London and Vienna
to study the elusive Mexican antiquities up close. As I found out, there were
many other missing pieces in this Mexican puzzle. As I assembled them, a very
different picture of Freud emerged: a Freud who spoke Spanish, corresponded
with Mexican disciples, owned Mexican antiquities, read Mexican history, and
interpreted Mexican dreams. In the end, I arrived at the terra incognita that is
Freud’s Mexico.

freud in mexico

My Freudian odyssey led me to investigate the reception of Freud’s ideas in

Mexico. Who were his earliest readers? What role did psychoanalysis play
in Mexican culture? Did psychoanalytic theories have an impact on art and liter-
ature, as they did in other countries? How did a traditionally Catholic country
react to Freud’s direct discussion of sexuality? Did the Mexican Revolution
play an important role in the reception of analytic ideas, as was the case in
post-1917 Russia? Was psychoanalysis ever deemed politically incorrect, as it

2
was in the Soviet Union? To answer these questions, I turned to the history of
psychoanalysis in Mexico
The canonical history of Mexican psychoanalysis—as written in a few
articles and a little book—posits that Mexican intellectuals, unlike their Ar-
gentinian or Brazilian counterparts, expressed little interest in Freud in the
early years of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis did not enter the main-
stream until the 1950s, when Santiago Ramírez and Ramón Parres founded the
APM (Mexican Psychoanalytic Association), the first Mexican organization to
gain the recognition of the International Psycho-Analytical Association.2
Interest in a different kind of analysis spiked after Erich Fromm moved
to Mexico City in 1950 to teach at UNAM, the National University. His courses
and publications brought together a wide spectrum of interests that included
psychoanalysis, Marxism, Buddhism, and even Talmudic exegesis.3 Fromm was
a charismatic teacher who gained a large following, and eventually his disciples
formed a new association, the SPM (Mexican Psychoanalytic Society), that pre-
sented itself as an alternative to the orthodox APM. Thus the stage was set for
what would become a long-drawn-out struggle between two analytic tenden-
cies, one Freudian, the other Frommian.
Fromm launched some of the most eccentric projects in the history of
psychoanalysis: in 1957 he organized a workshop on “Psychoanalysis and Zen
Buddhism” that took place in Cuernavaca and included a public debate with
D. T. Suzuki. In the same year Fromm began a “socio-psychoanalytic study”
of a small village in the countryside: his goal was to combine the methodol-
ogies of psychoanalysis and sociology, using Rorschach tests and interpreta-
tive questionnaires, to understand the interplay between social conditions and
emotional well-being in rural Mexico. The study, coauthored by the American
sociologist Michael Maccoby, was published as Social Character in a Mexican
Village: A Sociopsychoanalytic Study (1970) and includes—among other sur-
prising applications of Freudian techniques—a sociopolitical interpretation of
the villagers’ dreams.4
Led by a similar motivation, Santiago Ramírez used psychoanalytic
theories to explain the peculiarities of the Mexican character. In El mexicano:
Psicología de sus motivaciones (The Mexican: Psychology of his motivations)
he offered an interpretation of the national psyche, emphasizing the detrimen-
tal effects of collective neuroses, psychoses, and other pathologies on Mexican
culture. In one of the book’s most unusual chapters, Ramírez interpreted the

introduction 3
 childhood enthusiasm for breaking piñatas as a “symptom of the aggressive
feelings . . . toward the pregnant mother.”5 His was but one of numerous ef-
forts to psychoanalyze Mexican identity that will be discussed in detail in chap-
ters 2 and 3.
The psychoanalytic societies led by Fromm and Ramírez were ravaged
by internal strife: in the 1960s dissident members resigned from the APM to
form new groups. Among these, the most colorful was the AMPP (Mexican As-
sociation for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy), an organization made up almost
exclusively of female analysts (in rival groups, the members were known as las
fálicas, the “phallic girls”).6 Another splinter society, the AMPAG (Mexican
Association for Analytic Group Therapy), experimented with group analysis,
and made headlines around the world when two of its members—Frida Zmud
and Gustavo Quevedo—became the analysts of the controversial Benedictine
monastery discussed in chapter 4.
The 1970s brought an influx of Argentinian analysts who arrived in
Mexico after fleeing the military dictatorship, including Marie Langer, who was
born in Austria, emigrated to Argentina in the 1930s, and had become one of
the most respected training analysts in Latin America by the time she arrived
in Mexico City. Néstor Braunstein, another Argentinian, played a key role in
the introduction of Lacanian thought, and remains one of the most prolific au-
thors of psychoanalytic works in Mexico.
Since then the number of psychoanalytic organizations in Mexico has
mushroomed: there are now dozens of associations, including Freudian, Fromm-
ian, and Lacanian groups that identify themselves through ever more complex
acronyms: AMPAG, GMEP, APJ, CMPP, CMP, GESF. The dizzying number of
splinter societies once led Santiago Ramírez to describe the original APM as
“the CTM of psychoanalysis,” referring to the powerful Central Workers’ Union,
an umbrella group for the thousands of unions scattered throughout Mexico.7
So goes the canonical history of psychoanalysis in Mexico. But there
are several problems with this narrative. First, these articles present partisan
accounts, and their authors often seem less interested in striking a balanced
viewpoint than in vindicating their own association. The title of one of San-
tiago Ramírez’s books—Ajuste de cuentas (Settling my scores; 1979)—illustrates
the tone of many of these works. Second, these authors have written institu-
tional histories, focusing on the struggles among various institutes and socie-
ties and often overlooking the influence of psychoanalysis on other spheres of
Mexican cultural life. But as Thomas F. Glick has remarked, such an approach

4
tends to exclude influential discussions of Freud by artists and intellectuals.8
Third, these histories assume that serious discussions of Freud began only after
the founding of the first analytic institutes in the 1950s, while in fact Mexican
intellectuals had been reading Freud since the 1920s. As Glick noted: “The
early reception of Freud in Mexico has not been studied,” even though “his
work was amply diffused there in the 1920s and 1930s.”9
But there is an alternative approach to writing the history of psycho-
analysis: rather than focusing on psychoanalytic institutes and associations, one
can study the influence of Freud on poets, novelists, artists, and philosophers.
Some of the most audacious interpretations of Freud were devised by figures
who were complete outsiders to analytic associations: think of André Breton’s
Manifesto of Surrealism, Salvador Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method, or the sur-
realist experiments with free association. Around the world, Freud was read by
historians, sociologists, painters, and architects who found innovative ways of
applying psychoanalysis to their disciplines.
Two critics have written cultural histories of psychoanalysis focusing
on artistic and literary readings of Freud. The first, Elisabeth Roudinesco, pub-
lished an impressive account of Freud’s influence in postwar France, highlight-
ing the psychoanalytic readings undertaken by André Breton, Salvador Dalí,
and Georges Bataille among many others.10 The second, Alexander Etkind,
studied how the reception of psychoanalysis in Russia became entangled in
revolutionary politics as Leon Trotsky and other Russian intellectuals sought
to reconcile Marx and Freud, debating whether psychoanalysis could play a
positive role in Soviet society.11
As these studies show, the reception of Freud varied greatly by country,
and was influenced by the local political and historical context. In France the
most influential readers of psychoanalytic theory were avant-garde artists; in
Russia they were revolutionary intellectuals. If, as Mariano Ben Plotkin has ar-
gued, “an exploration of the way psychoanalysis was disseminated in a particu-
lar society and culture tells us something important about both psychoanalysis
and that culture,” then what does the history of psychoanalysis tell us about
Mexico? And what does the Mexican reception of Freud tell us about the his-
tory of psychoanalysis?12
Freud was read by Mexican poets, novelists, historians, philosophers,
and artists, as well as by medical doctors and psychiatrists. Salvador Novo was
a reader of Freud, and so were Samuel Ramos, Octavio Paz, and Frida Kahlo,
as well as lesser-known figures like judge Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo. Some could

introduction 5
read German, but most read the Spanish translation of the Complete Works is-
sued between 1922 and 1932 by Madrid’s Biblioteca Nueva, a publishing house
connected to Ortega y Gasset’s influential Revista de Occidente.
These readings of Freud were framed by the intense debates about na-
tional identity that dominated the Mexican cultural landscape for the first half
of the twentieth century, as intellectuals sought to define the new nation that
emerged in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. Government officials
hailed the new society as a cultural utopia, while sociologists, historians, and
philosophers mused on the peculiarities of the Mexican character.
Three figures stand out for their innovative applications of Freudian
theory to contemporary debates about national identity: Salvador Novo, Sa-
muel Ramos, and Octavio Paz. The first part of this book, “Freud in Mexico,”
examines how these intellectuals read Freud and used psychoanalytic theory
as a basis for new poetic, philosophical, and literary projects, offering origi-
nal contributions to the debate on “Mexicanness” that dominated the post-
revolutionary years.
But that is only half of the story: the second part of the book, “Freud’s
Mexico,” is an inquiry into Freud’s perception of Mexican culture. By analyzing
the Mexican books in his library, the Mexican antiquities in his collection, and
the Mexican dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, I aim to reconstruct the
analyst’s perception of a country that had deep historical connections to the
Hapsburg Empire.
The book opens with a chapter on one of the most eccentric readers
Freud ever found: the poet Salvador Novo, who fashioned himself a Mexican
Oscar Wilde and led a willfully scandalous public life as a gay man in the 1920s.
Novo was one of the first serious readers of Freud in Mexico: he acquired the
Complete Works published by Biblioteca Nueva, reviewed psychoanalytic publi-
cations for literary journals, and wrote an autobiography that doubled as an ex-
ercise in self-analysis. Novo was especially interested in the Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, a book he used to arrive at a new understanding of his own
sexual identity. At a time when analysts and psychiatrists debated the psychoan-
alytic view of homosexuality, Novo used Freudian theory to affirm his identity
as a gay man and counter the prejudices of an extremely conservative society.
Freud found a very different kind of reader in the philosopher Samuel
Ramos, the subject of chapter 2. Ramos was the first intellectual to use Freud-
ian theories to interpret the national character: his article “Psychoanalysis
of the Mexican” (1932) identified a series of collective neuroses afflicting the

6
 country, and ignited an intense debate on Mexican identity that attracted the
attention of poets, philosophers, and artists.
Chapter 3 explores how Octavio Paz entered the debate about the psy-
chology of Mexicanness, and responded to Ramos’s essay in The Labyrinth of
Solitude, a work that proposes an alternative Freudian interpretation of the na-
tional character. Mexicans, Paz argued, suffer from a collective melancholia that
has ensnared them in a labyrinth.
Chapter 4 presents the case of Gregorio Lemercier, a Benedictine
monk who introduced psychoanalytic therapy into his monastery and gained
world fame as a Freudian reformer of Catholicism. Freud was a proud atheist
who dismissed religion as a collective neurosis, and it comes as a surprise that
a believer would embrace his theories to enhance monastic life—one of the
many paradoxes in Lemercier’s project, the most eccentric episode in the Mexi-
can reception of psychoanalysis.
Freud’s readers in Mexico were a gay dandy, a conservative philosopher,
a cosmopolitan poet, and a Benedictine monk. 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.
If part I considers the reception of psychoanalysis in Mexico, part II
investigates Freud’s ideas about Mexico. The analyst had powerful associa-
tions about most countries: France was the home of Charcot; England, the
land of freedom; Italy, the realm of Renaissance art; Greece, the birthplace
of Eros. What place did Mexico have in this affective geography? Freud must
have had certain ideas about the country, since he owned Mexican antiquities,
read Mexican books, and corresponded with Mexican readers, but how are we
to reconstruct his associations? On the basis of a handful of fragments, I
undertake what psychoanalysis calls constructions—imaginative efforts to
reconstitute a fragment of inner experience that would otherwise be lost for-
ever. Constructions, Freud tells us, are the psychological equivalent of ar-
chaeological reconstructions: on the basis of a few psychic traces, the analyst
“lay[s] before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history that he has
forgotten.”13

introduction 7
 To prepare the ground for my inquiry into Freud’s Mexico, I devote
chapter 5 to Freud’s use of Spanish: beginning at age fifteen, Sigmund corre-
sponded in the language of Cervantes with his best friend, and this tongue re-
tained an intense affective charge in his adult life. Even though this linguistic
experience did not relate specifically to Mexico, it would later allow him to read
the publications of his Mexican disciples and to answer the letters he received
from Mexico.
Later in life, Freud rarely had an opportunity to use Spanish, but the
language was well represented in his library, which he took with him to Lon-
don after leaving Vienna in 1938. Freud’s books include several volumes deal-
ing with Mexican topics, and among these the most interesting is a treatise on
criminal law published in 1937 by the Mexican judge Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo.
Chapter 6 chronicles the history of this most unusual reader of Freud: a crimi-
nologist with a passion for psychoanalysis who presided over the trial of Ramón
Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin, and subjected him to a forced psychoanalysis.
Back in Berggasse, Freud’s study contained not only Mexican books but
also Mexican antiquities: the pieces from Mezcala and Nayarit that were miss-
ing from the San Ildefonso exhibition. As I show in chapter 7, pre-Columbian
antiquities are closely linked to a practice Freud explored in his writings: hu-
man sacrifice. The authors who had the strongest influence on Freud—Hein-
rich Heine, James Frazer, Robertson Smith—wrote extensively on Aztec
sacrificial practices, and their accounts shaped the analyst’s understanding of
Mexico and his Mexican antiquities.
After analyzing books and antiquities, I turn to Freud’s Mexican dreams
in chapter 8. The “breakfast-ship,” “revolutionary,” and “self-dissection” dreams
contain numerous references to Maximilian von Hapsburg, the Austrian arch-
duke who became Emperor of Mexico and ruled for three years before being
executed at the firing squad. These three dreams depict Mexico as a danger-
ous land where Austrians—including Freud—could fall victim to murderous
impulses.
The book concludes with a creative epilogue in which I trace a typical
day in Freud’s life, highlighting the numerous references to Mexico he would
have encountered in and out of his apartment. Monuments and memorials to
Austria’s involvement with Mexico dot the Viennese cityscape, and on his daily
walks Freud would have been constantly reminded of the traumatic history
linking the two countries since the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V ruled over
New Spain in the sixteenth century.

8
 Between these seven chapters I have interspersed several “free associa-
tions”: short pieces presenting additional material, including a failed plot to
bring Freud to Mexico; his role in the murals of Diego Rivera and the paint-
ings of Frida Kahlo; and the portrayal of psychoanalysis in the canvases of Re-
medios Varo.
Freud’s Mexico will challenge many received ideas about the role of
psychoanalysis in twentieth-century culture. Many critics have assumed that
Freudian theories were put at the service of a conservative, restrictive ideology
that sought to normalize sexual identities. Carlos Monsiváis, one of the most
respected Mexican intellectuals, has derided psychoanalysis as a fashionable
doctrine that led “writers, psychiatrists, and psychologists” to analyze Mexi-
can history and cultural life “in light of sublimation, the phallus, . . . and many
other hair-raising stereotypes.” In his view, psychoanalysis inherited “the capac-
ities to interpret and cure the soul that were earlier monopolized by the Catho-
lic Church, and ultimately defined a new canon of mental health at the service
of the bourgeoisie.” The rise of psychoanalysis as a respected discipline, he be-
lieves, resulted in an increased marginalization of women, gay men, and other
minorities.14 In line with this view, Robert McKee Irwin, in his otherwise ex-
tremely perceptive Mexican Masculinities, argues that “Freudian psychoanalysis
quickly (certainly by 1940) became a mystified, totalizing, normative system,
an ideological structure that, through tropes such as the Oedipus complex and
penis envy, was mobilized to calcify norms of gender and sexuality.”15
What a different picture emerges when we revisit Novo’s reading of the
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as a series of modern conceptual tools
to affirm his gay identity; when we read Octavio Paz deploying the theories of
the Oedipus complex and Geistigkeit to champion the liberating powers of the
intellect; or when we discover Frida Kahlo’s use of psychoanalytic theories to
understand pre-Columbian religions. I hope this book will reveal Freud’s role
in Mexican cultural history as an intellectual model for some of the most origi-
nal thinkers of the twentieth century.
I would like to end with a few words on methodology. This is a work
of cultural history inflected by psychoanalytic theory, and as such it deals with
facts—documents I uncovered in the course of archival research at the Freud
Museum London, the Library of Congress, and Mexico City’s Casa del Poeta—
but also with images, perceptions, affects, and fantasies. Some readers might
object that some of my interpretations are too speculative. I do take some in-
terpretative liberties, but my strategy is not without precedent: Freud himself

introduction 9
taught us that interpretation is an art that must encompass unconscious as well
as conscious material, and that the analyst—including the cultural analyst—
must not be afraid to propose bold hypotheses, strong arguments, and specula-
tive constructions. Freud’s challenge has been taken up by some of the critics I
consider my intellectual models: Roland Barthes, who urged readers to play an
active role in constructing meaning and taking pleasure in texts; Carl Schorske,
whose analyses in Fin-de-siècle Vienna guided my own interpretations of Freud’s
dreams; and Edward Said, who transformed the technique of analytic listening
into a strategy for unmasking hidden political implications in art and literature.
I began this Introduction by evoking the missing pieces at the exhibi-
tion of Freud’s antiquities—symbolic absences that led me to explore other la-
cunae in Freud studies: the reception of Freud in Mexico, the place of Mexico
in Freud’s world, and the role of psychoanalysis in twentieth-century Mexican
culture. Freud’s Mexico is an effort to retrieve those missing pieces and solve the
puzzle I first encountered at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso. The follow-
ing chapters will retrace my steps, chronicling my explorations and discoveries,
and leading my readers into the wilds of psychoanalysis.

10
 | Part I |

FREUD IN MEXICO
 | 1 |

P E RV E R S I O N S

¡Un Proust que vive en México!

[A Mexican Proust!]
s a l va d o r n o v o

To the poetry of nostalgic memory, we

oppose that of feverish expectation.
Against tears of beauty, shed over the
tomb, we set the finely chiseled features of
the pilot, the chauffeur and the aviator.
f. t. m a r i n e t t i 1

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Freud was read around the world, not only
by doctors and psychiatrists, but also by poets, artists, philosophers, and other
intellectuals. Some of the most original and innovative uses of psychoana-
lytic theory emerged from these nonmedical readings of Freud: André Breton
used The Interpretation of Dreams to write his 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,”
launching an artistic and literary movement that altered the cultural landscape
of the twentieth century; in Spain, Salvador Dalí praised the creative powers of
paranoia and devised a “paranoiac-critical method” to increase the powers of
perception; the German director G. W. Pabst created a film—Secrets of a Soul

13
(1926)—that attempted to translate unconscious mechanisms into cinematic
techniques; Leon Trotsky mused on the political applications of psychoanaly-
sis in socialist society; and judges from Vienna to Mexico City sought ways of
incorporating psychoanalytic techniques into judicial procedures.
While poets and artists around the world devoured Freud’s works and
devised unsuspected aesthetic uses for psychoanalytic theory, Mexican writers
gave the Viennese doctor a cooler reception: the works of Freud were discussed
in the pages of Mexico City’s literary supplements, but most writers took his
ideas with a grain of salt. They were interested in psychoanalysis as a product of
modernity, but very few seemed to actually have read his work. In the 1920s El
Universal Ilustrado, Mexico City’s most influential literary journal, published
short articles on Freud by the Peruvian writer José Carlos Mariátegui and the
Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, but few avant-garde figures expressed an
interest in the new science of the unconscious. The Estridentistas never men-
tioned Freud in their manifestos; Diego Rivera was more interested in Marx
than in the unconscious; and Alfonso Reyes, the most celebrated writer in the
first half of the twentieth century, never concerned himself with the theoretical
writings coming from Vienna.
The one exception to this generalized disinterest in psychoanalysis was
a young poet named Salvador Novo who was born in 1904, lived through the
Revolution, and emerged as one of the most original—and irreverent—figures
in Mexican culture. From a very early age, Novo affirmed his identity as a cos-
mopolitan subject: he learned English, French, and German, and followed the
latest literary trends coming from New York, Paris, and London. He—along
with a group of friends—founded Contemporáneos, an avant-garde literary
magazine that introduced Mexican readers to the work of Proust, Gide, Joyce,
and many other modernists. When John Dos Passos visited Mexico in 1927, it
was Novo who showed him around and took him on a tour of the countryside.2
Novo was also a gay man who affirmed his sexual identity with an al-
most exhibitionistic candor. He reviewed the works of Oscar Wilde, Proust,
and Gide, and argued for the necessity of modernizing both literary sensibili-
ties and sexual mores. He wrote explicit—some would say pornographic—
poems about his trysts, and published in the most unlikely places, including
a journal for Mexico City’s chauffeurs. He wrote an erotic autobiography that
was so scandalous—and involved so many respectable artists, writers, and intel-
lectuals—that it remained unpublished for two decades after his death.
Novo—a dandy with a will to be modern—became the most serious
reader of Freud among writers of his generation. While others merely quoted

14
the name of the founder of psychoanalysis, or sprinkled their work with terms
like “neuroses” or “Oedipus complex,” Novo read Freud’s complete works,
along with those of his disciples, and became an authority who reviewed the
latest psychoanalytic literature for literary journals and newspapers.

freudian readings

In the 1920s, Novo began acquiring the individual volumes of Freud’s Obras
completas, the Spanish translation of the analyst’s complete works published in
Madrid by Biblioteca Nueva between 1922 and 1932. The project of a Spanish
Freud was conceived by José Ortega y Gasset, who had already given consider-
able attention to psychoanalysis in the pages of his Revista de Occidente, and
asked Luis López y Ballesteros to undertake the vast project of translating Freud.
The first volume, La psicopatología de la vida cotidiana (The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life) appeared in 1922; volume sixteen, Historiales clínicos II, was
the last to appear in 1932. The publication of the complete works was inter-
rupted by the political turmoil that would eventually plunge Spain into a civil
war—and by Ballesteros’s death in 1938—and Freud’s late works, including Mo-
ses and Monotheism, would be released by other publishers in Latin America.3
Novo read Freud’s works in English and French translation, but it was
López Ballesteros’s Spanish version of the Complete Works that allowed him
to engage in a careful and sustained study of the fundamental theories of psy-
choanalysis. Novo first mentioned Freud in a 1923 article—written when he
was nineteen years old, for El Universal Ilustrado—commenting on his recent
psychoanalytic readings.4 He quoted Freud again in El joven, a short autobio-
graphical piece.5 By 1928 he was reviewing psychoanalytic works, and Freudian
terms like “neuroses,” “libido,” and “Oedipus complex” appeared regularly in
his writing.6
Novo acquired all sixteen volumes of Freud’s Obras completas. These,
along with the poet’s other books on psychoanalysis, are now part of the Biblio-
teca Salvador Novo housed in Mexico City’s Casa del Poeta. A careful study of
the volumes in this library allows us to reconstruct Novo’s psychoanalytic read-
ings during the 1920s and 1930s.
Unlike Freud, Novo was a compulsive annotator: he underlined pas-
sages, marked key concepts with asterisks, and even registered his objections
in the margins of the text. These marginalia allow us to reconstruct Novo’s

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 15
discovery of Freud and to gain insight into his impressions, reactions, and ob-
jections to the analyst’s arguments.
Novo was primarily interested in Freud’s writings on sexuality. The
most heavily annotated volumes are Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905; Spanish translation 1923) and the sections of the Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis summarizing the theory of psychosexuality. Novo was so in-
terested in this topic that he even acquired—and annotated—many of Freud’s
sources, including the works of Edward Carpenter, Smith Ely Jelliffe, and
Havelock Ellis.7
Novo began reading Freud at a time when he was exploring his own
sexuality. In his autobiographical writings—El joven and La estatua de sal—he
described his early twenties as a period of frequent and intense sexual adven-
tures. In post-gay-lib terms, we could say that Novo came out of the closet with
a vengeance. As he narrates in La estatua de sal, he and his partner-in-sexual-
crimes Xavier Villaurrutia rented a tiny studio on Donceles, in downtown Mex-
ico City, that became the stage for dramatic scenes of masculine seduction as
well as a locale for the capital’s wildest gay parties. And as Novo swung open the
floodgates of his libido, he turned his attention to Freud.
Novo was especially interested in Freud’s views on homosexuality—a
topic discussed at length in the Three Essays and later in the Introductory Lec-
tures. At a time when homosexuality was still considered a form of “degeneracy”
and could land its practitioners in prison, Freud argued that same-sex attrac-
tion should not be considered abnormal: in the history of civilization, he ex-
plained, homosexuality was not always a proscribed behavior. It was raised to
the level of “an institution . . . among the people of antiquity at the height of
their civilization.” And closer to our time, it was “found in people . . . distin-
guished by especially high intellectual development and ethical culture.” Freud
also noted that degeneracy could exist only in civilized societies but homosex-
ual behavior was widespread among savages—an observation Novo, a lover of
rough types, would have savored.8
Novo underlined key phrases in Freud’s discussion of perversions and
neuroses. At various points in the text, Novo appears to recognize his own ex-
perience in Freud’s descriptions, and his annotations reveal a certain passion
for self-diagnosis. When Freud explains that narcissists are often incapable of
transference and are thus unlikely candidates for psychoanalytic treatment,
Novo writes “Yo [myself ]” in the margin like a schoolboy raising his hand
when called by the teacher.9 He makes the same annotation next to a passage

16
 in The Interpretation of Dreams arguing that obsessional neurosis can be pro-
voked by an unusually strong sense of morality.10 These inscriptions of Novo’s
“I” in Freud’s text reveal a desire to place himself within the psychopathologi-
cal landscape: by identifying himself as a narcissist, an obsessional neurotic, or
the victim of an inflated superego, he found a place in the neurotic modernity
sketched by the Austrian analyst.
Other markings reveal a reading of psychoanalytic theory we can only
characterize as camp. When Freud describes a perverse tendency to use the
mouth and anus as vaginal substitutes, Novo, playing the part of a bashful Vic-
torian lady, expresses his shock with a coy “oh!”11 The same exclamation follows
the discussion of mothers who display a pathological erotic interest in their
daughters (“oh!”),12 paranoiacs who suffer from excessive homosexual tenden-
cies (“oh!”),13 girls who treat their baby sisters as replacements for the baby they
desired from their fathers (“oh!”),14 and fetishists excited by dirty and foul-
smelling feet;15 “oh!” indeed (figure 1.1)!
Novo did not always agree with Freud, and he often registered his ob-
jections on the margins of the Obras completas. To the argument that infantile
anxiety reproduces the anguish experienced at birth by the separation from the
mother’s body, Novo responds “Exagera [he exaggerates].”16 In other places, he
vaunts his cosmopolitan, multilingual education by responding in English or
German. To Freud’s assertion that children display an active sexual life after age
three, Novo answers, in English: “long before that!”17 When the analyst, in a
rhetorical move, asks his readers if they are not aware that many adults replace
the vagina by the anus in their sexual life, Novo retorts: “No, I’m not” (figure
1.2).18 And when Freud muses that some individuals experience sensual pleasure
while defecating, Novo chimes in: “The writers”!19
In addition to English, Novo had learned French and German, and
he displays a surprising bravado by responding to Freud in the analyst’s own
language. When Freud discusses a series of sexual practices, including kissing
and masturbation, that do not have procreation as an end, Novo adds: “Und
unsere Sachen auch,” a literal translation of the Spanish “y nuestras cosas tam-
bién,” which can be rendered in English as “and also the things we do.”20 By “we”
he means gay men, and “the things we do” usually unfold in the privacy of a
bedroom. With this German turn of phrase, Novo outs himself to Freud, in-
scribing his gay desire in the margins of his Complete Works. More poignant is
Novo’s annotation, following a mistranslated phrase describing homosexuality
as a “triste anomalía,” a “sad anomaly”: “Es ist nicht traurig! [There is nothing

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 17
 f i g u r e 1.1
“Oh!” Handwritten annotation by Salvador Novo on his copy of Sigmund Freud’s Una
teoría sexual y otros ensayos, vol. 2 of Obras completas (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1923), p. 33.
Courtesy Casa del Poeta, Mexico City.

18
 f i g u r e 1.2
“No, I’m not.” Handwritten annotation by Salvador Novo on his copy of Sigmund Freud’s
Introducción a la psicoanálisis, vol. 5 of Obras completas (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1923),
pp. 110–111. Courtesy Casa del Poeta, Mexico City.

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 19
 sad about it]” (figure 1.3), Novo retorts.21 Though the young poet is fascinated
by analytic theory, he refuses to bow down to Freud as the ultimate authority
and gives free expression to his objections.
There is one final class of marginal annotations worth discussing. On
several occasions, after reading a description of a particular neurosis or patho-
logical behavior, Novo offers an impromptu diagnosis of a particular friend
or acquaintance. When Freud discusses megalomania and delusions of gran-
deur as the result of a narcissistic cathexis of the ego, Novo writes “Castellanos
Quinto,” the name of a famously eccentric poet who was one of his school-
teachers at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria.22 Even more telling is the inscrip-
tion, following an explanation of how in some neurotics anxiety can lead to
fears of stroke, of the initials “X.V.” (figure 1.4)—two letters that can only refer
to the poet Xavier Villaurrutia, a close friend of Novo’s who suffered terrible at-
tacks of depression that left him “delgado, débil, enfermizo [thin, frail, sickly],”
as Novo once wrote.23
Novo’s annotations were witty, campy, even haughty. They also reveal a
careful, serious, and well-documented reading of Freud’s work. The page from
the Introductory Lectures containing the remark that homosexuality “ist nicht
traurig,” for instance, prefaces a more scholarly gloss speculating on Freud’s crit-
ical sources: Freud made a passing reference to the “scientific spokesmen” of
homosexuals; in the margin Novo inquires who these spokesmen might be—
“Edward Carpenter? Havelock Ellis?”—identifying two authors who were not
only crucial for the development of Freud’s sexual theory, but were also repre-
sented in Novo’s own library. Novo could improvise witty bons mots, but he
could also read Freud like a scholar, going back to the sources and responding
to his arguments.

*
Novo spent a good deal of the 1920s reading Freud, but he also engaged in other,
less scholarly endeavors. He turned eighteen in 1922, at a time when Mexico
City had left behind the chaos of the Mexican Revolution to reinvent itself as a
modern, twentieth-century metropolis. New neighborhoods were built follow-
ing the latest architectural trends from Europe; plans for the first radio stations
were under way; and the leafy, Parisian-style boulevards designed by Maximil-
ian and Porfirio Díaz became crowded with late-model Fords.
Novo fashioned himself a modern writer, and embraced the inven-
tions of the twentieth century with open arms: he was one of the first poets to
use a typewriter; he broadcast his essays over the airwaves (including a witty,

20
 f i g u r e 1.3
“Es ist nicht traurig.” Handwritten annotation by Salvador Novo on his copy of Sigmund
Freud’s Introducción a la psicoanálisis, vol. 5 of Obras completas (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva,
1923), pp. 94–95. Courtesy Casa del Poeta, Mexico City.

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 21
 f i g u r e 1.4
“X.V. [Xavier Villaurrutia].” Handwritten annotation by Salvador Novo on his copy of
Sigmund Freud’s Introducción a la psicoanálisis, vol. 5 of Obras completas (Madrid: Biblioteca
Nueva, 1923), p. 229. Courtesy Casa del Poeta, Mexico City.

22
f i g u r e 1.5
Frontispiece, El Chafirete (April 5, 1923).

self-reflexive “Radio lecture on radio”); he read avant-garde journals from Lon-

don, Paris, and New York. Novo came to embody the spirit of the new gen-
eration of Mexican poets, and he became the first person visiting intellectuals
asked to see. Of all the inventions of the twentieth century, there was one that
awakened an unusually intense passion in the young poet: the automobile.
No other invention had a comparable impact on Mexico City: what
had been a town of carts and horse-drawn carriages before the Revolution had
now become a city bustling with automobiles, buses, tramways, and taxicabs.
Almost overnight the capital sped up and saw a precipitous spike in horsepower
and kilometers per hour. Cars and buses zoomed by and pedestrians were
forced to run, jump, and sprint to stay alive. Novo, following the lead of Euro-
pean avant-garde poets from Marinetti to Apollinaire, applauded the accelera-
tion of time brought about by the automobile.
In 1923, when Novo was a few months shy of his nineteenth birthday,
he made a most unusual discovery: he stumbled upon the inaugural issue of El
Chafirete, a newspaper for operators of city buses and cars for hire. “Chafirete”
was a slang term for a driver, and the title captured the spirit of the publication:
low-key, humorous, and streetwise. The paper appeared weekly and featured:
comparative reviews of gas and service stations; diatribes against policemen
who—even in 1923!—stopped drivers arbitrarily to demand bribes; and spe-
cific suggestions on how to improve the capital’s already chaotic traffic flow. It

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 23
even contained a regular column called “Gasolina con camote [Gasoline with
sweet potato].”
Novo found the concept of a publication for chauffeurs so captivating
that he visited the editorial offices and asked to become a contributor. It might
seem odd that a modernist poet would choose to write for a newsletter devoted
to such pedestrian topics as radiators and gas stations, but Novo saw this as an
opportunity to take an active role in the wave of modernization that was chang-
ing the face of Mexico City. It also became a unique opportunity for the poet to
exercise his wit and to write some of his most caustic parodies.
From its inception, El Chafirete excelled at parody. Its articles were
signed using the most unlikely pseudonyms: Doña Ford, El Abate Chorizo
(which could be rendered in English as “Abbot Sausage”), Don Derrapadas (“Mr.
Skidmarks”), and Fray Fotingo (“Fotingo” was a term of endearment used to re-
fer to Fords: a “Fordling” of sorts). Novo signed his contributions with the nom
de plume “Radiador” (Radiator), and less than a month after his first article—
as he recalls in his memoirs—he “was ghostwriting the entire newspaper.”24
One can easily recognize Novo’s dark sense of humor in many of the ar-
ticles published in El Chafirete. On March 22, 1923, the paper printed an apoc-
ryphal interview with Henry Ford, who responds to the journalist’s queries in
broken Spanglish. The conversation was prefaced by a paragraph explaining
that Abate Chorizo had traveled to Detroit to meet the automobile magnate,
and at times reads like a scene from a Marx Brothers film:

[Ford:] Mi tenga mucho gusto to see you.

[Abate Chorizo:] Tablas, querido Enrique. . . . Y dí, Enrique, ¿cómo te
hiciste millonario, o mejor dicho, qué te dio por hacer los fotingos que tanto
quehacer han dado?
[F:] Oh, that’s very fácil to contestar: in my boyhood infancia fui muy afi-
cionado a la mecánica, pero como mis padres no tenían ni segunda camisa, era
natural que tampoco tenían dinero con qué pagar mis estudios en la Uni-
versidad de Chalchihuites de la Peñas, Estado de Pennsylvania. Mis padres
murieron, . . . rodando fui a parar a una fábrica de vacinicas [sic] y escupideras
situada en Grand Rapids, Michigan. Allí fue donde aprendí la electroterapia
de la Hoja de lata, y el gonococo de la mecánica tlachiquera. De este último
lugar fui a trabajar a una factoría de W.C. de porcelana inglesa perfeccionán-
dome en el funcionamiento del epigastrio nasal ígnico. Tengo igualmente mu-
cha práctica en la construcción de tubos de albañal.

24
[AC:] Y haciendo a un lado lo de la gasolina, ¿qué es lo que de México, te
gusta más?
[F:] El polque curado, Ice Creams con Guacamole, & los “hot dogs” de To-
luca. ¡Ah, lo mismo que los “Mexican Hot Cakes” con salsa borracha!
[AC:] Mr. Ford quiere decir: los chicharrones de Toluca, las tortas con guaca-
mole, y las tortillas con salsa borracha, a las que él llama “hot cakes.”
[F:] El camote de Querétaro [debe] ser muy suave too; los perritos chi-
huahueños, que nosotros mandamos traer, los comemos como turky [sic] los
Thanks Given Days.
[AC:] ¿Pero es posible que se coman ustedes los perritos como si fueran
guajolotes?
[F:] Sure. . . . Me gustaría also traer a los States el plátano mocho.
[AC:] ¡. . . ah, comprendo: te gustaría traer plátano macho, no?
[F:] Yes. Cuando return osté a México, please dígale a todos los chofirretes
que mi se acordar de ellos all time; que mi estar very agradecido por la acogida
que han dado a mis fotingos, y que very muy pronto soon we have to see there.
[AC:] Suave, Mr. Ford.
¿Ustedes saben, queridos lectores, lo que Mister Ford nos ha dicho en perro[¿]?
Pues lo mismo yo, porque la verdad eso de plátano mocho, de Mr. Morcilla y
de esto de lo otro, que lo entienda un perro, porque nosotros . . . ni soca.
Y con esto terminó la entrevista al REY DE LA HOJA DE LATA, y entró por un
callejoncito y salió por otro más bonito.25

[[Ford:] Much gusto to meet you.

[Abbot Chorizo:] Ditto, my dear Enrique. . . . So tell us, Enrique, how
did you get to be a millionaire, or put it this way, what got you turning out
them jalopies that’ve been keeping everyone so busy?
[F:] Oh, that’s a fácil question: as a kid I was mucho taken with mechanics,
but seeing as my folks didn’t own a change of underwear, they hadn’t a peso to
send me to the Universidad de Chalchihuites de la Peñas, Estado de Pennsyl-
vania neither. My folks passed on . . . and I got into the basins and spitoons
business, at a factory in Gran Rapido, Michigan. That’s where I acquired
my vast expertise in Sardine Can electrotherapy, and the lore of tlachiquera
mechagizmos. Thence I betook me to a place that made English porcelain
toiletas, to perfect my knowledge of igni-nasal epigastrics. Am also mucho
practiced in the fabrication of sewer pipes.
[AC:] And to digress from matters of gas, what do you like best about
Mexico?

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 25
[F:] Cured pulque, Ice Creams con Guacamole & Toluca hot dogs. And I
sure appreciate your Mexican Hot Cakes with booze sauce!
[AC:] [Mr. Ford is referring to Toluca pork rinds, guacamole chips, and torti-
llas with salsa borracha, which he mistakes for hot cakes.]

Many of Novo’s contributions take the form of pastiches of famous

writers—greasier, oilier versions of Proust’s Pastiches et mélanges. Almost every
issue of El Chafirete featured a poem or short text by an allegedly famous writer:
Garcirrastro de la Viga, Juana Inés de Cabús, Mamado Cuervo, Luis Sin Semilla,
Mivi Olin, and Don Juan Velorio Chafirete—puns on a host of Spanish and
Latin American writers that include Garcilaso de la Vega, Juna Inés de la Cruz,
Amado Nervo, Luis Quintanilla, Nahui Ollin, and Don Juan Tenorio.
To write these pastiches, Novo often took a canonical work of Spanish
poetry, then refashioned it to focus on cars and chauffeurs. Thus the famous
sonnet by Sor Juana about the illusory nature of beauty:

Éste, que ves, engaño colorido, [This gaudy sham you look upon,
que del arte ostentando los pretense
primores, Attired in all of art’s exquisite prism
con falsos silogismos de colores Deploys in color lying syllogisms
es cauteloso engaño del sentido;26 And stealthily it doth deceive our
sense.]

becomes a “soneto lubricante” [lubricating sonnet] lamenting the fate of a

wrecked city bus:

Éste que ves, camión descolorido [This battered bus you look upon,
Que arrastraba en “Las Artes” sus that roared
furores And erstwhile loosed its furies
Y que vigilan hoy tres inspectores through “Las Artes”
Es un hijo de Ford arrepentido. Today’s by three inspectors sternly
Éste en quien los asientos se han guarded,
podrido A sorry son of Ford.
Con la parte de atrás de los señores, This bus whose threadbare seats have
Que no pudo enfrentarse a los rigores slowly rotted

26
De la vejez, del tiempo y del olvido, Beneath the press of passengers’
Es un pobre camión desvencijado backsides
Que en un poste de luz hizo parada. Unable to withstand the tides
Es un resguardo inútil para el Hado. Of age and time, at last forgotten,
Es una vieja diligencia herrada Is nothing but a worn-out shabby
Es un afán caduco, y bien mirado, crate,
Es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es Stopped now beneath a lamp post.
nada.27 No safeguard against Fate.
Poor old stagecoach: past it, rusting,
All thrust expired, in truth, at most
A corpse, a dust, a shadow, nothing.]

In a similar vein, Novo reworks “Volverán las oscuras golondrinas,” Gustavo

Adolfo Bécquer’s melancholic poem about lost love that every Mexican school-
boy learns to recite, into a sonnet about bribery:

Volverán los obscuros vigilantes [The dark cops riding motorbikes

En su moto las multas a cobrar Will soon be back again to fleece us,
Y otra vez con el pito las señales Swoop again with whistles shrill
Y el alto marcarán. The traffic to command.
Pero aquellos que el vuelo But those who paused in skimming
refrenaban flight
Tu camión y mi carro a contemplar To contemplate your bus, my car
Aquellos que aprendieron nuestros Those who came to know our names
nombres Those . . . will not return.
Esos . . . no volverán. Again the numbskulls on the take
Volverán los tupidos mordelones Will climb my bus’s steps
De mi camión las gradas a escalar And once more in the afternoon
Y otra vez a la tarde, aun más Their hungry beaks shall gape.
hambreados But those in yellow uniform
El hocico abrirán. Whose glossy boots we eyed
Pero aquellos, vestidos de amarillo Boots that creaked and smelled of
Cuyas botas mirábamos brillar liquor
Y rechinar y oler a pulquería Those . . . will not return.]
Esos . . . no volverán.28

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 27
 Novo also used the pages of El Chafirete to settle some literary scores.
An interview with Gabriela Sidral (parodic alter ego of the Chilean poet Ga-
briela Mistral, who had moved to Mexico City to work with José Vasconcelos
at the Ministry of Education) pokes fun at her looks—she was famously un-
attractive—and outs her through a string of double entendres (“tortillera” de-
notes a woman who makes tortillas, but also, in Mexican slang, a lesbian). In the
apocryphal interview Gabriela tells El Chafirete:

. . . no soy de esas. En mi tierra no se acostumbra, prefiero el pan a la tortilla.

No sé precisamente lo que es ser tortillera. Aunque las conozco: las veo muy
seguido en los mercados.

En Chile no nos metemos en esos mitotes: para eso no se hizo la lengua.

Doblemos la hoja. . . .

¡Qué cochinas, eh? En la república de Chile no se ve eso. . . . El Despachador

toca el pito; meto carrera; huyo porque en ello hallo mi orgullo, hasta el hoyo.
De ustedes afectísima y segura servidora, GABRIELA SIDRAL.29

[. . . I’m not one of them. It’s not the custom in my country: I like bread better
than tortillas. I’m not exactly sure what it means to be a tortillera. I know who
they are, mind you: I see them in the markets all the time.

In Chile we don’t go in for such palavers: that’s not what tongues were made for.
Let’s turn the page. . . .

The dirty sluts! You never see that sort of thing in the Republic of Chile. . . .
The dispatcher calls time; I dash for it; I flee because that’s my pride, where I
hide, up to the hilt in a hole. Affectionately and most sincerely yours, GABRI-
ELA SIDRAL]

The young Novo considered Mistral too stiff, too serious, and—unlike him-
self—too repressed about her sexuality, and used the pages of El Chafirete to
proclaim his views to the world . . . of chauffeurs!
Another poet targeted by Novo’s wit was Luis Quintanilla, a member of
the Estridentista avant-garde group, who becomes “Luis Sin Semilla” (Seedless

28
 Luis) in the pages of the journal. The Estridentistas entered the Mexican liter-
ary scene in 1921, when the poet Manuel Maples Arce launched a bombastic
manifesto urging young poets to leave nineteenth-century literature behind
and devote their work to singing the praises of automobiles, airplanes, and
other inventions of the modern era. Two years later, in 1923, Luis Quintanilla, a
friend of Maples Arce’s, published Avión (Airplane), a collection of experimen-
tal poems devoted to propellers and other modern machines.
Novo did not think highly of the Estridentistas. Though he shared
their passion for modernity, he dismissed their poetic experiments as unsophis-
ticated and somewhat juvenile. A few months after the publication of Avión,
Novo began mocking Quintanilla—and the entire Estridentista project—in
El Chafirete. He referred to his book as “Camión” (Bus) and “Avio-camión”
(Plane bus), bringing Estridentista ambitions down to earth by transforming
Quintanilla’s sonic airplane into a rickety city bus. The journal published a se-
lection of “Poems from the Book ‘Avio-camión’ by Luis Sin Semilla” that made
Estridentista poetry look like a series of random non sequiturs. Quintanilla’s
“Verano” (Summer), for instance, is a sentimental poem about contemplating a
beautiful woman on a warm sunny day:

Lu i s Q u i n ta n i l l a , “ V e r a n o ” ( 19 19 )

Abro los ojos [Summer

Mi alma se espereza al sol de la I open my eyes
mañana My soul awakens to morning
¡COCORICO! sunshine
El cielo está azul COCK-A-DOODLE-DO!
Tan azul The sky is blue
El muro es blanco So blue
Por la ventana abierta The whitewashed wall
Azúcar o nieve By the open window
El aire perfumado de flores Sugar or snow?
Y tú The air carries the scent of flowers
Mi amada que despiertas en mis And you
brazos My loved one, wake up in my arms
Perfumada de amor y de juventud Perfumed by love and youth
MIRA PUES SO LOOK

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 29
Abre bien tus azorados ojos Open your bedroom eyes
Es la fresca vereda que sonríe There’s a fresh path smiling at us
SALTA DE TU LECHO SPRING FROM BED
Río A River
Ruido de copas que brindan Sound of leaves rustling
Aurora camina sobre el pasto sin Aurora, walk on the grass without
quebrar el rocío disturbing the dew
Y sumergirse And plunge
Nadar con las manos llorando cristal Swim, your hands crying crystal tears
Verano Summer
Pajarillo rojo A Red bird
Que canta esta mañana en mi jardín.30 Sings in my garden this morning.]

Novo renders Quintanilla’s “Verano” as “Marrano” (Swine): what had been a

pastoral poem about water, flowers, and blue skies becomes an urban song to
oily streets, beefy chauffeurs, and experimental drugs:

S a lva d o r N o v o , “ M a r r a n o ”

Mata los piojos [SWINE

Mi cuate se las truena al son de la I pluck the lice
mañana My pal gets high to morning noise
¡LANGUARICO! COCKSUCKER!
El metileno azul The methylene is blue
Tan azul So blue
El burro es blanco The whitewashed mall
Por la macana tuerta By the one-eyed truncheon
Coca con nieve Coke with snow
El asfalto manchado de aceite The asphalt carries the scent of oil
Y tú And you
Mi camionero en seco te derrapas My trucker, skid up short
Perfumado de gasolina y de estopa Perfumed with gasoline and burlap
MIRA PUES SO LOOK
¡cómo te bufan los pies! Puff your feet!
Es la fresca leche que llegó Gaze at the fresh milk
SACAME EL DINERO Y PAGA SHOW ME THE DOUGH AND PAY
Ríe Laughs

30
El lechero ya se va The milkman’s leaving
Mi “pato” camina sobre mi camión My “pet” walks on my without
sin quebrar la dirección steering too wide
Señales me hace con las manos.31 He signaled me with his hand.]

In an act of poetic cross-dressing, Novo rewrites Quintanilla’s heterosexual ref-

erents as gay images: the maiden turns into a chauffeur, the pastoral images
yield to oily urban symbols. In the same issue, he includes an equally irreverent
rendition of Quintanilla’s “Lluvia” (1917), a calligram featuring words falling
like raindrops across the page.
The Estridentistas followed Marinetti’s vision of the racecar as the new
symbol of industrial, mechanical beauty; Novo’s passion for automobiles, on
the other hand, came from a very different place. At a very early age Novo dis-
covered not only that he was attracted to other boys, but also that his most
intense erotic fantasies revolved around . . . chauffeurs! As he recalls in his
autobiography, one of his first and most intense erotic encounters as a teen-
ager involved the family chauffeur, who seduced him on the roof of the fam-
ily’s Mexico City house.32 From that moment on, chauffeurs became his “fiery
predilection.”33
In the 1920s most drivers were working-class men, young enough to
learn the complicated workings of automotive machinery, strong enough to
crank the engine, lift the hood, and change a tire when the need arose, and
presentable enough to look good in a freshly pressed uniform. Novo was smit-
ten by these rough men who, for a small sum, would drive paying passengers
around town in their roaring automobiles. Their cars were for hire and, at least
according to Novo, so were many of their bodies.34 At nineteen, Novo excelled
at the sport of riding city buses and hiring cars as a ruse to seduce the drivers.
“One of these chauffeurs,” he writes in a representative passage of his autobiog-
raphy, “who was famous among the queens for his sexageration, drove me to
the house—at Pescaditos 4—owned by a certain Fidencio who rented out his
room and his oversize brass bed for the sum of two pesos.”35
Novo, a lover of chauffeurs, found an erotic paradise in the offices of
El Chafirete. Not only did the newspaper grant him access to drivers, but the
entire editorial team was what one might call a gaggle of queens: the publisher,
Novo tells us, lusted after the newsboys who sold his paper; Don Derrapadas,
the main reporter, flirted with bus and tramway fare collectors; and Novo, for
his part, went straight for “the most solid chauffeurs.”36

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 31
 Novo soon turned El Chafirete into a vehicle for seducing drivers. He
began by publishing literary parodies but soon found ways of using the paper
for more outrageous endeavors: he launched a competition for “El Chafirete
más feo [the ugliest chauffeur]” (figure 1.6), probably reasoning that while no
self-respecting motorized macho would agree to enter a beauty pageant, scores
of drivers would gladly participate in an ugliness contest. He was right: the en-
tries poured in, and macho men—who probably had in mind the old Mexican
saying “El hombre debe ser feo, fuerte y formal [Men should be ugly, strong,
and responsible]”—vied to prove they were the ugliest of all. The competition
was won by a certain Manuel Cabrera, a.k.a. “El Sapo Marino [The Sea Toad],”
proclaimed “champion of gasoline ugliness” on August 20, 1923 (figure 1.7).37
With time, Novo became more daring. He introduced “El Aviso Gra-
tuito,” a section devoted to classified ads, most of them written under a host of
pseudonyms, featuring brief messages full of sexual innuendo, and addressed
to the chauffeurs he most desired. Consider, for instance, the following ad,
printed in the August 20, 1923 issue of El Chafirete:

Samuel de mi vida: ¿Todavía chambeas en Tacubaya Mixcoac San Ángel? ¿Me

hiciste siempre de chivo la tocada con esa desgraciada con quien te ibas a casar?
¿No piensas ir a Torreón? ¿Quedaste bien de la operación en el glande y el
chico?—Te adora ADELAIDA.38

[Samuel baby: still working in Tacubaya Mixcoac San Angel? Still going out
dancing with that bitch you were going to marry? Any plans to go to Torreón?
Recovered from the nuts and bolts operation? Your adoring ADELAIDA]

As the months passed, the articles became more daring, the flirtation
more explicit, and the puns more sexual. Following a classic strategy of détourne-
ment, Novo used poems and other forms traditionally associated with high cul-
ture to smuggle his most erotic fantasies into the pages of El Chafirete. In
September 1923, one month before the newspaper ceased publication, the front
page featured a selection of French poems “from the book Chaudement Je Suis
Accouchant.” An editorial note explained that the newspaper’s editor, a polyglot,
had recently published this collection of poetry in French: “His book is note-
worthy because of the innovation of its versification.” A selection of French
verse might seem like a poor fit for the pages of a journal devoted to chauffeurs
and bus drivers, until we have a close look at one of the poems:

32
 f i g u r e 1.6
“¿Cuál es el chafirete más feo?” El Chafirete ( July 23, 1923).
f i g u r e 1.7
“Manuel Cabrera, alias ‘El Sapo Marino,’” El Chafirete (August 20, 1923):4.

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 33
J’ai une grande bourse [I have
où sont in my big
curieusement bag
gardés two
deux funny
grands œufs eggs
aussi grands as big
qu’un bœuf. as a pig.
Et l’on vient People
très souvent keep coming
adorer to worship
ces trésors these treasures
et s’agenouiller kneeling
devant eux before
car ils contiennent what contain
ailleurs besides
toute une famille a whole
en projet. family project.
Au-dessus Just above
lorsqu’on if you
y caresse stroke
doucement gently
l’on peut you can
en tirer draw
du lait milk
et y laisser and leave
en savoureux some tasty
souvenir chocolate
du chocolat or cocoa
ou du cacao.39 as a souvenir.]

We can imagine Novo deriving tremendous pleasure from the impres-

sion his pornographic French verses made on Mexico City’s chauffeurs. What
these burly men considered an edifying selection of sophisticated French po-
etry was in fact a litany of homoerotic double entendres! The drivers would
have seen the inclusion of French poetry as a sign of El Chafirete’s respectabil-
ity, a response that fulfilled Novo’s desire to seduce the journal’s readers. Novo’s

34
literary friends, in contrast, would have understood the poem’s explicit imagery
and celebrated it as a transgressive literary ploy. Respectability, this episode re-
veals, is in the eye of the beholder.

n e u r o s e s , p e r v e r s i o n s , m e c h a n i c a l e x c i tat i o n s

If we now return to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, we see that
Novo was a most unusual reader of Freud. Since his late teens Novo had been
a liberated gay man who was well aware of his particular desire for chauffeurs,
those sexy symbols of a Mexican modernity. He indulged his fancy for drivers
in both fantasy and reality: his elaborate literary divertimenti wound up in the
pages of El Chafirete while the real chauffeurs—as he recounts in his autobiog-
raphy—landed in the bachelor apartment he kept in downtown Mexico City.
Novo’s annotated reading of the Three Essays gives us a clear idea of
how the young poet used psychoanalytic theory to interpret his desire for mo-
torists. Not surprisingly, Novo marked a passage devoted to “Mechanical ex-
citations” in which Freud speculates that riding in a moving vehicle produces
sexual arousal. The analyst links the pleasure derived from riding aboard a car
or train to the childhood pleasure experienced in “games of passive movement,
such as swinging and being thrown up into the air.” Later in life, Freud explains,

the shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises
such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at
one time or other in his life wanted to be an engine driver or a coachman. It is
a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things
connected with railways, and at the age at which the production of phantasies
is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a sym-
bolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway
travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sen-
sations of movement.40

Novo must have recognized his own experience in this description: the young
poet also postulated a link—albeit a more literal one—between motorized
transportation and erotic arousal. Like Freud’s boys, Novo took pleasure in
being driven around; but while Freud’s imaginary subjects—obedient to

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 35
 nineteenth-century mores—gave a lukewarm expression to their desire by
“want[ing] to be engine driver[s] or coachm[e]n,” Novo dispensed with the
symbolism and went straight for the engine drivers and coachmen, turning
automotive travel into a form of sexual pleasure. Novo was excited by riding
Mexico City’s cars, buses, and tramways, but he was even more excited by their
drivers, since motorized travel became merely a prelude to full-fledged sexual
acrobatics. Freud certainly never envisioned that “the extraordinarily intense
interest” boys took in motor vehicles could ever lead to such erotic creativity!
In addition to the passages on “Mechanical excitations,” Novo marked
a good number of sections in the Three Essays focusing on the relation between
neuroses and perversions. He seemed especially interested in Freud’s argu-
ment that most neurotic symptoms were expressions of repressed sexual desires.
“Symptoms,” the analyst famously wrote, “constitute the sexual activity of the
patient,”41 which often involves “abnormal” impulses that are repressed from
consciousness.42 In the case of mechanical excitations, for instance, extremely
prudish neurotics who resist the erotic pleasure experienced aboard moving
vehicles risk developing a travel phobia “or will be subject to attacks of anxiety
on the journey and will protect themselves against a repetition of the painful
experience by a dread of railway travel.”43 Perverts, in contrast, do not repress
their impulses; they give full expression to their desires by acting them out. The
parallels between neuroses and perversions led Freud to conclude that “neuro-
ses are, so to say, the negative of perversions.”44
Novo also marked Freud’s repeated statements that perversions are nei-
ther “aberrations” nor “pathological” acts, but simply a form of sexual behav-
ior present even in “normal” sexuality. Freud argued that the sexual life most
people considered “normal” was simply a halfway point between symptoms
and perversions.45
Novo’s reading of Freud was framed by his erotic adventures with Mex-
ico City’s chauffeurs. At a time when critics were engaged in a passionate debate
about the psychoanalytic view of homosexuality—a debate that, in some re-
spects, continues to this day—Novo chose a most unusual position. One group
of critics argued that Freud’s theory of sexuality presented a normative view of
erotic life, noting that the analyst labeled homosexuality a “perversion” and
classified it under the unkind heading of “the sexual aberrations.” A rival group
insisted that Freud’s argument was more complex, that he viewed “normal” sex-
ual behavior as including “perverse” practices, and that he explicitly refused to
classify homosexuality as an “aberration.”46 Critics who espoused this view of-
ten pointed to Freud’s 1935 letter to an American mother who wrote expressing

36
concern about her son’s sexual identity. “Homosexuality,” he wrote her, “is as-
suredly no advantage but it is nothing to be ashamed of: no vice, no degrada-
tion, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the
sexual function produced by a certain arrest of the sexual development. Many
highly respected individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosex-
uals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo
da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime and a
cruelty too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.”47
While Freud’s critics debated the possibility of reconciling homosexu-
ality and psychoanalysis, Novo proposed a radical solution. He chose to live
his life as a liberated—and libertine—gay man, indulging his taste for chauf-
feurs without the least restraint, while at the same time engaging in a serious
reading of Freud’s psychoanalytic writings. In his mind, Freud was the perfect
complement for his erotic life: the poet had modernized his libido by going af-
ter the motorized men who embodied the twentieth century (“los choferes,” he
wrote, “eran la joven generación lanzada a manejar las máquina, a vivir veloz-
mente” [chauffeurs were the young generation who threw themselves into the
driving seat, to live the fast life]),48 and had also modernized his theoretical un-
derstanding of his own desires by turning to the most avant-garde writings on
the subject (in El joven Novo associates Freud’s writings with other inventions
of the modern era, including film, telephones, and . . . vegetarianism!).49 In the
Three Essays Novo found a twentieth-century theory to elucidate his twentieth-
century object choice. His interest in psychoanalysis, along with his desire for
chauffeurs, was another expression of what Octavio Paz has called the young
poet’s “will to be modern.”50

n o v o, r e v i e w e r o f f r e u d

Novo continued to read Freud through the 1920s. By 1928 he had become an
expert on psychoanalytic theory, and he reviewed the most recent books on the
subject for various journals and newspapers in Mexico City. On November 1,
1928 he published an article in El Universal Ilustrado discussing the most recent
trends in psychoanalytic publishing in Spain, France, the United States, and
Mexico. The list of books reviewed—an impressive list for a twenty-four-year-
old poet—illustrates Novo’s voracious appetite for psychoanalytic texts. His
review discusses Gordon’s The Neurotic Personality, Marie’s La psychanalyse et

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 37
les nouvelles méthodes d’investigation de l’inconscient, the anonymous Journal
psychanalytique d’une petite fille, Kretschmer’s La histeria, and César Juarros’s
Los horizontes de la psicoanálisis, as well as books by Freud in three different
languages—The Future of an Illusion, Ma vie et la psychanalyse, and El análisis
profano y otros ensayos (volume XII of Obras completas).51
In his review, Novo discusses the reception of psychoanalysis in France,
the United States, and Mexico. He praises French novelists for using psycho-
analysis as an inspiration for a new narrative technique, comments on “the
delirious interest with which the United States received psychoanalysis,” and
laments the fact that Mexico lags behind the times in reading—and writing
about—Freud.52
The most interesting section of the review is an aside speculating on
how the dissimilar receptions of Freud in Mexico and the United States can be
traced to religious differences:

Es bien sabido el interés delirante con que los Estados Unidos acogieron el psi-
coanálisis y la gallarda libertad con que los norteamericanos se daban a desatar
sus complejos. Lo cual se explica un poco, por la práctica protestante de no
confesarse. La confesión de los países católicos, a que precede siempre un mi-
nucioso examen de consciencia es ya, en cierto modo, el interrogatorio psico-
analítico, aunque falto de técnica y terminología.53

[The delirious welcome Americans gave to psychoanalysis and the spirited in-
tensity with which they give free rein to their complexes are well-known, and
may partly be explained by the Protestant abstinence from confession. This
Catholic practice, preceded as it always is by a meticulous examination of con-
science, prefigures in some sense the psychoanalytic interrogation, despite tech-
nical or terminological differences.]

Novo’s comparison of the talking cure and confession anticipates many later
studies of the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion. In In the Be-
ginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, Julia Kristeva makes a similar argu-
ment: in our secular societies, psychoanalysis has taken the place traditionally
assigned to religion—as a space for the exploration of inner life, allowing the
individual to experience the wide spectrum of human affects—and the analytic
hour has become the modern equivalent of confession.54

38
n o v o ’s s e l f - a n a l ys i s

Novo maintained an interest in Freud throughout his life. After his youthful
dalliance with El Chafirete and his annotated reading of the Complete Works, he
wrote his most serious psychoanalytically inspired text around 1946: La estatua
de sal, an erotic autobiography so scandalous that it remained unpublished un-
til 1998. According to Carlos Monsiváis, who finally convinced Novo’s heirs to
authorize the publication, no Mexican editor dared to touch the book during
Novo’s lifetime.55
La estatua de sal is an explosive text, and it is easy to see why it remained
unpublished for so long. In it, Novo narrates his life story, foregrounding
the intense—and often extremely entertaining—sexual encounters mark-
ing his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. His adventures involve,
in one way or another, the most respected figures of the cultural scene of the
1920s and 1930s: the poets Xavier Villaurrutia and Jaime Torres Bodet, the
Dominican-born intellectual Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Ricardo Alessio
Robles, one of the main characters in the book and the scion of an illustrious
family of politicians and revolutionary generals, better known among his friends
as “Clarita,” “Chucha Cojines,” “Emma Moreno,” or “Anetta Gallo.”
After a few pages recounting his childhood in the northern city of
Torreón—including the murder of his uncle by Pancho Villa’s revolutionar-
ies—Novo devotes the rest of the book to his sexual life, offering his readers an
adventure-packed sampler of his conquests in which chauffeurs occupy center
stage: he describes how he experienced his first erection after running to catch
a tramway, recounts how as a teenager he was seduced by the family driver, and
gives a behind-the-scenes account of his work at El Chafirete.
But not all his erotic adventures involve mechanical excitations: Novo
takes the reader on a tour of Mexico City’s most infamous male brothels and
dens of iniquity that at times makes his book read like a comic version of
Dante’s Inferno. Consider, for instance, the following passage:

Pero Clara [Ricardo Alessio Robles] no creía en el amor, ni en la exclusividad.

Predicaba y practicaba el goce y la alegría tempestuosos, y me llevaba todos los
días a presentar con gente diversa y pintoresca, a conocer sus casas y sus medios
bizarros: a la vecindad en una de cuyas accesorias el bailarín Pedro Rubín dor-
mía aún a la una de la tarde sobre el suelo, después de una noche de orgías que
relataba con todo género de detalles; a otra vecindad de la calle de Luis Moya

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 39
que era una especie de casa de citas masculina, regenteada por un mesero cuyo
amante dormía a todas horas en la gran cama de madera llena de lazos azules,
y animada a ratos por la presencia de un español muy viejo que lucía una larga
cabellera, se hacía llamar Carmen y se marchaba por las noches a servir en un
burdel de mujeres.56

[But Clara [Ricardo Alessio Robles] didn’t believe in love or exclusiveness. She
both preached and practiced a tempestuous sort of unfettered bliss, and was
always introducing me to strange and colorful characters and taking me into
their homes, letting me into their bizarre worlds: the courtyard apartments in
one of whose annexes the dancer Pedro Rubín was still passed out on the floor
at midday, following an all-night orgy he proceeded to describe in juicy detail;
another old building on Calle Luis Moya that was a kind of male brothel, run
by a waiter who kept his lover tucked up in a big wooden bed covered in blue
bows, and enlivened now and then by the presence of an ancient, long-haired
Spaniard who called himself Carmen, and trotted off at night to work in a het-
erosexual whorehouse.]

In other passages he recounts how the very respectable and very straight Pe-
dro Henríquez Ureña made advances on him; how an elegant gentleman of
a certain age became known as “La Tamales” for his custom of luring young
boys to his apartment with the promise of “a beer and some tamalitos”; how
he prostituted himself to pay the rent of his studio; and how Clara, after a trip
to London, introduced her Mexico City friends to the very modern fashion of
snorting cocaine. All this in the Mexico City of the 1920s.
But how does La estatua de sal relate to Freud? In the opening para-
graph Novo explains that he remembered and relived many of the childhood
memories presented in the narrative during the time he spent in psychoanaly-
sis, delving into “the primitive stages in the development of libido.” Important
episodes in his life were “fixed” in his memory thanks to his analyst’s comments.
Novo even offers a self-diagnosis: his own “Oedipus complex,” he tells us, did
not follow the normal course of development—in part because he spent “the
later part of my life in the company of a mother who is merely fifteen years my
senior.”57
This most unusual opening—part theoretical frame, part self-
diagnosis—reveals that Novo considered La estatua de sal an exercise in anal-
ysis (as Monsiváis noted, “Salvador Novo was a fanatic of self-analysis”).58
Writing an autobiography was also an attempt to put on paper the childhood

40
memories that had surfaced after what he calls his “belated and failed” attempts
at analysis, and to continue the work of recollection by other means.
Perhaps Novo was merely following Freud’s example. The Viennese
analyst also engaged in a self-analysis—in part because there were no psycho-
analysts at the time—and presented his discoveries of forgotten childhood
memories and unconscious desires in The Interpretation of Dreams, a book
that became the founding text of psychoanalytic theory. Didier Anzieu has
called Freud’s self-analysis—carried out between 1895 and 1902—“the most
singular aspect of the discovery of psychoanalysis.”59 Should we then consider
La estatua de sal as a more salacious Mexican version of The Interpretation of
Dreams? Did Novo mean to write an Interpretation of Flings?
Novo’s Mexico City in 1930 was a very different place from what Freud’s
Vienna had been in 1900. When Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, psy-
choanalysis did not exist as a discipline, neither did practitioners who could
help him interpret his dreams. By the time Novo became interested in these
matters, psychoanalysis had mushroomed into an international movement and
analysts could be found all over the world—even in Mexico City. We don’t
know much about Novo’s experiences with analysts, except for the fact he con-
sidered them “belated” and “failed.” Chances are he was dissatisfied with his
analyst, and one can easily see why: it would be hard to find a match for Novo’s
mind, for his quick wit, erudite culture, and worldly life in a city that, despite
its rapid transformation into a bustling metropolis, was at heart still dominated
by provincial mores and conservative values. One can imagine that the brilliant
young poet, faced with a dimwitted analyst, would have felt frustrated enough
to terminate the analysis . . . or at least to continue it by other means: not on the
couch but on paper, a writing cure rather than a talking cure.
Novo’s self-analysis differed greatly from the model found in The In-
terpretation of Dreams: Freud privileges dreams as “the royal road to the un-
conscious”; Novo highlights sexual experiences, and his autobiography is a
compilation of trysts that at times reads like Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Consider, for instance, Novo’s recollection of being seduced by Emilio,
the family chauffeur. Remembering this formative experience that took place
when he was a schoolboy, Novo writes:

Una tarde, al subir a la azotea, encontré que el chofer descansaba, echado en su

camastro. Procuré no hacer ruido al cruzar su habitación, y fui a acodarme en el
pretil, perdido en la grata absorción de aquel silencio, del panorama de azoteas
punteando a trechos por las copas de los árboles amarillentos por el atardecer,

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 41
cuando sentí que Emilio llegaba hasta mí, y sin pronunciar una palabra, se
oprimía contra mi cuerpo. Me volví, y entonces me estrechó en sus brazos, cogió
mi mano y la llevó hasta la prominencia que se erguía en su bragueta. Luego de-
sabrochó sus botones, extrajo su pene, y pugnó por hacerme tocarlo, mientras
me miraba con atención. “¿Te gusta?,” murmuró. Yo no contesté. Apoyado de
espaldas en el pretil, lo empuñé, más lleno de curiosidad que de deseo; contem-
plé su tesura, la redondez de su cabeza que terminaba en una pequeña boca, li-
bre del prepucio que mis masturbaciones no lograban aflojar en mi propio sexo;
de un hermoso color moreno, muy distinto del monstruoso color rojizo que en
Jorge González me había asustado. Poco a poco, echamos a andar a su cuarto. Se
cercioró, asomándose al patio, de que nadie podría buscarnos; aseguró la puerta
de entrada a la azotea, y me atrajo a su cama. La almohada, su cuerpo, su rostro
áspero, sus manos duras, efundían un olor de gasolina que a partir de aquel acto,
iba a condicionar durante mucho tiempo un placer que en aquel momento gus-
taba verdaderamente por la primera vez.60

[One afternoon I climbed up to the roof terrace, where I found the driver hav-
ing a nap on his cot. Trying not to disturb him I tiptoed through the room and
went to lean on the parapet, lost in contented absorption of the silence and the
vast roofscape that was dotted here and there by treetops bathed in yellow eve-
ning light. Then I heard Emilio’s footsteps behind me, and felt him push his
body into mine without a word. I turned around and he embraced me, took
my hand and guided it to the bulge that was rising in his crotch. He undid his
fly and brought his penis out and tried to get me to touch it, staring intently at
me. “Like it?” he whispered. I didn’t answer. Leaning back against the parapet,
I grasped it, moved more by curiosity than by desire: fascinated by the stiffness
of it, the roundness of the head that ended in a little mouth, free of the foreskin
that no amount of masturbation could loosen up on mine; it was a beautiful
shade of brown, quite unlike the monstrous red thing that had so scared me
with Jorge González. Little by little we wandered into his room. He glanced
down over the patio, to make sure no one was coming; he bolted the door, and
drew me to the bed. The pillow, his body, his prickly face and hard hands were
rank with the smell of gasoline that from then on, and for a long time, was to
condition a pleasure which I had never truly felt until that day.]

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud followed the same procedure for analyz-
ing every dream: he wrote a concise summary, followed by a detailed description

42
 of the associations evoked by each element or image, and concluded with an in-
terpretation revealing the unconscious wish fulfilled by the dream. Novo fol-
lows a very different process in his interpretation of sexual experiences. As his
memory of the family chauffeur demonstrates, Novo is mainly interested in
writing down his memories of erotic encounters: he focuses on the sensory de-
tails, and uses words to paint the sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations
associated with the memory. In the chauffeur memory he privileges sight and
smell: the passage opens with an almost lyrical description of the Mexico City
landscape (“panorama de azoteas punteando a trechos por las copas de los ár-
boles amarillentos por el atardecer”) that gives way to a colorful erotic land-
scape (“de un hermoso color moreno, muy distinto del monstruoso color rojizo
que en Jorge González me había asustado”). As in Dalí’s double images, the
image of the chauffeur’s tumescent penis is superimposed on the sight of the
towering trees seen from the roof: a phallic mountain rising above the placid
cityscape.
The sense of smell occupies a prominent role in this memory. Once
the young Novo enters the chauffeur’s room, the visual descriptions come to
an end: the narration stops abruptly and the reader is left in the dark about the
events that unfolded behind the closed door. Novo loses himself in the smell of
gasoline, leaving the reader with only a series of fragmentary, disconnected im-
ages (“La almohada, su cuerpo, su rostro áspero, sus manos duras”), and staging
a disintegration of the narrative voice. It is as if the narrator were intoxicated
by the pungent smell, as if his consciousness had been dissolved in gasoline.
Novo’s recollections evoke the title of a book that would be published almost
half a century after his encounter with Emilio: David Wojnarowicz’s Memories
That Smell Like Gasoline.61
Freud devotes several pages to tracing the associations sparked by his
dreams; Novo, in contrast, seems more interested in penning a description
filled with sensory details, and once this has been done, he offers an almost
telegraphic interpretation—a sentence or two explaining how the event relates
to his later life. The chauffeur memory concludes with the brief observation
“the smell of gasoline that from then on, and for a long time, was to condition
a pleasure which I had never truly felt until that day.” Novo identifies this teen-
age experience as a defining moment in his erotic development, one destined to
fuse lovers and chauffeurs, sex and gasoline, for the rest of his life. But he does
not seem interested in taking the interpretation any further: once he has identi-
fied the “primal scene” of his attraction for drivers, he can move on to the next
erotic recollection.

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 43
 Unlike Freud, who scanned dreams in search of unconscious associa-
tions, Novo seems less interested in analyzing than in re-creating. Following
the model of the scene involving the family chauffeur, his other memories of-
fer rich sensory descriptions of his adventures and misadventures. The reader
gets the impression that Novo turned to writing as a means to relive his youth-
ful dalliances: his written descriptions are so vivid that they take him back in
time, transforming the middle-aged poet once more into the attractive teen-
ager whose life was an endless string of sexual conquests.
Novo finished La estatua de sal when he was forty-two. He had not
aged well: no longer the svelte, attractive boy he once was, he had turned into
a chubby, balding middle-aged man. As he confessed in one of his sonnets, he
felt disgust at the sight of his sagging body, wrecked by age:

Escribir porque sí, por ver si acaso [I write for writing’s sake, in case
Se hace un soneto más que nada Some sonnet come, worth more than
valga; nought;
Para matar el tiempo, y porque salga To kill the time, in hopes some word
Una obligada consonante al paso. I sought
Porque yo fui escritor, y éste es el caso By chance appear and fall into its
Que era tan flaco como perra galga; place.
Crecióme la papada como nalga, Because I was a writer once. I profess,
Vasto de carne y de talento escaso. I was lean as a hound on the run;
¡Qué le vamos a hacer! Ganar dinero Now my jowls hang flabby and loose,
y que la gente nunca se entrometa like my bum,
en ver si se lo cedes a tu cuero. Endowed with less talent than flesh.
Un escritor genial, un gran poeta. . . Ah well, can’t be helped! Line your
Desde los tiempos del señor Madero, pockets
Es tanto como hacerse la puñeta.62 And don’t let the busybodies see you
Slip some to your hunky poppet.
A writer of genius, a poet of note . . .
It’s not, since the days of Madero,
Any better than wanking by rote.]

By 1940 Novo had become an established figure in the Mexico City literary
scene. He was making a good living and was widely respected as a poet. But he

44
would have given up his fame, recognition, and money to get back the thin, de-
sirable body of his youth. He would never again be the cute boy he once was,
but he could use words to re-create the intense sexual experiences he once had,
and to relive, in writing, the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and tactile sensations
of his earlier life. Freud analyzed himself in search of the unconscious wishes
being fulfilled in dreams. Novo, more literal- minded, engaged in a self-analysis
aimed at fulfilling a simple wish: to turn back the clock so he could once again
act out his fantasies.
Despite the difference between Freud’s and Novo’s self-analyses, La es-
tatua de sal constitutes the most sophisticated product of Novo’s psychoana-
lytic readings. More elaborate than the campy comments inscribed on the pages
of Freud’s Obras completas, or than his perverse contributions to El Chafirete,
his autobiography deploys psychoanalytic theory to interpret his own life, al-
beit with a twist. Freud believed a successful analysis would give the patient a
clear picture of his psychic development from infancy into adulthood; Novo
was more interested in understanding his own mental evolution in order to re-
claim the golden years of his late adolescence.

“ m e d i tat i o n s o n r a d i o ”

Novo continued reading Freud and using psychoanalytic theory in his writing
throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934 he published his most unusual con-
tribution to Freudian theory: “Meditaciones sobre el radio,” an extremely per-
ceptive essay about psychoanalysis and radio—a relatively new medium that
fascinated the world with its ability to broadcast decorporealized words across
continents.
The first radio stations began broadcasting in the early 1920s, and po-
ets from F. T. Marinetti to Manuel Maples Arce celebrated this new technol-
ogy as a model for avant-garde poetry. Marinetti urged young poets to exercise
a “wireless imagination”; Apollinaire penned a calligrammic “Ocean Letter”
depicting the transformation of words sent through Hertzian waves; Maples
Arce inaugurated one of the first radio stations in Mexico City by broadcast-
ing “T.S.H.,” a futurist poem about the wonders of radio. Salvador Novo, who
was younger than these more established radiophilic poets, was also smitten

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 45
by what one columnist called “the madness of radio.” In 1924, one year after
the opening of the first radio station in Mexico City, Novo founded a literary
journal called Antena and went on the airwaves to read a “Radio-conferencia
sobre el radio [Radio lecture on radio],” marveling at the powers of the new
medium to broadcast his voice around the world and to bring his message into
the living rooms of thousands of listeners he did not know. “Señoras y señores
que me escucháis,” he began, “No sabría explicar la emoción que se intercala
en mi garganta al considerar que mi voz se escucha, débil como es, en el confín
lejano, por magia de la ciencia [Ladies and gentlemen who are listening, I can
scarcely find the words to express the emotion that chokes me at the thought
of my voice being heard, however faintly, across the far distance, thanks to the
magic of science].”63
Novo continued to think about radio throughout the 1920s, all while
reading Freud and seducing chauffeurs. In 1934 he published his most sophis-
ticated article on the subject, “Meditaciones sobre el radio,” a text that brings
together radio and Freud. This remarkable essay evokes Walter Benjamin’s ar-
ticle on mechanical reproduction, and its subtitle could well be “The Work of
Art in the Age of Wireless Transmission.”
The essay opens by presenting media as extensions of bodily organs,
and points out that the most interesting inventions are those extending the
powers of the eyes and the ears—the telescope, the microscope, the telephone,
the telegraph, and radio—before offering a succinct “biography of radio”:

El radio aparece como la culminación de una serie de inventos científicos para

transmitir el sonido a distancia que van desde el telégrafo y el teléfono hasta el
gramófono con sus sucesivas superaciones: los tubos, los discos, la “ortofónica.”
Chico precoz como todos los de “hoy en día,” en sus poco más de diez años de
vida ha prescindido de la galena por los bulbos, se acomoda en un bolsillo, se in-
stala solemnemente en la sala de la casa o arrulla nuestra siesta sobre la mesilla de
noche; va con nosotros en el coche, le permite al Ministro desde su despacho, es-
cuchar los denuestos que le lanzan en la Cámara los Diputados, y nos desespera
en el restaurant. Finalmente, y por una inexplicable—para mí, naturalmente—
paradoja de nomenclatura, ostenta una “onda corta” que permite cubrir auditiva-
mente la más larga distancia y una onda larga que permite escuchar las estaciones
más cercanas. Y aun anuncia enriquecerse con la televisión. Ya ninguna sorpresa
puede asombrarnos. Desde el siglo XIX venimos viviendo en el milagro.64

46
[Radio emerged as the climax of a series of scientific attempts to transmit sound
over long distances, from the telegraph and the telephone to the gramophone,
with successive improvements such as bulbs, records, and “orthophonics.” A
fast learner like all of today’s “precocious kids,” at barely ten years old it has re-
placed lead sulfide with bulbs; it can fit into a pocket, dominate the grandest
living room or lull our siesta from the bedside table; it rides with us in the car,
allows a Minister in his office to hear the abuse hurled against him in Congress,
and drives us crazy in restaurants. Lastly, by virtue of an inexplicable—to me,
of course—paradox of nomenclature, it offers a “short wave” for aural coverage
of the farthest distance, and a “long wave” for listening to nearby stations. And
as though this weren’t enough, enhancements are coming in the form of televi-
sion. No surprise can any more amaze us. Ever since the nineteenth century, we
have been living with miracles.]

After this brief history of radio, Novo spends several pages analyzing the effects
of broadcasting on language: he develops an important distinction between
the “words” (palabras) uttered by a speaker and his “voice”—colored by an ar-
ray of tones, modulations, and eccentricities that are lost when words are writ-
ten down. Words, he writes, serve to express ideas, but they can be understood
only by those who speak the language in which they are uttered; voice, on the
other hand, functions like music, a universal language to transmit emotions.
The affects communicated by the voice, he believes, are more remote, more
primitive, and more universal than the rational meaning conveyed by words.
In the history of civilization, noise and music were the most ancient means of
communication; only later did man invent words “for his comfort.” But we still
retain, “intact, the primitive treasure of reacting not to words but to voice.”65
Novo then links this opposition between words and voice to two fun-
damental concepts in psychoanalytic theory. “To use the language of Freud-
ians,” he writes, “we could say that [man’s] conscious mind—the ego—is full
of words, while his unconscious—the id—is full of noises that can slip past the
censorship of consciousness when we are overcome by emotion.” Cries, screams,
and other spontaneous interjections communicate primeval affects emanating
from the id, while words simply stem from the conscious mind. Novo observes
that a person’s voice matters more than his physical appearance, and uncon-
sciously determines whether we consider him pleasant or unpleasant, since “it
is the tone of the voice which is put at the disposal . . . of the unconscious.” The

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 47
voice has the power to make a strong psychic impression, and its pitch and tone
often work against the conscious message conveyed by words:

Una persona grata a nuestros ojos puede sernos odiosa en cuanto hable, por
seductoras que sean sus palabras. Y por duras y hostiles que sean las palabras
de una persona fea, el tesoro de un subconsciente afín al nuestro puede ganar-
nos desde su voz. La utilidad del “tono” por encima de la palabra (del lenguaje
del subconsciente por encima del consciente) se prueba en mil ejemplos del
pasado.66

[Someone pleasant to look at can become hateful when talking, even if their
words are attractive in themselves. And no matter how hard and hostile the
words of an ugly person, we might nevertheless sense the treasure of a kindred
subconscious from their voice alone. The power of “tone” over word (of sub-
conscious over conscious language) has long ago been demonstrated, in num-
berless examples.]

Novo then links these observations to the wireless. Radio, he tells us, magnifies
the ring and tone of the voice, thus any imperfections that routinely go by un-
perceived on the street are heard as jarring blunders by the listener. He encour-
ages radio announcers to bear in mind this crucial characteristic of the medium,
and to pay special attention to the modulations of the voice in broadcasts. “Be-
cause radio is a new and peculiar invention, it must develop a new and peculiar
technique allowing every word to cede ground to pure sound, remembering . . .
that it is destined to be heard and not seen or read.”67
Novo closes his essay with a series of recommendations to announcers,
urging them to spend less time chattering—a sure way to bore listeners and lead
them to change stations—and more time experimenting with techniques for
highlighting the musicality of the voice.
In addition to his observations about voice and words, Novo uses the
language of psychoanalysis to theorize another characteristic of broadcasting.
Like neuroses, he observes, radio offers the possibility of escaping the world:
it “is an invisible form of Jacob’s ladder allowing the sick man, the neurotic, or
even the chambermaid to flee their immediate reality.”68 Radio is an inherently
neurotic medium, and listening to its programs for too long is one of the “new
maladies of the soul” unleashed by modernity.69

48
 Novo elaborates on Freud’s remark—in Civilization and Its Discon-
tents—that modern media function as extensions of our organs and emerge
as the “prosthetic gods” of twentieth-century modernity. He seeks to isolate
the characteristics distinguishing radio from other media, and in the process
he arrives at some of the same conclusions as the most celebrated theorists of
the time, from Rudolf Arnheim to André Coeuroy: that it is a blind medium
(“the radio listener,” he writes, “becomes blind and mute”); that this temporary
blindness takes listeners to a “heightened aural perception,” leaving them “ready
to vibrate at the most minor stimulus without the need for words”;70 and that
the microphone amplifies the accidents and tics of announcers, transforming
them into unforgivable blunders.
But Novo’s most original contribution to the understanding of the me-
dium comes with his use of psychoanalytic concepts. He anticipates by three
decades the quality that Roland Barthes called “the grain of the voice,” and his
distinction between words and voice prefigures Julia Kristeva’s theory of poetic
language. Novo’s theory of voice as the most important feature of radio trans-
mission, surpassing the meaning of words, corresponds to Kristeva’s account of
how the semiotic register, punctuated by rhythm and musicality, is in constant
tension against the symbolic register and its Cartesian elements.71
Novo believes that the most interesting and exciting uses of radio are
those that exploit the endless possibilities of voice, rather than simply treating
it as a medium for broadcasting words. Rephrased in Kristevan terms, his ar-
gument claims that radio—like poetic language—mobilizes the semiotic reg-
ister against the strict rules of the symbolic. The most successful avant-garde
authors—from Antonin Artaud to Samuel Beckett—arrived at a similar con-
clusion and used their radio plays to broadcast eerie human voices colored by
powerful emotions that transcend the meaning of the words uttered. Artaud,
for instance, staged the breakdown of language in his Pour en finir avec le juge-
ment de dieu: words eventually give way to a series of primal screams, drum
beatings, and “glossolalias.”72 Orson Welles exploited the illusion of reality and
immediacy produced by a chummy announcer to fool his listeners in The War
of the Worlds. And in plays like Embers and Cascando Samuel Beckett experi-
mented with novel techniques for emphasizing the blind condition of radio
listeners and intensifying their sense of disorientation.
Even more original is Novo’s comparison of radio and neuroses. Like a
neurotic, the listener tunes the radio “in order to escape reality,” and listening
to the wireless is a form of symptomatic behavior. If we push Novo’s analysis

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 49
a bit further, we can interpret radio broadcasts as a form of collective psycho-
sis: a world of auditory hallucinations shared by all those who tune in. If the
psychotic flees into a world of delusions, the radio listener, by putting on a pair
of headphones, becomes not only temporarily blind, but also temporarily de-
tached from reality.
To my knowledge, only one other author made a connection between
radio and the unconscious: the French critic André Coeuroy, who in a short ar-
ticle from the 1920s compared the night sky, filled with invisible radio waves, to
the unconscious: like the unconscious, it was full of messages that were inacces-
sible to our perception. And if the technique of free association allows us fur-
tive glimpses of the unconscious, then radio receivers allow us to tap into tiny
fragments of the vast universe of radio communications.
By the time Novo published his “Meditaciones sobre el radio” in 1934,
he had gone a long way from his first readings of Freud in 1923. He had devel-
oped a more sophisticated knowledge of psychoanalytic theory that extended
beyond sexuality. Freud would have approved, since he was always dismayed at
those who reduced psychoanalysis to a theory about sexual life understood “in
the popular sense, namely in which by sexual needs nothing is meant but the
need for coitus or analogous acts producing orgasm and emission of the sexual
substances.”73 Freud never tired of repeating that psychoanalytic theory was
much more complex, and that it encompassed a myriad of mental factors that
went beyond genital sexuality.
In his youth, Novo started out with a “wild” understanding of psy-
choanalysis as a theory of sex; by 1934 he had achieved a more sophisticated
comprehension of Freud that allowed him to elaborate on the theory of the
unconscious, and its relation to language and broadcasting.

conclusion

As we have seen in this chapter, Salvador Novo was one of the most versa-
tile readers of Freud anywhere in the world. He used psychoanalysis to think
through sexual identity, to act out his own fetish for chauffeurs, to develop
a theory of the wireless unconscious, and ultimately to engage in a self-analysis
that culminated with the composition of La estatua de sal, his version of The
Interpretation of Dreams. During this time, Novo emerged as one of the most

50
serious commentators on psychoanalytic theory for a lay audience: he pub-
lished articles and reviews of the latest literature in El Universal Ilustrado and
other literary journals.
At a time when gay writers around the world, from André Gide to Luis
Cernuda, struggled to find literary and social acceptance for same-sex desire,
Novo became the only poet to brandish psychoanalytic theory as a weapon
in this fight. He saw Freud’s work as a modern theory that could be deployed
against the social taboos that dominated Mexican society, as a critical tool to
destroy the prejudices of a country that remained, even after the Revolution,
mired in nineteenth-century mores. And while old-fashioned doctors and psy-
chiatrists—including the unsympathetic doctor who treated Novo’s friend
Jorge Cuesta74 —debated whether homosexuality should be treated as a per-
version, Novo heralded Freud as the modern thinker who could lead the world
out of its sexual impasse.
Novo had a will—almost an obsession—to be modern. He embraced
the machines of the twentieth century as well as the novel techniques of mod-
ern poets from T. S. Eliot to Ezra Pound. Freud’s work became one more item
in his list: an invention of the modern era he yearned to master. But importing
Freudian theory became a more urgent task than modernizing literary sensibili-
ties or proclaiming the virtues of radio: Freud’s writings provided an alternative
to the stultified beliefs that continued to dominate Mexico City in the 1920s: a
poisonous combination of machismo, sexual prudishness, and extreme nation-
alism. In the next chapter we will see how a Mexican philosopher proposed a
psychoanalytic cure for these cultural neuroses.

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 51
TA X I

Novo’s passion for drivers and chauffeurs was well known among his friends
and colleagues. In 1924 Manuel Rodríguez Lozano painted him aboard a taxi
speeding through the streets of downtown Mexico City. El taxi (figure 1.8;
plate 1) portrays the poet as the ultimate dandy: he is young, handsome, and
well groomed: slicked hair, plucked eyebrows, and bright red lips make him
into a 1920s poster boy for metrosexual aesthetics.
Through the window, we see the modern metropolis that Mexico City
had become by 1924: a late-model Ford drives down a boulevard; a tramway
stops to pick up passengers; cast-iron lampposts illuminate the city’s sidewalks.
And above the graceful, modern buildings, a bright moon shines over a balmy
Mexico City night.
More surprising is Novo’s outfit: we would expect the cosmopolitan
poet to wear a suit, a smoking jacket, or a tuxedo outfit. But in fact he is draped
in a loose garment that looks like . . . a dressing gown or a bathrobe. But why
would he be wearing such an informal piece of clothing aboard a taxi? Per-
haps he felt as comfortable aboard a taxi as he did at home; perhaps the taxi
had become his second home; perhaps he hoped to turn the taxi into a bed-
room of sorts.
We can see why Rodríguez Lozano chose to paint Novo in this noctur-
nal setting. As we learn from his memoirs, Novo lived at night, hopping from
theaters to cinemas to parties . . . and to male brothels. He was the consummate

53
f i g u r e 1.8
Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, El taxi (1924). Courtesy Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City.

54
urban night owl, and Rodríguez Lozano’s painting captures him in the midst
of one of his nocturnal escapades, as he is driven across the city to his next
adventure.
Even more important, however, is what we cannot see. El taxi gives us
merely a partial view of the automobile’s interior: we can see Novo, the taxi
window, and the cityscape in the background. But we cannot see what for Novo
might have been the most important part of the driving experience: the chauf-
feur. Novo can see him from the back seat, but he remains inaccessible to us
viewers, cut off forever by the frame of the painting.
Perhaps it is this irony that makes Novo smile: his eyes are turned to-
ward the viewer, but his body faces the chauffeur. Viewers might think they are
contemplating a portrait of the artist aboard an automobile, but in fact they
are witnessing the prelude—or the aftermath—of a seduction. Where is Novo
going to—or coming from—dressed in a robe and accompanied by a chauf-
feur? Perhaps he does not have a destination, and he is simply using the taxi as
a bedroom—as a stage for the kind of seductions he describes in his autobiog-
raphy. If so, the taxi functions as a motorized boudoir, as another instance of
the young poet’s efforts to modernize his desire. El taxi is a portrait of the artist
cruising on Mexico City’s streets.

Chapter 1 | p e r v e r s i o n s 55
 | 2 |

COMPLEXES

While Novo explored Freud’s sexual theories, one of his contemporaries, the
philosopher Samuel Ramos, used psychoanalysis for a very different purpose:
to diagnose the collective neuroses afflicting the Mexican nation. This was the
first effort to put the nation on the couch—a project that developed into a ver-
itable obsession in the first half of the twentieth century and led a battery of
historians, sociologists, and political scientists in search of cures for the collec-
tive pathologies of the Mexican psyche.
Samuel Ramos (1897–1959) was born in the provincial city of Zitá-
cuaro, in the state of Michoacán, and moved to Mexico City as a teenager to
attend medical school. His plans changed after attending the lectures on phi-
losophy given by Antonio Caso at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, the coun-
try’s most celebrated secondary school. Ramos became a philosopher, and by
the mid-1920s his articles on culture and national identity appeared regularly
in the pages of Ulises, a literary journal edited by Salvador Novo and financed
by the extravagant Antonieta Rivas Mercado.
Ramos is remembered chiefly for his contribution to the “philosophy of
Mexicanness.” After the Revolution came to an end in 1920, the country’s intel-
lectuals published a dizzying number of studies that sought to define the iden-
tity of the new country that had emerged from the civil war. What was the new,
postrevolutionary Mexico? How was it different from the old regime? What

57
role did Spanish and Indian cultures play in this new nation? What were the
traits of the new citizens? What did the future have in store for them? These
questions dominated the intellectual scene and they prompted publications by
anthropologists, philosophers, historians, poets, artists, and psychiatrists.
The first important essays on Mexican identity were José Vasconcelos’s
La raza cósmica (The cosmic race, 1925) and Indología (Indology, 1926). Vas-
concelos was appointed the country’s first Secretary of Education after the Rev-
olution, and he put his theory of national culture into practice by hiring Diego
Rivera to paint a cycle of murals on the walls of the ministry and launching the
most ambitious publishing program the country had seen: the ministry’s pub-
lishing house printed millions of copies of the classics of Western literature,
from Plato to Goethe, and distributed them throughout the country (along
the way, he enlisted Ramos to work on the translation of Plotinus’s Enneads,
one of the titles on the list).1 Under the influence of Vasconcelos, Ramos ex-
plored new approaches to analyze national identity. His first publication on the
Mexican character appeared in Examen, a short-lived journal that also counted
Novo as a contributor, and in 1934 he released an expanded version, Perfil del
hombre y la cultura en México (Profile of man and culture in Mexico). This was
Ramos’s most influential book—it inspired responses by intellectuals as diverse
as Leopoldo Zea and Octavio Paz—and for some time it was required reading
in most Mexican secondary schools. Though Ramos was trained as a philoso-
pher, Perfil addresses the question of national identity not from a philosophi-
cal but from a psychoanalytic perspective: the central chapter of the book bears
the Freudian title “Psicoanálisis del mexicano” (Psychoanalysis of the Mexican),
and it marks the first attempt to put Mexico on the couch.
The first time Ramos mentioned Freud was in an article he wrote when
he was twenty-eight: “Otto Weininger: El simposio en el año 1925” (Otto
Weininger: The symposium in 1925). This playful text features a most unusual
discussion of psychoanalytic theory: structured like a short story, it is set in-
side a fashionable cabaret, where a jazz band plays and young couples dance in
an “atmosphere electrified by sexuality.” By the dance floor, two friends start a
conversation about love and eroticism. “Our discussion of love as we sit around
a table,” remarks the first, “reminds me of Plato.” Struck by the unlikely juxta-
position of Platonic philosophy and modern nightlife, his friend wonders how
the characters of the Symposium would react if they came back to life in the
twentieth century:

58
 Yo: Si Diótima de Mantinea resucitara en este tiempo me imagino que
no sería difícil encontrar en los periódicos un anuncio económico en estos
términos:
PARA DUDAS AMOROSAS CONSULTE A DIOTIMA DE MANTINEA, ES-
PECIALISTA EN PSICOANÁLISIS.
El joven helenizante (con indignación): Diótima de Mantinea hablando de la
“libido” y del “complejo de Edipo.” ¡Qué horror!2

[Me: If Diotima of Mantinea came back to life today, I imagine you’d soon
see small ads in the newspapers saying something like this:
FOR ALL YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVE, CONSULT DIOTIMA OF
MANTINEA, EXPERT IN PSYCHOANALYSIS.
Young Hellenophile (indignantly): Diotima of Mantinea talking about the
“libido” and the “Oedipus complex”? How ghastly!]

The young Hellenophile—whose opinions echo those of Ramos—reacts with

horror at the suggestion that psychoanalysis might be a modern-day equivalent
of Platonic philosophy. His impassioned response expresses a common preju-
dice held by conservative intellectuals in the 1920s: that Freudian theory—like
the new music heard in cabarets across the world—was a modern fad, a fash-
ionable invention that would eventually fade into oblivion. Traditionalists
looked down upon Freud, jazz, and loose morals as evidence of the destruction
of social values that was one of the side effects of modernity. Ramos disliked
Freud for the same reason that Novo enthused about him: because he was a
modern thinker who opened a frank discussion about sexuality.
Ramos’s short text brings Diotima back to life so she can engage in a
conversation with Ramos’s alter ego, who quizzes her about psychoanalytic
theory:

Yo: Veo, Diótima, que te has convertido al freudismo.

Diótima: Cómo, ¿qué me he convertido al freudismo? Si es Freud el que
se ha convertido al platonismo.
Yo: ¡Ah! Ya lo sospechaba. Al leer el “Banquete” entre líneas se descubren
recónditas afinidades entre el filósofo de Atenas y el psicólogo de Viena.
Cuando se dice que ciertos productos mentales superiores son satisfacciones

Chapter 2 | c o m p l e x e s 59
desviadas de un impulso sexual reprimido, se traduce a un lenguaje científico
una idea latente en el platonismo: que sin Eros no hay Filosofía.3

[Me: So, Diotima, I see you’ve converted to Freudism.

Diotima: What do you mean, converted to Freudism? It’s Freud who has
converted to Platonism.
Me: Ah! Just as I thought. Reading between the lines of the Symposium,
one finds hidden affinities between the Athenian philosopher and the Vien-
nese psychologist. To say that certain higher products of the mind are satis-
factions diverted from a repressed sexual impulse is to translate into scientific
parlance an idea already latent within Platonism: that there is no Philosophy
without Eros.]

Ramos then spends the rest of his text—which is structured like a Platonic
dialog—arguing that the essence of love is to be found in Plato’s philosophy
and not in Freud. He is quick to dismiss psychoanalysis, arguing that its most
celebrated concepts—from the theory of the libido to sublimation—already
appear in the Symposium.
Interestingly, Jonathan Lear, who has written extensively about the re-
lation between philosophy and psychoanalysis, notes a similar coincidence. In
Open Minded he explores the parallels between Freud and Plato, but his conclu-
sion could not be more different than that reached by Ramos: he argues that Pla-
tonic and Freudian theories of love are compatible, and that psychoanalysis fits
perfectly well within the canon of Western philosophy. “Plato,” Lear writes, “can
be credited with the invention of psycheanalysis, at least in the sense of being the
first to give a systematic account of a structured psyche.”4 This sounds remark-
ably similar to Ramos’s criticism, except Lear stresses that “psychoanalysis and
philosophy . . . are forms of life committed to living openly—with truth, beauty,
envy and hate, wonder, awe, and dread.”5 If Ramos judges Freud a pale copy
of Plato, Lear shows that Plato and Freud tackled similar questions at differ-
ent points in history, and used the language of their time to formulate answers.
Unlike Novo, Ramos was not an enthusiastic reader of Freud: he ap-
proached psychoanalysis with suspicion, and even before delving into its
theories he was quick to dismiss it as a fashionable but superficial discourse.
Given this inauspicious beginning, it is all the more surprising that Ramos
would become known as the author of a “Psychoanalysis of the Mexican.”

60
 After this article, Ramos devoted himself to philosophy and did not
take up psychoanalysis again until 1932, when he published the extremely con-
troversial article “Psicoanálisis del mexicano” in the journal Examen. Even
though Ramos had been unsympathetic to Freud, his article uses psychoana-
lytic ideas to diagnose the Mexican nation and offer a cure for its psychic ail-
ments. The philosopher paints a bleak portrait of Mexico as a country in the
throes of a collective neurosis, where most inhabitants suffer from a deep-
seated feeling of inferiority that leads to all kinds of pathological behavior: vio-
lent outbursts in the working classes; inauthenticity in the urban elite; extreme
sensitivity and a pathological obsession with power in all segments of society.6
In an oft-quoted passage that would eventually become one of the main
points of reference for most intellectual debates about national identity, Ra-
mos argues that the “feeling of inferiority” constitutes the defining trait of the
Mexican character:

Ya otros han hablado antes del sentido de inferioridad de nuestra raza, pero
nadie, que sepamos, se ha valido sistemáticamente de esta idea para explicar
nuestro carácter. . . . Debe suponerse la existencia de un complejo de inferiori-
dad en todos los individuos que manifiestan una exagerada preocupación por
afirmar su personalidad; que se interesan vivamente por todas las cosas o que
significan poder, y que tienen un afán inmoderado de predominar, de ser en
todo los primeros.7

[Others have noted the feeling of inferiority that afflicts our race, but no critics
so far, to our knowledge, have analyzed this idea in depth to explicate our char-
acter. . . . An inferiority complex should be presumed of every individual who
manifests an excessive need to assert his personality; who takes an avid interest
in everything to do with power, and displays an immoderate desire to dominate,
to come first in everything.]

After giving a psychological explanation of the origins of the feeling of inferi-

ority in childhood, Ramos extrapolates from child development to national
history: the “feeling of inferiority,” he writes, first develops in infancy, when
the child becomes conscious of his weakness in contrast to the strength of his
parents. And Mexico is in the position of this weak infant since “when [it] was
born, [the country’s] position in the civilized world was akin to that of the

Chapter 2 | c o m p l e x e s 61
 child toward its elders. It emerged in history during the primacy of a civiliza-
tion that was already mature, and which could only be partially comprehended
by a childlike spirit.” The young nation’s feeling of inferiority only deepened
over the course of its traumatic history, and it reached pathological propor-
tions in the early nineteenth century, after independence from Spain.8
In Ramos’s account, the intensified feeling of inferiority exploded into
a full-blown collective neurosis in the twentieth century. To illustrate this point
he discusses how pathological behavior manifests itself in three sectors of Mex-
ican society: the lower classes, the city dwellers, and the cultivated bourgeoisie.
Regardless of education, social class, or economic conditions, all Mexicans—
the essay concludes—suffer from feelings of inferiority that lead them to act
out in neurotic patterns.
Despite his bleak thesis, Ramos closes on a positive note: though the
national psyche is haunted by ghosts, these can be exorcized if Mexicans simply
follow the Socratic advice to know oneself. “Man’s natural faculties,” he argues,
“are not enough to acquire self-knowledge; it is necessary to equip him with the
intellectual tools devised by psychoanalysis.” Once the country’s inhabitants—
rich and poor—have subjected themselves to therapy, they will be cured of
their neuroses, for “ghosts are nocturnal beings and vanish as soon as the light
of day shines upon them.”9
Freud once fantasized about forming a “salvation army of psychoana-
lysts” to rid the world of its neuroses. Ramos closes his analysis of the Mexican
psyche by recommending that all his countrymen lie on the couch to rid the
country of its collective ailments—an exercise that would certainly require a
salvation army of Mexican analysts.

on inferiority

Readers familiar with analytic literature will have noticed that Ramos’s theory,
despite its insistence on “neuroses,” “feelings,” and “psychoanalysis,” does not
seem very Freudian. Freud’s neuroses were invariably accompanied by debil-
itating symptoms: phobias, hysterical paralyses, obsessive-compulsive behav-
ior, or, at the very least, melancholia. Ramos, in contrast, describes “neurotic
symptoms” that do not seem to fit into any of the usual pathologies: feelings
of inferiority, insecurities, arrogance—behavioral patterns found, to varying

62
degrees, in most “normal” individuals. This crucial difference in the defini-
tion of a neurosis stems from the fact that Ramos adapted his main theoreti-
cal framework not from Freud but from one of his dissident disciples: Alfred
Adler (1870–1937), the Austrian physicist who developed a theory of “organ
inferiority.”
Adler began his career as one Freud’s earliest and staunchest supporters:
he joined the movement in 1900, published one of the first favorable reviews of
Freud’s theory of dreams in the Neue Freie Presse, and became one of the origi-
nal members—rising, for a time, to the position of chairman—of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society, the small group that met every Wednesday at Freud’s
apartment.10 The members took turns reading papers, and each presentation
was followed by a lengthy discussion and debate. Thanks to the publication of
The Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in four volumes, the records of
these discussions have been preserved.
Unlike Freud, Adler was active in political circles. He had a theoretical
interest in socialism, feminism, and communism, and he became acquainted
with Trotsky during his brief stay in Vienna.11 Adler brought these views to
the Wednesday group, and the Minutes portray him as an energetic participant,
attending all sessions, asking questions, and engaging in lively discussions. Be-
tween 1906 and 1911, he presented over a dozen papers: his first interventions
were well received by Freud, who did not fail to compliment Adler on his intel-
ligence and originality even as he politely disagreed with some of his findings.
It was at the Wednesday group that Adler began to develop his theory
of inferiority. On November 7, 1906, he read a paper on “The [Organic] Bases
of Neuroses,” arguing that many neuroses were consequences of bodily defects
or other instances of “organ inferiority.”12 He was especially interested in how
individuals afflicted with organic defects sought to compensate for their con-
dition, and as a result often developed extraordinary abilities. As examples, he
pointed to “Beethoven [who was deaf ]; Mozart, who was said to have mis-
shapen ears; Schumann, who suffered from a psychosis which began with audi-
tory hallucinations.”13
Even though Adler’s theory seemed to contradict the accepted doctrine
on the psychogenesis of the neuroses, Freud went out of his way to express his
support for his younger disciple. He praised the “great importance [of ] Adler’s
work,” and even told his audience that it had brought his own work a step fur-
ther. “To judge from the immediate impression,” he continued, “much of what
Adler said might be correct.”14 Only after such a laudatory preface did Freud

Chapter 2 | c o m p l e x e s 63
 voice his reservations about the use of the term “inferiority,” which he did not
consider particularly useful.
Over the next four years, Adler continued to refine and develop his
theory of inferiority. On June 2, 1909, he presented a paper on “The Oneness
of the Neuroses,” arguing that all neuroses could be explained as efforts to com-
pensate for an organ inferiority. This time Freud was less accommodating, ob-
jecting that “Adler . . . has eliminated the sexual factor” from his theory, while
psychoanalysis considers that “the etiology of the neuroses is on the whole
sexual.”15
In his responses to the presentations given by other members of the
group, Adler unfailingly interpreted case studies, pathological symptoms, and
even dreams, as confirmation of his theory of organ inferiority. Eventually he
refined his theory by conceding that neuroses were not necessarily caused by
constitutional defect; sometimes “a feeling of inferiority” was enough to make
a person fall ill. Around the same time, he developed the concept of “masculine
protest,” a mechanism through which men who feel feminized by their feelings
of inferiority attempt to assert their virility.
The theoretical differences between Adler and Freud deepened over
the years. Freud eventually abandoned his conciliatory tone to criticize, in in-
creasingly vocal terms, Adler’s rejection of sexuality and his subjection “of the
psychological material to biological points of view.”16 Adler, for his part, moved
further and further away from Freudian theories. On January 4, 1911, he gave a
paper on “Some Problems of Psychoanalysis,” challenging some of the funda-
mental tenets of Freudian doctrines. “The view that each instinct has a sexual
component,” he told the Wednesday group, “is biologically untenable.” What
Freud called the libido could be seen as a form of masculine protest: “sexual-
ity is aroused and stimulated early through organ inferiority, and it is felt by
an intensified masculine protest as gigantic.”17 Other members voiced strong
objections to Adler’s presentation: Federn, for instance, accused him of hav-
ing “done retrogressive work and aligned himself with the opponents of Freud’s
teachings.”18
Tensions mounted, and the conflict between Adler and Freud exploded
into an angry confrontation on February 1, 1911, after Adler read a paper on
“The Masculine Protest as the Central Problem of Neuroses.” He reiterated the
same point he had been making for years—that neuroses result from feelings
of inferiority combined with a masculine protest—but this time he proposed
translating one of the central concepts of psychoanalytic theory—the Oedipus

64
 complex—into his own terminology. “Even the Oedipus complex,” he told a
stunned audience, “will have to be understood . . . as one stage of the masculine
protest.”19
This proved too much for Freud, who was finally provoked to de-
nounce Adler’s paper. The theory of the “masculine protest,” he told the group,
rejected the unconscious and the libido in favor of a simplistic ego psychology.
“This,” he thundered, “is not psychoanalysis.” He accused Adler of fomenting a
schism in the small psychoanalytic society, and warned that Adlerian teachings
were destined to “make a deep impression and will, at first, do great harm to psy-
choanalysis . . . the entire doctrine has a reactionary and retrogressive character
and this offers a greater number of pleasure premiums.”20
The debate became so heated that it spilled over into the following two
meetings. Freud continued his criticism, and called Adler’s theories “wrong”
and “dangerous.” Other members took sides: Wilhelm Stekel supported Adler,
Federn backed Freud, while Steiner attempted to mediate, telling the group he
“had noticed striking affects during the discussion, which call for a psychologi-
cal explanation.”21
Steiner’s attempts at mediation proved unfruitful. At the next meeting,
on March 1, 1911, Adler stepped down as chairman of the Vienna Psychoana-
lytic Society. He continued to attend the Wednesday sessions, sitting quietly
through the presentations, but finally resigned from the Society on Octo-
ber 11, 1911 to establish his own dissident group, which he called the “Society for
Free Psychoanalytic Investigation.” The Vienna Society responded by passing
a resolution dictating that “membership in the Society for Free Psychoanalytic
Investigation is incompatible with membership in the [Vienna] Psychoanalytic
Association.”22 The rift between Adler and Freud was consummated.
Adler continued to develop his two central ideas—the theories of or-
gan inferiority and masculine protest—and in 1921 he published The Neurotic
Constitution, eventually translated into Spanish as El carácter neurótico. In all
probability, this was the edition that Samuel Ramos used to acquaint himself
with Adlerian thought. The book presented the most concise summary of
Adler’s views to date, and it is easy to recognize the passages Ramos quoted in
his “Psychoanalysis of the Mexican.”23
Neuroses, wrote Adler, originate in childhood, when the vulnerable in-
fant draws “comparisons between himself and others, at first with his father, as
the strongest in the family,” and is led to consider “himself incompetent, in-
ferior, degraded, insecure.” In an attempt to overcome these painful feelings,

Chapter 2 | c o m p l e x e s 65
 the child “endeavors to raise himself to the level of his (all powerful) father,
even to the point of surpassing the latter.” This, of course, can be done only
by “remov[ing] himself with one mighty bound from reality” and becoming
caught in “the meshes of a fiction.”24
Adler considered this “fiction”—which he also called a “guiding prin-
ciple”—as the driving force behind pathological behavior, making the neurotic
“behave as if he surpassed all others” while at the same time producing “a form of
conduct identical with that of the child.”25 The symptoms Adler pinpoints are
the same ones Ramos identifies in the Mexican character: exactness, pedantry,
and a need “to distinguish himself from others in dress, in work, in morals”; in
the worst cases, the neurotic character is marked by egoism, envy, greed, and
“the tendency to undervalue men and things.” Such individuals, writes Adler,
“are enveloped in phantasy and live in the future.”26
To cure such extreme cases, Adler makes a recommendation that was
copied verbatim by Ramos. The neurotic’s flight from reality, writes the Aus-
trian doctor, is “corrigible by analysis, [and] has its analogy in the ‘know thyself ’
of the sublime philosophers.”27
A few years after Adler’s resignation from the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society, Freud would write an account of the rupture in “On the History of the
Psycho-Analytic Movement” (1914). His main motivation, he told his readers,
was “to show that these theories controvert the fundamental principles of psy-
choanalysis . . . and for that reason they should not be known by the name of
psychoanalysis.” Freud was particularly concerned that some might try to rec-
oncile his own teachings with those of Adler. “Outsiders who are unconnected
with analysis,” he wrote, “are evidently as unskillful in appreciating the differ-
ences between the views of two psychoanalysts as we Europeans are in detect-
ing the differences between two Chinese faces.”28
Freud offers a point-by-point rebuttal of Adlerian theories. First, he
refutes the notion that organ inferiority is at the origin of all neuroses. “If it
were so,” he argues, “neurosis would appear as a by-product of every kind of
physical decrepitude, whereas observation shows that an impressive majority
of ugly, misshapen, crippled, and miserable people fail to react to their defects
by neurosis.”29 Concepts like “masculine protest” reveal an excessive depen-
dency on ego psychology, whereas psychoanalysis emphasizes the eternal con-
flicts between the ego and the id, between conscious and unconscious wishes.
Ultimately, Adler has fallen victim to the ego’s tricks: “the ego here is play-
ing the ludicrous part of the clown in the circus who by his gestures tries to

66
convince the audience that every change in the circus ring is being carried out
under his orders. But only the youngest of the spectators are deceived by him.”30
Freud’s final criticism has to do with love. “The view of life which is re-
flected in the Adlerian system,” he writes, “is founded exclusively on the aggres-
sive instinct.” The main problem with this worldview is that “there is no room
in it for love.” Freud wonders that “such a cheerless Weltanschauung should have
met with attention at all,” and finally concludes that “human beings, weighed
down by the burden of their sexual needs, are ready to adopt anything if only
the ‘overcoming of sexuality’ is offered them as a bait.”31
Despite his profound disagreement with Adlerian theories, Freud does
offer some positive remarks about his rival’s system: “It is,” he writes, “marked
by consistency and coherence.” Adlerian investigations, he concludes, “brought
something new to psychoanalysis—a contribution to the psychology of the ego.”32
Freud and Adler never crossed paths again—though for a few weeks
Lou Andreas Salomé—that remarkable woman whose charm and intellect se-
duced Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud—obtained a special dispensation to attend
both analytic societies and for some time acted as a psychoanalytic go-between.33
Adler continued to develop the doctrines of individual psychology until his
death in 1937. Meanwhile, Freud’s Psycho-Analytical Association grew into an
international movement with followers spread around the world, from Mos-
cow to Australia.
If we now return to Mexico, Samuel Ramos’s influential essay raises a
crucial question: why did the philosopher choose Adler over Freud for psy-
choanalyzing national culture? Why did he consider individual psychology
the most appropriate doctrine for examining the Mexican character? How did
he choose sides on a debate that by 1932 had evolved into a full-fledged war
between two rival camps? And what did he gain by this choice? Surprisingly,
none of the dozens of critics who have studied Ramos’s writings has asked these
very basic questions.34
At first sight, Ramos’s choice seems puzzling. Unlike Adler, Freud had
published several essays of applied psychoanalysis—most notably Totem and
Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents—establishing parallels between the
individual psyche and civilization. If Ramos intended to apply psychoanalytic
concepts to the Mexican nation, wouldn’t Freud’s writings on group psychol-
ogy make a better model than Adler’s work on individual psychology?
Several factors contributed to Ramos’s identification with Adler. First
of all, Ramos had met Adler during a trip to Europe in 1927–1928: he traveled

Chapter 2 | c o m p l e x e s 67
to Moscow as part of the Mexican delegation to the celebration of the tenth an-
niversary of the Russian Revolution, and after the festivities he spent some days
in Vienna, where he attended Adler’s lectures and visited his clinics.35
Ramos was drawn to Adler’s optimism: the founder of individual psy-
chology believed that his discoveries would eventually lead to a better world,
while Freud—especially after the Great War—made no attempts to disguise
his profound pessimism about the essence of human nature and the future of
civilization. Adler, in contrast, developed what Walter Kaufmann has called
a “messianic streak,” preaching psychology’s power to heal social wounds, and
publishing books with titles like What Life Should Mean to You. Searching for
a theory to interpret Mexico, Ramos would have certainly preferred Adler’s
hopeful message to Freud’s dark vision.
Moreover, Ramos would have been attracted to Adler’s writings on ed-
ucation. In The Education of Children and other works, Adler argued that edu-
cation was the best prophylactic against neuroses—an idea expanded in the
1904 article “The Physician as Educator.” Ramos would have been extremely
receptive to this idea, since medicine and education were two important pas-
sions in his life: as a teenager he planned to become a doctor, but he went on to
become an educator, and later head of the School of Literature and Philosophy
at Mexico’s National University. Like Adler, Ramos closed his book on an opti-
mistic note, preaching the redemptory powers of education.
In Adler Ramos found a concept of the unconscious that was more
useful for his purposes than Freud’s. His analysis of the Mexican psyche con-
cluded that Mexicans suffer from “unconscious complexes” that lead them to
neurotic behavior.36 He insists on the need to liberate Mexicans of these com-
plexes by bringing their secrets into the open, since ghosts disappear when they
see the light of day. Even though this formulation sounds rather Freudian—
and echoes the psychoanalytic theory of neurotic symptoms as the return of
the repressed—Ramos’s understanding of the unconscious is closer in spirit to
Adler. Adler seldom used the term “unconscious,” but his theories argue that all
neuroses stem from an unacknowledged wish to express one’s masculinity. Un-
derstood in this way, the Adlerian unconscious is simply the repository of an
unavowed ambition to assert one’s virility. The Freudian unconscious, on the
other hand, is a dark and mysterious realm, inhabited by the most primal and
destructive forces, containing incestuous desires, transgressive sexual fantasies,
murderous impulses, and aggressive urges—a true Pandora’s box.
In choosing Adler’s unconscious over Freud’s, Ramos opted for the
more sanitized version of the concept and elided the sinister elements Freud

68
attributed to the unconscious: his description of the Mexican psyche left no
room for the powerful forces of death and sexuality—Eros and Thanatos—
nor for the eternal conflicts between the ego and the id. He theorized an uncon-
scious that was clean and uncomplicated, holding in store simply an unavowed
masculine wish. Once this desire was brought to light—through education
and the “tools of psychoanalysis”—all complexes and neuroses would vanish.
Ramos envisioned a not-too-distant future in which all Mexicans would make
conscious all their unacknowledged desires, leaving us with the perplexing no-
tion—at least from a Freudian perspective—of a nation of individuals devoid
of an unconscious.
But the main reason why Ramos chose Adler over Freud was because
individual psychology downplayed—and at times completely overlooked—
the role played by sexuality in individual development. As we saw in our earlier
discussion of “Otto Weininger: The symposium in 1925,” Ramos viewed the
liberalization of sexual mores as one of the evils generated by modernity. It is
telling that he places Freud on the same level as the cabaret: he considered psy-
choanalytic discoveries as the intellectual equivalent of the exhibition of bare
flesh found in dancing halls. Ramos was a traditionalist, and he wanted to turn
back the clock to the utopian time of classical Greece, when young men dis-
cussed Plato and debated the philosophic merits of Eros instead of abandoning
themselves to the sensual rhythms of jazz music.
In most of his published work, Ramos expressed a rather prudish view
of sexuality. In Hipótesis he condemned it as a side-effect of modernity; and
in Perfil del hombre, his discussion of the three classes of Mexicans—the ur-
ban poor, the city dweller, and the bourgeoisie—he portrays the pelado (a term
Claudio Lomnitz has translated as “urban scoundrel”)37 as an antisocial nym-
phomaniac. Ramos was famously unsympathetic to this poor urbanite, de-
scribing him as “the human detritus of the great city” and dismissing him as
worthless—“un cero a la izquierda.” On an economic level, he writes, the pe-
lado “is more than a proletarian and on the intellectual level he is a primitive.”
Of all the evils embodied by the pelado, Ramos considers his everyday
use of a sexualized language to be the most disturbing. He appears so horrified
at the prospect of having to quote the pelado’s explicit speech that he takes the
unusual step of prefacing his discussion with an elaborate apology:

Desgraciadamente el lenguaje del pelado es de un realismo tan crudo, que es im-

posible transcribir muchas de sus frases más características. No podemos omitir,

Chapter 2 | c o m p l e x e s 69
sin embargo, ciertas expresiones típicas. El lector no debe tomar a mal que cite-
mos aquí palabras que en México no se pronuncian más que en conversaciones
íntimas, pues el psicólogo ve, a través de su vulgaridad y grosería, otro sentido
más noble. Y sería imperdonable que prescindiera de un valioso material de es-
tudio por ceder a una mal entendida decadencia de lenguaje. Sería como si un
químico rehusara analizar las sustancias que huelen mal.38

[The pelado’s language is so crude and direct that it would not be possible to
transcribe many of his most characteristic phrases. But we cannot omit certain
key phrases. The reader should not be offended by our quotation of words that
in Mexico are pronounced only in intimate conversations, for the psychologist
sees, beyond their vulgarity and rudeness, a more noble sense. And it would be
unpardonable to ignore such valuable study material for the sake of bowing to
a poorly understood decadence of language. It would be as if a chemist refused
to analyze any substances that smelled bad.]

After such an elaborate disclaimer, Ramos proceeds to quote three of the pe-
lado’s sexually charged expressions: “tener muchos huevos [to have big balls],”
“yo soy tu padre [I’m your daddy],” as well as a phrase that Ramos does not cite
and which he paraphrases as a demonstration of this individual’s “phallic obses-
sion”—probably the term “chingar,” which Octavio Paz would later dissect in
The Labyrinth of Solitude, as we will see in the next chapter.39
Ramos interprets these expressions as examples of the pelado’s obses-
sion with sexual potency and his desire for power and domination—the “mas-
culine protest” Adler theorized in his studies. In Ramos’s diagnosis, the pelado
lacks an ideal but “attempts to fill this void with the only value within his reach:
that of the macho.”40
Ramos’s comments betray an aversion to overt manifestations of sexu-
ality. In his study of the Mexican psyche, sex is relegated to the section on the
pelado: he never discusses how middle- or upper-class Mexicans use language
to describe sex. Ramos effectively banishes sex to the urban slums, associating
it with the poor, the uneducated, and the vulgar. He views any open discussion
of sexual topics as a symptom of the neurosis that afflicts the Mexican nation.
If we think through the consequences of his argument, we arrive at the conclu-
sion that in his outlook, education will eventually lead to the eradication of
the collective feeling of inferiority, but also to the disappearance of the pelado,

70
along with his sexually inflected expressions. Once Mexico is cured of its na-
tional neuroses, its inhabitants will no longer mention testicles, phallic symbols,
or any other unsavory sexual imagery.
Ramos’s discussion might strike us as prudish and excessively guarded,
but at the time his article was one of the first attempts to bring sexuality—even
if it was painted in the most negative terms—into intellectual debates about
national identity. The publication of “Psychoanalysis of the Mexican” pro-
voked a minor scandal: many readers were horrified at the inclusion of expres-
sions like “tener muchos huevos” in a respectable literary journal—even if it
was prefaced by a polite disclaimer. A columnist for Excélsior censored Ramos
as an “escritor soez e inmoral [obscene and immoral writer],” accusing him of
writing phrases that were fit only for the prison courtyard, and used the occa-
sion to launch into a fierce diatribe against psychoanalysis:

El Psicoanálisis, esa escuela deprimente que recoge los detritus sociales para
hacerlos objeto de estudio, y luego, mediante falsas generalizaciones presentar-
los como tipos representativos, escuela que tiene al teratólogo Freud por após-
tol, y que, como el espiritismo o la teosofía, ilusiona a muchos espíritus con
sugestiones de ciencia moderna y curiosidades de investigación original, ha in-
vadido también, aparte de nuestro mundo pedagógico, ciertas zonas de nuestra
juventud intelectual, que en estos momentos han despuntado en el campo de la
meditación conceptuosa o de la agudeza de ingenio.41

[Psychoanalysis, that depressing school that sweeps up the rejects of society in

order to make a study of them, and then uses false generalizations to present
them as representative types; the school whose apostle is the teratologist Freud,
and that, like spiritualism or theosophy, fools many a mind with its sugges-
tions of modern science and the curiosities of original investigation, has lately
invaded—besides the world of education—some milieus of our youthful in-
telligentsia, infecting many who have begun to distinguish themselves in the
domain of conceptual thought or creative ingenuity.]

And we thought Ramos was being unfair to Freud: Excélsior’s angry indictment
of psychoanalysis makes the philosopher seem like a loving ally of the Viennese
professor.

Chapter 2 | c o m p l e x e s 71
 The Excélsior article snowballed into a collective attack against Ra-
mos. Conservative intellectuals were outraged by the fact that a young edu-
cator would put such “filth” in print, and they pressed the government to file
charges. Ramos—along with Jorge Cuesta, the editor of Examen—was tried
for obscenity. He was eventually acquitted, but along the way he became the
only Mexican to be prosecuted for venturing to psychoanalyze his country.42
Leaving the obscenity charge aside, what most strikes the twenty-first-
century reader about Ramos’s discussion of the pelado’s sexual expressions is his
willingness to take them at face value. He never attempts to read between the
lines or to provide interpretations—in the analytic sense—of the secret mean-
ing lurking behind these apparently obscene expressions. Mexico would have
to wait until Octavio Paz published his Labyrinth of Solitude fifteen years later
for a more sophisticated analysis of the most sexualized expressions of Mexican
Spanish. As Freud would have remarked, Ramos’s analysis remains on the level
of ego psychology, and he missed the opportunity to explore the unconscious
ideas concealed beneath obscenities.
In the end, Ramos might have chosen Adler over Freud because he
found it easier to identify with the founder of individual psychology. Freud
was a radical thinker—he compared his discovery of the unconscious to the
Copernican revolution—while Adler was a social-minded reformer: his theo-
ries focused on using psychology and education to make society a better place
for the poor and oppressed. Ramos was a conservative intellectual, and he felt
more comfortable with Adler’s proposal for a gradual evolution of society than
with Freud’s calling into question the most fundamental values of Western civi-
lization. Even though the Mexican philosopher lived in a country that was in
the midst of a radical refashioning of its identity, he shied away from revolu-
tions in both the political and intellectual spheres.
One concrete example: Freud used psychoanalytic theory to question
religious belief. He considered religion, at best, as an illusion, and, at worst, as
a collective obsessional neurosis. Ramos, on the other hand, was born into a
provincial bourgeois family that instilled in him a set of conservative values he
retained for the rest of his life. His writings present religion as a cornerstone of
civilization: “all cultures,” he wrote in Perfil del hombre y la cultura en México,
“are always based on a religious feeling toward life.”43 And when cultures try to
do away with religion—as the Mexican “Jacobins” did in the past—the result is
a collective neurosis: “Religious life is not a passing state of the soul [espíritu] . . .
if its presence is not accepted, it will turn into a dark force and corrupt our

72
 perspective and value, forcing individuals to live in a world of illusions.”44 Af-
ter reading these words, it comes as no surprise that Freud’s theories were too
threatening for a conservative Catholic like Ramos.
In the end, Ramos’s efforts to develop an Adlerian interpretation of the
Mexican character led to a deeply paradoxical project. First, his terminology
was equivocal. After Adler resigned from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in
1911, Freud stressed repeatedly that Adlerian theories, while coherent and use-
ful, did not qualify as “psychoanalysis.” The concept of the libido was the foun-
dation of psychoanalytic theory, and since Adler did not acknowledge that
sexuality played a primary role in either individual development or neurotic
illness, his school could not be considered part of the psychoanalytic move-
ment. Freud would have certainly objected to Ramos giving his essay the title
“Psychoanalysis of the Mexican,” since it was essentially an “Individual Psychol-
ogy of the Mexican Mind.”
A second paradox has to do with Ramos’s attempt to apply the findings
of individual psychology to the Mexican nation. Freud believed that the find-
ings of psychoanalysis transcended national origin, geographic location, or cul-
tural background. The unconscious, the Oedipus complex, and the neuroses
were universal structures of the psyche, found in Ancient Greeks, twentieth-
century Austrians, and Renaissance Spaniards alike. Although he never devel-
oped the argument, his writings on civilization—especially Totem and Taboo
and Moses and Monotheism—suggest that national identity, like religious feel-
ing, is an illusion that can be cast away by the findings of analysis. Though
Adler rejected many of Freud’s theories, he seems to have agreed with his insis-
tence on the universality of psychological structures. His writings on individ-
ual psychology do not differentiate between the “Austrian Mind,” the “Jewish
Mind,” or the “Gentile Mind.” Ironically, Ramos turned a theory that rejected
national identity as an illusion and aspired toward universality into a tool for
constructing an essentialist notion of the Mexican character.
But ultimately, the most striking paradox contained in Ramos’s argu-
ment was his attempt to sketch a “psychoanalysis of the Mexican mind” that
was scrubbed clean of sexuality. The notion of a psychoanalytic theory that
elides sexuality might seem like a contradiction in terms, and this was precisely
the criticism Freud directed at Adler and his followers; by focusing exclusively
on ego psychology, Adlerians discarded two of the fundamental concepts of
psychoanalysis: the libido and the unconscious. “All the psychological acqui-
sitions of psycho-analysis have been thrown to the winds by Adler,” quipped

Chapter 2 | c o m p l e x e s 73
Freud.45 The filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who was fascinated by the role played by
sexuality in Catholic cultures like Spain and Mexico, once remarked that “sex
without sin is like an egg without salt.” The same could be said for the kind of
sexless psychoanalysis preached by Ramos.

conclusion

Freud would never have imagined that the theoretical debate that erupted in
the Wednesday group around 1911 would resonate two decades later, halfway
around the world, in discussions about postrevolutionary Mexican identity. In
the hundred or so years after the discovery of the unconscious, psychoanalysis
has been put to a wide range of uses: it has been used as a clinical technique
in psychiatry and psychology and has inspired new movements in art and lit-
erature; it has been brandished as an ideal for proponents of sexual liberation
and sexual repression alike; but one of its most unorthodox applications re-
mains Ramos’s use of psychoanalytic theories to cure the Mexican character of
its pathologies.
In the 1940s an audacious young poet challenged Ramos’s analysis of
the Mexican psyche: in the next chapter we will see how Octavio Paz proposed
an alternative diagnosis of the national character and brought the discussion
back to Freud.

74
AC A D E M Y

Freud could not have found two more different readers than Salvador Novo
and Samuel Ramos. Surprisingly, Novo and Ramos came from similar back-
grounds: they both belonged to the same generation of postrevolutionary in-
tellectuals; both were born just before the Revolution—Ramos in 1897, Novo
in 1904—to middle-class families; and both spent part of their childhood in
provincial towns, Novo in Chihuahua and Ramos in Zitácuaro; both moved
to Mexico City as teenagers to attend the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, the
country’s most famous secondary school, where they studied with the same
group of prominent intellectuals; they both worked for the Ministry of Edu-
cation (Novo under Henríquez Ureña; Ramos under Narciso Bassols), both
published in the same journals: Examen, Ulises, and Contemporáneos, and both
developed an interest in psychoanalysis.
But the similarities end there: Ramos became a philosophy professor,
head of humanities at the university, and was elected a member of the Cole-
gio Nacional, the Mexican Academy of Arts and Sciences. By the time he died
in 1959, Ramos had become one of the most visible representatives of official
Mexican culture. Novo, on the other hand, was an enfant terrible: his brief stint
at the Ministry of Education came to an abrupt end after his boss—Pedro Hen-
ríquez Ureña—got word of his scandalous sexual adventures. He spent the next
decades living in the margins of official Mexican culture, leading a libertine
existence and making the most of his intellectual and sexual freedoms: he read

75
Gide and Proust, traveled to California and Hawaii, seduced scores of chauf-
feurs, and published sexually explicit poems.
Novo and Ramos discovered Freud around the same time—in the
1920s—but they put him to radically different uses. Novo used Freudian theory
to engage in a self-analysis and to experiment with his sexuality; he understood
the revolutionary implications of psychoanalytic theories and freed himself
from the traditionalist values of his provincial education; he abandoned re-
ligion, rejected the “virile” ideal promulgated by postrevolutionary intellectu-
als, and refused to participate in the sentimental nationalism that dominated
Mexican culture in the 1920s and 1930s; he used psychoanalysis to question the
monolithic identity preached by many of his contemporaries that was based on
virility, Catholicism, and nationalism. Freud dismissed religion as an illusion;
Novo extended the criticism to masculinity and national identity.46
Ramos, in contrast, retained the conservative, provincial values of his
upbringing. He was a prude and could not stomach Freud’s overt discussions
of sexuality, which he considered a symptom of the decadence of the mod-
ern world. Yet he was still attracted to certain elements in psychoanalysis—the
theory of the neurosis, the concept of the unconscious, the emphasis on infan-
tile development—that he deemed useful for analyzing the Mexican character.
Ramos based his study of the Mexican psyche on the theories of Adler, Freud’s
one-time disciple who had rejected the primacy of sexuality, a choice that al-
lowed him to keep his traditionalist values intact: his Perfil del hombre argues for
a postrevolutionary culture that is Catholic, virile, nationalistic . . . and chaste.
The two best-known portraits of Novo and Ramos illustrate how dif-
ferently they would be remembered: the most famous portrait of Novo is the
painting by Manuel Rodríguez Lozano discussed in chapter 1. It depicts a mis-
chievous young poet, attired in a robe de chambre, cruising the streets of Mexico
City aboard a late-model automobile. Ramos, on the other hand, was immor-
talized by Juan O’Gorman—a painter and architect who was close to the mural
movement and designed Diego Rivera’s studio in San Ángel: his canvas (figure
2.1), executed in 1959 for the Colegio Nacional, depicts a graying, sixty-two-
year-old Ramos at the height of his career. He wears a jacket and tie, and stands
in front of a desk stacked with his own books. Even more important is the in-
stitutional frame: the portrait hangs in the gallery of the Colegio Nacional, the
pantheon of official Mexican culture. Novo would be remembered as a motor-
ized flâneur; Ramos as an academician who lived in an ivory tower, far away
from Mexico City’s lively street culture . . . and miles away from the pelado.

76
f i g u r e 2.1
Juan O’Gorman, Portrait of Samuel Ramos (1959). Courtesy Colegio Nacional, Mexico City.

Chapter 2 | c o m p l e x e s 77
 Nowhere are the differences between Novo and Ramos as apparent
as in their attitudes toward working-class Mexicans. Novo, as we saw in chap-
ter 1, used Freud’s writings on sexuality to simultaneously analyze and act out
his attraction for Mexico City’s chauffeurs. He was fascinated by these uni-
formed, muscular men, and he considered them the embodiment of an anx-
iously awaited Mexican modernity that was rapidly changing the appearance
of Mexico City, filling it with automobiles, tramways, and buses. Chauffeurs
were desirable because they embodied the promises of the modern world, and
thus allowed Novo to put his psychoanalytic readings to good use: what Freud
theorized, Novo practiced on them.
Ramos, on the other hand, expressed nothing but disdain toward the
working classes. He did not write specifically about chauffeurs, but he devoted
the most often quoted section of his essay on the “Psychoanalysis of the Mex-
ican” to the pelado, a class of subalterns that would have certainly included
Novo’s drivers. Ramos looks down on the pelado, dismissing him as a primitive
and a pseudo-proletarian, and denouncing his sexualized language. For Ramos
the pelado embodies the psychological pathologies that must be eradicated
from the Mexican psyche if we are to cure the nation of its neuroses.
Both Novo and Ramos associated working-class Mexicans with sexual-
ity: Novo found their unrestrained sexuality irresistible, and spent many happy
hours exploring their bodies and their drives. Ramos, on the other hand, was re-
pelled by their phallic language, compared them to “chemical substances with a
foul smell,” and tried to banish them from his ideal Mexico.

78
 | 3 |

MONOTHEISMS

Of all the books published by Freud, the one that had the most influence
in Mexico was Moses and Monotheism, an essay that might seem like an odd
choice: what could a book about Moses and the Egyptian origins of Judaism
teach Mexican intellectuals about their country? Why would writers and art-
ists be inspired by a study that stands out as Freud’s most difficult—and contro-
versial—work? As we will see in this chapter, the fate of Moses in Mexico is one
of the most fascinating episodes in the history of psychoanalysis.
Moses and Monotheism was the last book Freud published before his
death in 1939. The German title is Der Mann Moses und die monoteistische Re-
ligion, “Moses the Man and the Monotheistic Religion,” and it tackles a thorny
question: what makes the Jews such a distinct people, and why has their history
been so full of accidents and catastrophes? The book was a radical departure
for Freud, a proud atheist who rejected religion as illusion, and once described
himself as a “godless Jew.” Historians, poststructuralists, and even postcolonial
critics have read Moses and Monotheism as Freud’s belated attempt to come to
terms with his own identity and his place in the world as a Jew.
In order to analyze the particularity of the Jews, Freud, like a good ana-
lyst, makes an inquiry into the beginning, into the origin of the culture. His
study focuses on the figure of Moses and proposes a rather extravagant hypoth-
esis: Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian, a follower of Akhenaton, the pha-
raoh who introduced a monotheistic religion that in the end proved too strict

81
 for his people, who rebelled, murdered him, and reinstituted the old polythe-
istic cult. In the wake of this bloody coup, Moses escaped from Egypt, brought
monotheism to the Jews, and became their leader.
At this point Freud adds another twist to the plot: in a repetition of
the Egyptian episode, the Jews rose against Moses and murdered him, but kept
alive the monotheistic cult. The memory of Moses’ killing was repressed, but
its phantasmatic presence has haunted the Jews ever since: like an infantile
trauma it is destined to return and to repeat itself. Freud identifies yet another
historical repetition of this murder in the advent of Christianity, founded on
the sacrifice of another father figure.
Freud argues that the murder of Moses led to several crucial develop-
ments in the history of civilization. First, the figure of Moses was internalized as
a strict superego that led the Jews to reach “ethical heights which had remained
inaccessible to the other peoples of antiquity.”1 Second, Freud considers mono-
theism one of the most important developments in the history of civilization,
one that led to what he calls an “advance in intellectuality” (“der Fortschritt in
der Geistigkeit”), a refinement of abstract thinking that culminated in the in-
vention of literature, philosophy, other forms of scholarship. Freud links this
“advance” to the Mosaic prohibition against graven images, since “a sensory
perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea—a
triumph of intellectuality over sensuality, or, strictly speaking, an instinctual
renunciation, with all its necessary psychological consequences.”2
Moses and Monotheism is an unusual book for Freud, not only in its
subject matter but also in its form. In contrast to The Interpretation of Dreams
or The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, featuring a clear and elegant narrative
structure, Moses is chaotic, disjointed, and plagued by interruptions and digres-
sions. The book consists of three essays—“Moses an Egyptian,” “If Moses Was
an Egyptian,” and “Moses, His People and Monotheist Religion”—and two
prefaces, appearing not at the beginning but between the second and third sec-
tions. The third essay is longer than the first two combined, and throughout
the book Freud expresses his dissatisfaction with its form, at one point com-
paring it to “a bronze statue with feet of clay”—a metaphor that betrays his
anxieties that the edifice of Moses might come tumbling down.3 The book’s
structure reflects the numerous interruptions that Freud endured during the
writing process: several operations on his malignant tumor, the Nazi seizure of
power, the Anschluss, his last-minute move to London, and the buildup to the
Second World War. All of these traumatic events left their mark on the text.

82
 Moses and Monotheism attracted the attention of a diverse group of
scholars. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said have all
published books examining Moses as an expression of Freud’s views on Judaism
and Jewish identity, and recasting Freud’s obscure treatise on Egyptian mono-
theism in light of current debates about cultural identity and alterity.4
But how did Freud’s wild, disjointed, and speculative hypothesis about
the repressed murder of Moses find an audience in Mexico? Moses as an Egyp-
tian, the tension between polytheism and monotheism in Ancient Egypt,
the origins of Judaism . . . how could these questions resonate with Mexican
intellectuals?
Contrary to what might be expected, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism
had circulated widely in the Spanish-speaking world. Though it was not in-
cluded in the Obras completas published in Spain by Luis López Ballesteros—
the project was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War—it was released by
Editorial Mundo Nuevo in Chile in 1939, only a few months after the English
and German versions. The book was called Moisés y la religión monoteísta, and
the title page announced that it had been “translated from the French by Luis
Rodríguez M.” In the same year, the Argentinian publisher Losada issued an-
other version, and followed with a reprint in 1944. As early as June 1939, a brief
note in Sur, the influential journal edited by Victoria Ocampo that counted
Borges and Octavio Paz as contributors, commented enthusiastically on the
publication of Moses, and in the 1940s the book gained popularity among Latin
American artists and writers, despite its esoteric subject matter.5

a postcolonial moses

In 1943 the artist Frida Kahlo discovered Moses and Monotheism and decided to
make a painting inspired by Freud’s book—the first attempt by a Latin Ameri-
can intellectual to relate Freud’s discussion of Judaism to a different cultural
context. In an interview published in 1945, shortly after completing her paint-
ing Moses (figure 3.1; plate 2), Kahlo explained her discovery of Freud’s book:

One day, about two years ago, [the industrialist and collector] José Domingo
[Lavín] told me that he would like me to read Freud’s Moses, and he asked me to

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 83
f i g u r e 3.1
Frida Kahlo, Moses, 1945. Oil on canvas, 60 × 75.6 cm. Private collection, Houston. © Banco
de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society
(ARS).

84
paint, in whatever way I wanted, my interpretation of the book. This painting
is the result of that brief conversation with him. I read the book only once, and
I began to paint based on my first impression of the work.6

Moses was a radical departure for Kahlo, who usually painted self-portraits and
autobiographical images; it is one of the rare works in which she leaves her-
self out of the picture.7 Like Freud, she was venturing into unfamiliar and un-
charted territory in search of Moses.
Kahlo painted all the historical figures discussed by Freud, from
Akhenaton to Moses, and also suggested several ways in which Moses and
Monotheism could be related to Mexican history. First, Kahlo expands the cul-
tural context of Freud’s inquiry to include other cultures not mentioned in Mo-
ses and Monotheism, a work that—as Edward Said has perceptively pointed
out—presents “a Eurocentric view of culture,” privileging the Egyptian roots
of Judeo- Christian history and excluding other major religions, including Is-
lam, from its argument.8 Kahlo, in contrast, broadens the historical focus of
her painting to include a diverse pantheon of gods and goddesses from all cor-
ners of the globe. Kahlo allotted equal space to Western religions, depicted
on the right of the canvas, and Eastern beliefs, painted on the left. In the top
right corner she portrayed many of the Egyptian deities discussed by Freud,
including Horus (represented by an eye), Osiris (the falcon-headed figure),
Anubis (of the underworld), Khnum (the ram-headed god), and Iamassu, an
“Assyrian bull” that, as Gannit Ankori has suggested, Kahlo may have seen at
the Metropolitan Museum in the 1930s.9 Next to them, Kahlo painted the
Greek gods Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite, and Athena; below them, several Chris-
tian icons, including the Virgin Mary, the Divine Providence, and the Holy
Trinity.
Freud mentions all of these gods and goddesses, at least in passing, in
his Moses, but Kahlo also included a host of deities from other traditions that
were alien to Freud. The left side of the painting, devoted to the Eastern world,
includes a group of Aztec and Maya divinities: the rain god Tláloc, the terrify-
ing Coatlicue—wearing a necklace of human hands and a skirt of snakes—and
Tezcatlipoca. Below them, the Hindu divinity Brahma and a Chinese dragon
point to Asia.
Kahlo depicts not only a small pantheon of international gods, but also
an impressive convention of prophets, spiritual leaders, and secular thinkers

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 85
who founded doctrines that acquired the status of religions. Kahlo described
these figures as follows:

On the same ground, but painted with larger heads to distinguish them from
the masses, I portrayed the “heroes,” . . . the transformers or inventors of re-
ligions, as well as the conquerors and the rebels. On the right . . . you can see
Amenhotep IV, who later became known as Akhenaton . . . then Moses . . . fol-
lowed by Christ, Zoroaster, Alexander the Great, Julius Cesar, Mohammed,
Tamburlaine, Napoleon, and the missing child . . . Hitler. On the left, Nefer-
titi, Akhenaton’s wife . . . Buddha, Marx, Freud, Paracelsus, Epicurus, Genghis
Khan, Gandhi, Lenin and Stalin.10

Commenting on the curious ordering of this army of prophets, Kahlo said: “El
orden es gacho, pero los pinté según mis conocimientos históricos, que tam-
bién lo son [The order is tacky, but I painted it according to my knowledge of
history, which is also tacky].”11
By expanding the historical frame and geographical context of Freud’s
inquiry to consider the rise of Jewish monotheism within a worldwide pan-
orama of religions, Kahlo makes a crucial link between Freud’s account and
Mexican history. Her painting establishes a symmetrical equivalence between
the Aztec divinities on the left and the Egyptian gods on the right. Kahlo’s
Moses reminds the viewer that after the Conquest, Mexico, like Egypt and Israel,
underwent a passage from polytheism to monotheism.
Kahlo places monotheism within an enlarged context of world re-
ligions that includes a wide array of non-European belief systems. She read
Freud’s Moses like a multiculturalist avant la lettre, like a postcolonial critic in-
tent on giving a voice—or at least an image—to all the “others” that had been
excluded from Freud’s Judeo- Christian perspective. “Can the subaltern gods
speak?” would be a possible subtitle for her painting.
Kahlo continued to think about Moses and Monotheism throughout
the 1940s, and her diary includes several sketches suggesting other imagina-
tive elaborations of Freud’s argument. In an undated entry, Kahlo drew three
enigmatic, Egyptian-themed portraits: the first shows a man accompanied by
a pregnant woman identified as “the strange couple from the land of the dot
and the line” (figure 3.2); the second is a portrait of Neferúnico, “founder of
the city of Lokura” (figure 3.3); and the third introduces “his brother, Neferdós”
(figure 3.4).

86
f i g u r e 3.2
Frida Kahlo, “Strange Couple from the Land of the Dot and the Line,” The Diary of Frida
Kahlo, p. 28. © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. /
Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 87
f i g u r e 3.3
Frida Kahlo, “Portrait of Neferúnico,” The Diary of Frida Kahlo, p. 29. © Banco de México
Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS).

88
f i g u r e 3.4
Frida Kahlo, “Su hermano Neferdós,” The Diary of Frida Kahlo, p. 30. © Banco de México
Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 89
 These portraits present a triangular relationship between Neferú-
nico—a made-up name that could be translated as “Nefer-only-one”—and
his parents, Ojo-único (an allusion to the popularity of the eye in Egyptian
iconography) and Nefer-Isis (a condensation of two Egyptian figures: Isis and
Nefertiti, Akhenaton’s queen). The images evoke many Freudian themes: the
first of these drawings (figure 3.2) exposes the sexual organs of the two parents,
suggesting the infant’s entanglement in a Oedipal triangle; and Kahlo’s depic-
tion of the inner bodies, revealing hearts, wombs, and other organs, evokes the
Freudian delving into the inner realms of the psyche. Ojo-único, Nefer-Isis, and
Neferúnico form a Freudian triangle, turning Oedipus into an Egyptian.
If Freud pointed to Akhenaton as the inventor of the first monotheism,
Kahlo introduces Neferúnico as “the founder of the city of Lokura” and draws
him twice—first as a fetus inside his mother’s womb, and then as an adult—
as if to emphasize his place in this Egyptian family triangle. The name of the
city founded by Neferúnico is a play on “Locura,” the Spanish word for mad-
ness, although spelled with a K—K as in Kahlo. The artist thus seems to play-
fully inscribe herself inside the mad space founded by her Egyptian Oedipus.
Freud presented Geistigkeit as the most important achievement of civi-
lization. In her drawing of Neferúnico, Kahlo gives center stage to madness,
thus replacing Geistigkeit with Lokura and rationality with irrationality, a shift
that could not be more appropriate, since Kahlo was as invested in the border-
line states of creativity—the inspiration for much of her work—as Freud was
in the intellect.
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud identified with Akhenaton, the lone
founder of a new system of thought that, like psychoanalysis, met with wide-
spread opposition and unleashed murderous impulses in some of its followers.
Kahlo, too, identifies with her Egyptian hero: not only do her initials appear
in Neferúnico’s city, but his features bear a striking resemblance to those of
the artist: his eyes, nose, single eyebrow, and necklace recall Kahlo’s features as
depicted in works like Self-Portrait with Monkey, a painting completed in the
same year as her Moses.
Freud admired Akhenaton and Moses because they were innovators
who championed the powers of the intellect, but why would Kahlo become so
interested in Moses? In a fascinating essay, Gannit Ankori gives us an important
clue to solve this mystery by suggesting that Kahlo was intrigued by her Jew-
ish roots: her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a German Jew whose family, like
Freud’s, issued from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kahlo’s library included

90
books devoted to Jewish themes, and some of her paintings, including My
Grandparents, My Parents and I (Family Tree) (1936), contain numerous “co-
vert Jewish elements.”12 Moses and Monotheism made such a strong impression
on her because it presented the quest of a secular Jewish man, like her father,
for his cultural origins. If Moses was indeed an Egyptian, then Kahlo’s Jewish
heritage was rooted in Egypt, and she imagined herself as Neferúnico, her mad
version of Akhenaton. Kahlo’s drawing of Neferúnico is untitled, but it could
have been called “Portrait of the Artist as an Egyptian,” or even “Portrait of the
Artist as an Egyptian Jew.”
Despite her intense fascination with Moses and Monotheism, Kahlo’s
painting contradicts the most significant ideas contained in Freud’s work.
Freud’s Moses is a passionate argument for the virtues of monotheism, a theo-
logical system that replaced polytheistic deities with an abstract god, and
superstition with intellectual inquiry. Kahlo, in contrast, accords the same im-
portance to deities from Moses to Buddha, from Isis to Coatlicue, staging a
form of theistic relativism that might be syncretic and multicultural, but goes
against the grain of Freud’s argument. Freud told the tale of “Moses and Mono-
theism,” but Kahlo paints the saga of “Moses and polytheism.”
Kahlo’s painting also rejects one of the most important arguments in
Freud’s book: that visual images are intellectually inferior to abstract thoughts.
The prohibition against graven images was, in Freud’s view, one of the most
significant innovations of monotheism, one that sparked an advancement in
intellectuality and led to the development of the most sophisticated forms
of abstract learning. Images are simplistic creations that incite a form of in-
tellectual passivity: if a worshipper can see a divinity in a painting or a statue,
he will not need to use powers of the intellect to imagine its character or at-
tributes. The god of Moses, in contrast, was invisible and imperceptible by
the senses, and thus required its followers to exercise the powers of the in-
tellect to comprehend its existence. Given Freud’s emphasis on the virtues
of abstraction and invisibility, it is not surprising that he did not include a
single illustration of Akhenaton or the other Egyptian figures in Moses and
Monotheism.
Freud often expressed reservations about visual images, especially when
it came to expressing psychoanalytic concepts. In 1925, when the German direc-
tor G. W. Pabst was making the first serious film about psychoanalysis, Freud
wrote Karl Abraham: “My chief objection is still that I do not believe that sat-
isfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible.”13 The

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 91
“abstractions” of analytic theory were much too complex and subtle to be repre-
sented using the “plastic” means of the visual arts.
Kahlo, in contrast, had no objection to visual representations and she
made a career out of painting images, even—as in the case of Moses—graven
images and depictions of a polytheistic pantheon. If she had been truly con-
vinced by Freud’s argument, she would have abandoned painting to take up
writing or another nonvisual intellectual activity, and she would have spent
less time representing multicultural deities and more time celebrating—like
Freud—the virtues of monotheism.
Of course Kahlo did not have to agree with Freud on every point—
Gannit Ankori suggests that she purposefully “subverts the foundation of
Freud’s concept of monotheism [with] her spectacular polytheistic pantheon
of fantastic hybrid deities”14 —but I prefer to think that her differences with
Freud make Moses a deeply paradoxical painting: a visual representation of a cri-
tique of visuality, and a polytheistic rendition of an exaltation of monotheism.
Though Kahlo conceived Moses and her diary sketches as a celebration
of Freud’s ideas, these works cannot be called Freudian, since they are entirely
at odds with the ideas presented in Freud’s work. If Freud celebrates an invisible,
rational, and strict monotheism, Kahlo privileges a decidedly visual, irrational,
lenient polytheism. Freud famously told André Breton that he did not recog-
nize his ideas in the works of the surrealist movement; he would have said the
same about Kahlo’s Moses.

moses in the labyrinth

Freud wrote that Moses and Monotheism “tormented [him] like an unlaid ghost,”
and after his death the book continued to haunt others. After Kahlo completed
her painting, a very young Octavio Paz—who would later rise to become the
most important Mexican writer of the twentieth century—chanced upon
Freud’s Moses and, like Kahlo, he set out create a new work inspired by his read-
ing. Paz’s response to Freud took the form of an essay: The Labyrinth of Solitude,
first published in 1950.
In an interview with Claude Fell, his French translator, about the ori-
gins of The Labyrinth, Paz recalled the strong impression Moses and Mono-
theism made upon him. “Freud’s study of Judaic monotheism,” he told Fell,

92
inspired him to write an account “of the world of repressions, inhibitions,
memories, drives, and dreams that Mexico has been and still is.”15 Surprisingly,
Paz’s revelation—an invitation to read The Labyrinth of Solitude as a Mexican
version of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism—has never been studied in detail,
and despite the voluminous bibliography on The Labyrinth, no critics have
made an inquiry into Paz’s use of Freud’s Moses.16
The Labyrinth is an essay about Mexican identity, one of several books
on the national character published in the first half of the twentieth century.
Many of Mexico’s best-known intellectuals—including Alfonso Reyes, Anto-
nio Caso, and Samuel Ramos—played a role in the debate on “the philosophy
of Mexicanness,” but Paz was the first to use Freudian ideas to explain Mexi-
can culture. In eight chapters, The Labyrinth analyzes various Mexican “myths,”
from the popularity of masks to the Day of the Dead, and presents a critical
overview of the country’s history from the Conquest to the 1940s.17
But how does Paz’s essay about Mexicanness relate to Moses and Mono-
theism? Although the subject matter of the two books could not be more dif-
ferent—one is a book about Mexican identity; the other an analysis of the
rise of monotheism—there are a number of striking similarities between
the two. Freud worked on Moses during the 1930s; Paz wrote The Labyrinth
in the 1940s. Both books were written in exile: Freud completed his book in
London; Paz wrote most of his essay in Paris, where he worked at the Mexican
Embassy. Both Moses and The Labyrinth are veiled autobiographies; both au-
thors write about cultural identity from a position of marginality: Freud lived
in a German-speaking country but considered himself a “godless Jew”; Octavio
Paz was born in Mexico, but spent part of his childhood and a significant pe-
riod of his adult life living abroad—an experience that, as he recalls in Itinerario,
earned him the repeated accusation of being a foreigner in his own country.18
Both Moses and The Labyrinth are explorations of a complex subjectivity, one
that does not fit into the orthodox paradigms of national, cultural, or religious
identity.
There is one crucial difference between the two books: The Labyrinth
was Paz’s first major book, while Moses was Freud’s last. One was a work of
youthful exuberance—Paz was thirty-six years old when he published The
Labyrinth—the other a last will and testament, a farewell to the world written
by an eighty-three-year-old man who was dying of cancer. The differences in
style and tone between Moses and The Labyrinth constitute a good example of
what Edward Said has defined as “late style.”

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 93
 Said uses the term Spätstyl or late style—a concept he borrowed from
Theodor Adorno—to describe works produced late in an author’s life, cre-
ations that tend to be difficult, fragmentary, unresolved, and often produce an
alienating effect on the reader. This seems like a good description for Moses,
with its three parts, two prefaces, and endless expressions of doubts and inse-
curities on Freud’s part (“my structure has its weak spots,”19 he concedes at one
point, and later laments that the entire book is “inexperienced and inartistic”).20
Said actually presented Moses and Monotheism as one of his examples of Spät-
styl, since it is a book that “seems to be composed by Freud for himself, with
scant attention to frequent and often ungainly repetition, or regard for the el-
egant economy of prose and exposition. . . . Late style’s effect on the reader or
listener is alienating.”21
Books conceived early in an author’s career, on the other hand, are usu-
ally simpler, clearer, and more self-assured.22 The Labyrinth is a case in point:
in contrast to the numerous doubts that interrupt the narrative flow in Mo-
ses, the author of The Labyrinth writes with authority, clarity, and a remark-
able lack of anxiety at treating such an overwhelming subject—national
identity and the history of Mexico over 500 years. The tremendous ambi-
tion and self-confidence displayed in The Labyrinth is perhaps a symptom of
youthful naiveté.
In contrast to Kahlo, who focused on the Egyptian characters appear-
ing in Moses and Monotheism, Paz directed his attention to the theoretical ideas.
He was fascinated by Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the history of
civilization as a process punctuated by traumas, repressions, and unconscious
anxieties, and used a similar model to analyze Mexican history.
Most importantly, Paz borrows Freud’s notion of phylogenetic trans-
mission: the possibility that memories and traumas can be passed down un-
consciously from one generation to the next. In Moses, Freud argues that every
individual possesses an “archaic heritage . . . that comprises . . . memory traces
of the experience of earlier generations,”23 an “inherited property” that calls
“not for acquisition but only for awakening.”24 Paz applies this idea to Mexi-
can history as he analyzes the persistence of unconscious traces—most notably
solitude, the central theme of his essay—from the Conquest to the twentieth
century. Like Freud’s memory traces, solitude appears as an inherited condition,
one that eludes conscious understanding and produces powerful psychic effects.
In order to adapt Freud’s model to the Mexican context, Paz altered
many of the concepts presented in Moses and Monotheism. Freud wrote a psy-
choanalytic history of Judaism; Paz turned his attention to Mexican history.

94
The starting point for Freud’s inquiry is the prehistory of Judaism in Egypt.
The Labyrinth begins not with Aztec or Maya civilizations, but with the Con-
quest—an important difference, since Paz was much closer in time to the events
he analyzed than Freud was to Ancient Egypt. Freud focused his study on Mo-
ses but surprisingly, The Labyrinth lacks a protagonist: there is no founding
father of the Mexican nation to take center stage. Paz could have written on
Hernán Cortés, or on any of the figures of Mexican independence, but instead,
he writes a book without a hero.25
Despite these differences, The Labyrinth follows the argument of Mo-
ses and Monotheism quite closely. There are three key concepts in Freud’s essay
that Paz borrows for his analysis of Mexican history: the Oedipus complex; the
notion of an advancement in intellectuality; and the theory of cultural malaise.

the oedipus complex

Moses and Monotheism proposes one of the most original and controversial ap-
plications of the Oedipus complex, a theory Freud first developed in his corre-
spondence with Fliess in the 1890s, expanded in The Interpretation of Dreams,
and extrapolated to the history of civilization in Totem and Taboo. Moses and
Monotheism, the last work in this series, extends the Oedipal drama to the his-
tory of the Jews: at the origin there is the murder of Akhenaton by his sub-
jects, avatars of the primal horde. This killing was to be repeated in the history
of civilization against other father figures: Moses and Jesus. Freud interprets
the aftermath of these patricides as a crucial development: just as the primitive
brothers introjected paternal authority after their crime, the Jews internalized
the figure of Moses, a harsh and demanding superego that would lead them to
live under a strict moral code and accomplish numerous intellectual develop-
ments. The Jews, writes Freud, “imposed more and more new instinctual re-
nunciations on themselves and in that reached—in doctrine and precept, at
least—ethical heights which had remained inaccessible to the other peoples
of antiquity.”26
In this Oedipal account of Jewish history, Freud associates the figure of
the mother with the female deities prevalent in Egyptian polytheism, and with
the magic and superstition that had to be renounced in order to achieve an ad-
vancement in intellectuality. Freud saw polytheistic Egypt—as Carl Schorske
has argued—as the epitome of sensuality, femininity, and the maternal:27 the

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 95
 development of civilization required a rejection of femininity in favor of a
strong identification with paternal authority.
Freud’s application of the Oedipal metaphor to the history of the Jews
provided the conceptual framework for Octavio Paz’s analysis of Mexican his-
tory. But how could Freud’s controversial speculations about the murders of
Akhenaton and Moses be used to analyze Mexican culture?
In “The Sons of La Malinche,” the fourth section of The Labyrinth, Paz
applies Freud’s Oedipal model to Mexican history. In a move that recalls Ra-
mos’s analysis of the pelado, this chapter opens by inquiring about the possible
meaning of the most violent insults in Mexican slang: “Viva México, hijos de
la Chingada,” a profanity that could be translated as “Long live Mexico, sons of
a Chingada.” Delving into linguistic and lexicographic sources, Paz shows that
“chingar” means to rape, and “la Chingada” refers to a violated woman. The rest
of the chapter focuses on elucidating the identity of this debased female figure
invoked in everyday speech.
To solve the mystery of la Chingada’s identity, Paz turns to the origins
of the Mexican nation, a period he analyzes—following the example of Freud’s
Moses—in terms of an Oedipal tale. The modern Mexican nation, Paz writes,
was born out of a violent act, the Spanish conquest of Mexico, which he reads
as a symbolic rape: Indian women were overpowered by Spanish men, and out
of this traumatic event were born modern mestizo Mexicans. Paz identifies the
primeval Mexican father as Hernán Cortés, the conquistador, and the mother
as Doña Marina, Cortés’s Indian translator, popularly known as La Malinche.
Freud located a murder at the origin of civilization; Paz, instead, posits a rape
as the foundation of Mexican identity.
After proposing this revised version of the Oedipus complex, Paz ar-
gues that the “Chingada” invoked in the profanity is none other than La Ma-
linche, and that whenever Mexicans call someone an “hijo de la Chingada,” they
are effectively denouncing him as an offspring of rape. But the problem, Paz ar-
gues, is that the person uttering the curse issues from the same violent origins:
all modern Mexicans are “sons of La Malinche,” descendants of a traumatic en-
counter between Indians and Spaniards.
Paz concludes that “hijos de la Chingada” is not merely a curse, but a
disavowal of the speaker’s origins and a symptom of intense Oedipal anxieties
at the core of Mexican identity. The insult is ultimately an expression of ambiv-
alent feelings toward the mother: “In the same way,” Paz writes, “that the child
does not forgive his mother for abandoning him to go in search of his father,

96
the Mexican people cannot forgive La Malinche’s betrayal.”28 Like all neuro-
ses, Mexican Oedipal anxiety produces a repetition compulsion, leading to an
endless reiteration of the curse. Like Freudian traumas, its effects are felt with
a particular intensity: “The curious persistence of Cortés and Malinche in the
imagination and sensibility of Mexicans today reveals that these are not merely
historical figures: they are symbols of a secret conflict, one that we have not yet
resolved.”29 In Paz’s diagnosis the disavowal of the nation’s violent past is the
precipitating cause of the national neurosis that affects modern-day Mexicans.
Octavio Paz thus transformed Freud’s family romance into a new the-
ory of origins: he kept the Oedipal triad but gave its three elements—father,
mother, and son—an altogether different meaning from that found in Moses
and Monotheism. Freud had presented the paternal figure as a positive force in
the history of civilization and a catalyst for the “advancement in intellectuality.”
Paz, in contrast, theorizes a conquistador father who rapes women and sows de-
struction: a figure of barbarism. Moses features a series of founding fathers, ethi-
cal patriarchs representing the values of the superego. In contrast, Paz’s Spanish
father is a “macho,” a violent figure who “is not the founder of a people; he is
not the patriarch who exercises the paternal function; he is neither king nor
chief of a clan. . . . He is a complete stranger.”30 Other than Cortés, there are no
paternal figures in Paz’s book, no Akhenatons or Moses: even Miguel Hidalgo,
the father of Mexican Independence, is described as an “anciano inerme,” “a
puny old man.”
In contrast to Freud’s view of the maternal as representing the easy sen-
suality that must be overcome in favor of a strict rationality, Paz calls for a sepa-
ration from the father—the macho—and a stronger identification with the
Indian mother. The Labyrinth associates the father with violence and links the
mother with the sensual pre- Columbian heritage that is rejected with every
utterance of the curse against “la Chingada,” a speech act intended to disavow
the speaker’s filiation by pretending that only others are “sons of La Malinche,”
offspring of the violence of the Conquest.
Paz keeps many of the ideas presented in Moses, but shifts the emphasis
from the father to the mother: Freud argues that the murder of the father was
forgotten, eliminated from written history but preserved in distorted form;
Paz believes that the historical rape of Indian mothers was disavowed, but a
veiled memory of the crime lives on in popular language. Freud argued that
the Murder of Moses and its concealment explains the Jewish sense of guilt;
Paz proposed that the historical rape of Indian women gave rise to the neurotic

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 97
solitude tormenting modern Mexicans, and that the refusal to acknowledge
the mother’s role in national history is the precipitating cause of the neuroses
afflicting the Mexican psyche.
Paz borrowed the concept of a collective Oedipus complex from Moses
and Monotheism, but then transformed Freud’s patriarchal model into a ma-
triarchal one. Freud praised the virtues of paternal authority—the source of
reason, ethics, and conscience—but Paz emphasizes the importance of the ma-
ternal—a rich realm of myths, sensuality, and pre-Columbian traditions. Moses
is descriptive, but The Labyrinth is prescriptive: it urges readers to identify with
the feminine figures, from La Malinche to Sor Juana. If Kahlo’s Moses presented
a postcolonial reading of Moses and Monotheism, then The Labyrinth orches-
trates a feminist revision of Freud’s model, shifting the emphasis from fathers to
mothers. As a feminist, Paz is more radical than Kahlo. Her painting placed fa-
ther Moses at the center of the composition; Paz, in contrast, gives center stage
to the mother—the most important chapter in the book is not called “the sons
of Cortés” but “the sons of La Malinche.”31

geistigkeit

In addition to rewriting the Oedipus complex with an emphasis on the mother,

Octavio Paz responded to another important idea developed in Moses and
Monotheism: the concept of Geistigkeit.
Freud devoted a section of the third essay in Moses and Monotheism to
the question of intellectuality. He called it “Der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit,”
and in it he argues that the advancement in intellectuality culminating with
the development of abstract thinking was one of the most important Jewish
contributions to civilization, second only to the introduction of monotheism.
Freud sees this development as a direct consequence of the Mosaic prohibition
against graven images, leading to “the compulsion to worship a God whom one
cannot see.” A sensory perception “was given a second place to what may be
called an abstract idea,” resulting in a shift from the visible to the invisible, from
the senses to abstract reasoning.32 The outcome was “a triumph of intellectual-
ity over sensuality or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation, with all its
necessary psychological consequences.”33
Freud considered Geistigkeit as an advance over Sinnlichkeit, intellec-
tuality as an overcoming of sensuality. Thinking requires a “renunciation” of

98
 the senses, and thus Freud posits the highest form of intellectual activity as one
that cannot be verified by the senses. The passage from matriarchal to patriar-
chal societies went hand in hand with the development of intellectuality, since
“maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis,
based on an inference and a premiss.”34 In the history of Judaism, sense percep-
tions became associated with “a lower psychical activity”35 and were ultimately
relegated to a secondary place—along with sexuality.36
“The religion which began with the prohibition against making an im-
age of God,” writes Freud, “develops more and more in the course of the centu-
ries into a religion of instinctual renunciation.”37 In this respect the Jews differ
sharply from the Ancient Greeks, who managed to harmonize intellectuality
and sensuality, but at least, Freud concludes, Judaism opted “in favor of the wor-
thier alternative.”38 Despite its strictness, the renunciation of sensuality in favor
of intellectuality yielded invaluable benefits for the Jews, including a strong
sense of self-esteem (each individual, Freud explained, was able to share in the
greatness of the invisible God, much as individual Britons feel proud because
they have a small, individual share in the power of their country).39 It was these
“gifts” that helped the Jews survive: “The pre-eminence given to intellectual la-
bours throughout some two thousand years in the life of the Jewish people has . . .
helped to check the brutality and the tendency to violence which are apt
to appear where the development of muscular strength is the popular ideal.”40
Freud’s pages on the advancement of intellectuality must have made a
deep impression on Octavio Paz, a writer who placed a great value on the life of
the mind and spent much of his life defending freedom of thought. The Laby-
rinth itself is a tribute to reason, a book that repeatedly stresses the virtues of
intellectual inquiry. After painstakingly detailing the various historical errors,
simulations, and deceptions that have trapped Mexicans inside a “labyrinth of
solitude,” Paz points to crítica—the exercise of critical thought—as the thread
that can lead out of the maze.41
Paz devotes a chapter of The Labyrinth, “La ‘inteligencia’ mexicana,” to
the analysis of crítica, a concept that, like Freud’s Geistigkeit, is a form of ab-
stract intellectual activity. Following Freud, he emphasizes the development
of intellectuality as a prism to analyze the development of civilization: The
Labyrinth foregrounds the role played by writers and thinkers in Mexican his-
tory. Freud associated Geistigkeit with the invention of literature, and Paz re-
lates crítica to the development of a Mexican philosophy.42 Freud attributes
enormous powers to intellectuality—Geistigkeit allowed the Jews to survive
two thousand years of expulsions and dislocations—and Paz ascribes similar

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 99
virtues to criticism, which he presents as a cure for the perennial Mexican soli-
tude. “Philosophical reflection,” he writes “becomes an urgent task that leads
to salvation . . . it will offer us a concrete solution, one that will give meaning
to our presence on earth.”43 Though Paz presents a secular analysis of Mexican
history, his discussion of the redemptory powers of crítica is as charged with
religious overtones as Freud’s account of Judaic intellectuality. Paz once wrote
that for Alfonso Reyes, the most important Mexican writer in the first half of
the twentieth century, “literature was a form of religion,”44 and the same could
be said about the practice of crítica for Paz.
Both Freud and Paz lamented the decline of intellectuality in their
time: Freud, writing on the eve of World War II, was understandably the more
pessimistic of the two, and warned that the great advancement in intellectual-
ity that the Jews had given to civilization was in the process of being undone:
the world had suffered an initial regression from Geistigkeit after the introduc-
tion of Christianity, a religion that broke the prohibition against graven images,
reinstated a disguised form of polytheism—the worship of saints—and even
returned to a form of matriarchy—the cult of the Virgin. This historical re-
gression became more acute in Nazi Germany, a culture that privileged a retro-
grade form of instinctual satisfaction: “We find to our astonishment,” he wrote
in one of the prefatory notes to Moses, that “in the case of the German people,
[there has occurred] a relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism.”45
Paz was living in less barbarous times when he wrote The Labyrinth:
the war had been over for several years, and Paris, his new home, had become
an effervescent center for literary and philosophical activity. Mexico, too, was
in the midst of an intellectual boom, and the government had appointed many
writers and artists—including Paz himself—to important diplomatic and cabi-
net positions. But despite the widespread optimism, Paz worried that intellec-
tual life had suffered a setback, and that the increasing dependence of writers
on government jobs and grants had compromised their integrity: they “have
lost their independence and their critical activity has been diluted as a result of
their cautious or Machiavellian behavior,” he warned.46 In the book’s most pes-
simistic moment, Paz asks: “Has the Mexican intelligentsia ceased being intel-
ligent? Has it given up its role as the country’s critical conscience?”47
Unlike Freud, Paz ends on a hopeful note: the first edition of The Laby-
rinth closes with a call to arms, with an invitation to his readers to use the in-
tellect as a weapon to fight inauthenticity. “We must learn to face reality,” Paz
writes. “Thinking is the foremost obligation of our ‘intelligentsia’—often it

100
 is the only obligation.”48 Paz believes it is possible to recover lost ground and
charge forward—a possibility absent from Moses and Monotheism.
But there is an important difference between Paz’s crítica and Freud’s
Geistigkeit. Paz argues that abstract ideas have not always produced beneficial
results in Mexican history. He criticizes the historical periods known as the
Reforma and the Porfiriato as epochs marked by a proliferation of complex
but inauthentic political ideas that ultimately did more harm than good. The
ideas contained in the 1857 Constitution, the nineteenth-century Reform laws,
and the positivist doctrines of the Díaz regime were so far removed from the
Mexican reality that they became meaningless, empty signs. “Ideas,” he argues,
“served to cover up reality, instead of revealing it or expressing it.”49 Paz takes
issue with these nineteenth-century ideas because they were too abstract, too
intellectual, and too disconnected from the country’s reality.
In contrast to Freud’s unconditional belief in intellectual abstractions,
Paz argues that ideas are useful only when they are grounded in reality. The
Labyrinth stresses the importance of authenticity—a concept Paz borrowed
from Jean-Paul Sartre—and laments its absence in Mexican history. He criti-
cizes the Reforma and the Porfiriato as periods doomed by the inauthenticity
of their intellectuals, but celebrates the culture that emerged after the Revolu-
tion as characterized by truly authentic ideas. In his analysis, the Reforma and
the Porfiriato are periods that produced ideas that were too cerebral, too far re-
moved from the sensuous vitality of Mexican life. The ideology of the Reforma,
for instance, “ignore[d] one half of man: the half that is expressed in myths,
communion, festival, dreams, and eroticism.”50 If Freud argued that Geistigkeit
required an instinctual renunciation, Paz believes that ideas are worthless un-
less they are animated by the senses.
Paz’s ideal is not pure abstraction, as it was for Freud, but rather an in-
tellectual life that is energized by eroticism. Eros and Logos are entirely com-
patible in Paz’s system, and his essay prescribes an intellectual life tinged by the
joys of sensuality as the most appropriate remedy for Mexican solitude. Paz
conceives criticism—along with the poetry, festivals, and myths he analyzes
in The Labyrinth—as an activity that brings together mind and body, ideas
and perceptions, thinking and desiring. And this is perhaps the one most sig-
nificant difference between The Labyrinth of Solitude and Moses and Monothe-
ism: whereas Freud deemed intellectuality incompatible with sensuality, Paz
calls for a synthesis between the life of the mind and the life of the senses, for a
Geistigkeit that is also animated by Sinnlichkeit.

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 101
 Like other readers of Freud, Paz must have been surprised by Freud’s ac-
count of Geistigkeit as pure reason stripped of all sensual elements—a charac-
terization Carl Schorske considered almost puritan in its strictness.51 After all,
hadn’t psychoanalysis shown that literature, art, and all great cultural achieve-
ments resulted from a sublimation of sexuality, and thus had a sinnlich foun-
dation? André Breton and the surrealists embraced Freud’s writings precisely
because they uncovered the Dionysiac powers of sexuality that bourgeois so-
ciety was so intent on repressing. So why did Freud, the archaeologist of sexual
desire, turn his last book into a rejection of the realm of the senses?52
The reasons behind Freud’s turn away from Sinnlichkeit in his last work
remain a mystery, although it is not hard to understand why an old man, driven
to exile and dying of cancer, might want to escape the senses, which at that late
age brought only pain, in order to take refuge in the life of the mind, which had
always been his lifeline. As he struggled to finish his book, Freud had to forget
his own body, a constant source of discomfort—a form of “instinctual renun-
ciation” he then projected into his theorization of Geistigkeit.
Paz, in contrast, was in the prime of life when he set out to write The
Labyrinth: his body was strong and healthy, and a source of more pleasure than
pain. It is not surprising that Paz would want to incorporate the senses, the
body, and eroticism into his view of intellectual life. As a young man, he had no
need to forget his own body; on the contrary, the body—and the mystery of
erotic love—was one of the sparks that animated Paz’s work, from his first pub-
lications in the 1940s to his last books in the 1990s. In The Labyrinth the body
appears as a source of joy, as one of the antidotes to solitude: “we are neither
afraid nor ashamed of our body,” Paz writes, “we experience it with a degree of
plenitude.”53 Crítica, Paz’s synthesis of Geistigkeit and Sinnlichkeit, recalls the
Greek ideal of a perfect harmony between mind and body, which Freud be-
lieved had been denied to the Jews.
In my earlier discussion of Kahlo, I speculated that Freud would have
objected to her Moses as a work staging a regression into sensuality. Paz never
wrote about Kahlo’s painting, and it is even possible that he was unaware of its
existence (although one is tempted to imagine the extraordinary conversation
Paz and Kahlo might have had about Moses and Monotheism: “But how does
Coatlicue fit into Freud’s schema, dear Octavio?” “It is not Coatlicue but Ma-
linche that concerns me, my esteemed Frida”). Paz wrote dozens of essays about
painting—even one about Kahlo’s work—and he might have been captivated
by her attempt to translate Freud’s ideas into pictorial form.54

102
 But surprisingly, The Labyrinth affirms Freud’s belief that the devel-
opment of intellectuality requires a rejection of visual images in favor of in-
tellectual abstractions. In “Critique of the Pyramid,” an essay written in 1969
and incorporated into subsequent editions of The Labyrinth, Paz criticizes the
exhibition design at Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology. In his
view, its display of pre-Columbian sculptures and other archaeological artifacts
presents a false narrative in which the Aztecs appear as the culmination of pre-
Hispanic civilizations. Paz argues that this is a ruse by the governing party, the
PRI, to create a myth of origins by identifying itself with the Aztecs and tout-
ing postrevolutionary Mexico as a renaissance of pre- Columbian culture. To
propagate this false view of history, the Museum relies on a canny use of images:
“The glorification of Mexico-Tenochtitlán [the Aztec capital] in the Museum
of Anthropology is an exaltation of the image of the Aztec pyramid”—an im-
age leading to deception, entropy, and death: “all images,” he concludes, “suffer
a fatal tendency toward petrification.”55
Like Freud, Paz suggests that images foster a form of intellectual com-
placency: they offer a wealth of visual information to the senses and leave
little to the imagination. At times, his critique of images appears stronger that
Freud’s: Paz writes that crítica “is the acid that dissolves images.”56 Critical
thinking is the antidote to the manipulative images found in the Museum of
Anthropology—and writing books like The Labyrinth becomes a remedy for
the petrification of history orchestrated by the PRI.
Inspired by Moses and Monotheism, Kahlo sought to translate Freud’s
argument into visual images. Paz, in contrast, responded to Freud’s ideas with
a new theory of intellectual criticism. In the end, Kahlo’s Moses would not fare
well if it were subjected to Paz’s acid. (“My dear Octavio,” Frida might have ob-
jected, “you are always so caustic.”)

solitude, melancholia, malaise

In addition to the Oedipus complex and Geistigkeit, there is a third element

Paz borrowed from Moses and Monotheism: the concept of solitude. Freud did
not use the same term, but he elaborated a number of concepts that have much
in common with Paz’s theory: of these, melancholia appears to have the most
affinities to solitude.

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 103
 In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud defined melan-
cholia as a condition characterized by “a profoundly painful dejection, cessa-
tion of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition
of all activity, and a lowering of the self regard.” Like mourning, melancholia
stems from the loss of an object—a loved person, an ideal, or an illusion. Un-
like mourners, however, melancholics lack a conscious understanding of what
they have lost, and direct negative affects toward themselves: they experience
an “impoverishment of [the] ego,” which sometimes leads to “delusional expec-
tations of punishment.”57
Paz’s solitude has much in common with Freud’s melancholia. Paz, too,
identifies loss as the precipitating cause for of solitude: “Any rupture (with our-
selves, with our surroundings, with the past or the present) produces a feeling of
solitude. In extreme cases—separation from the parents, the womb, or the na-
tive country, death of the gods . . .—solitude becomes indistinguishable from
orphanhood.”58
In his discussion of solitude, Paz invokes a number of well-known
Freudian tropes. The first experience of being alone in the world, he tells us,
begins with the traumatic separation from the mother at birth: “Solitude . . .
began the day we were separated from the maternal realm and fell into a strange
and hostile world.”59 Like Freud’s melancholia, solitude generates a relentless
longing for the lost object, a “nostalgia for the body from which we were torn.”60
Paz never uses the word “unconscious,” but his discussion makes it clear that
Mexicans are unaware of the underlying causes for their feelings of loneliness.
Like Freud in Moses and Monotheism, Paz extends his analysis of soli-
tude from the individual to the group, from infantile to national history. In the
chapter “From the Conquest to Independence,” Paz discusses Mexican history
using the metaphors of individual development—birth, infancy, adolescence,
and adulthood: the Conquest marked Mexico’s birth as a nation, a traumatic
event that threw Mexicans into a strange new reality. Like the separation from
the maternal body, the collapse of pre- Columbian religions left the Indians
“alone, abandoned by friends, subjects and gods,” and the young nation plunged
into “a solitude caused by the death and destruction of [its] gods.”61 Eventually
this experience of solitude became a permanent condition, and a defining trait
of the national character.
There are also important differences between solitude and melancho-
lia. Freud considered melancholia a dangerous pathology that threatens the
ego with destruction, and emphasized the violent, sadistic, and murderous

104
impulses propelling melancholic dejection. The Labyrinth, on the other hand,
presents a more benign account of solitude. Solitude can be painful, even over-
whelming, but it is never deadly, and in certain cases it can even be a positive ex-
perience.62 And though for most of The Laybrinth Paz associates solitude with
inauthenticity, simulation, entrapment, and even “asphyxia,”63 he also portrays
his most admired intellectual figures as solitary beings, suggesting that solitude
and creativity went hand in hand. The seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz appears as “a melancholic and solitary poet who smiles and remains
silent”;64 and historian Daniel Cosío Villegas is “another solitary” intellectual.65
Far from being a dangerous and deathly impulse, solitude emerges as a catalyst
for intellectual reflection, for the exercise of crítica. For intellectuals, solitude
is a gift from the Muses.
This positive conception of solitude is closer to the Romantic myth of
the saturnine poet than to Freud’s discussion of melancholia as a devastating
pathology. Paz’s conception of a creative solitude has more in common with
the Greek—especially the Aristotelian—conception of melancholia as a by-
product of genius. In his “Problem XXX,” Aristotle discussed melancholia as
a special sensibility found in remarkable men, from Homer to Plato. “Why is
it,” asks Aristotle, “that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy,
statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic?”66 And why is it, we may ask,
that in The Labyrinth notable intellectuals are invariably presented as solitary
beings?67
But not all experiences of solitude are the same, and not all solitary in-
dividuals mentioned in The Labyrinth are poets or intellectuals. In addition to
the creative solitude of writers, Paz examines a second, more pernicious type of
solitude that he finds prevalent in the modern world. Writing about postwar
society, Paz laments “the endless, infinite labor” and “the solitude it produces;
the promiscuous solitude of hotels, offices, workshops and cinemas.” Paz con-
siders this experience of solitude as the most pernicious form of alienation, “a
total confinement, the reflection of a world with no exit.”68 In contrast to the
fertile experience of poets, the solitude of modern societies traps individuals in
the dark, soulless labyrinth evoked in the title of Paz’s book—a notion that has
more in common with Marx’s concept of alienation than with Freud’s melan-
cholia (in his youth, Paz read Marx as avidly as he read Freud).69
Paz’s solitude begins to look less and less like Freud’s melancholia: mel-
ancholia kills, but solitude is, at worst, a form of social alienation; Freud con-
siders melancholia an exceptional state, a pathological condition affecting only

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 105
those prone to neurotic symptoms, whereas Paz sees solitude as a universal con-
dition and affirms that “all men are alone.”70 Perhaps solitude has less to do
with melancholia than with another concept introduced by Freud in Moses and
Monotheism: “cultural malaise,” one of the most mysterious and least studied of
Freudian constructs.
In the final pages of Moses and Monotheism, Freud muses on the prev-
alence of a certain malaise in European culture, a “depressed mood of the
peoples” for which there is no rational explanation. Some historians have taken
this malaise as a symptom of the “ageing of ancient civilization,” but Freud in-
terprets it as a variant of the Jewish sense of guilt. Early in the history of Juda-
ism its people developed an intense sense of guilt, a feeling Freud traces to the
disavowal of the murder of Moses—and the Oedipal repression of “the mur-
derous hatred of the father.”71 Eventually this feeling spread, and became a per-
manent trait of European civilization: “The sense of guilt caught hold of all the
Mediterranean peoples as a dull malaise, a premonition of calamity for which
no one could suggest a reason.”72
As in melancholia, the originating cause for this cultural malaise has
receded into the unconscious. “The sense of guilt produced by civilization,”
writes Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), the only other text to
mention the concept, 73 “remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a
sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations.”74 In
other respects, however, cultural malaise is quite different from melancholia:
melancholia is an individual pathology; malaise a group affliction. Melancho-
lia poses a deadly threat to the ego; malaise merely casts a harmless gloom over
Mediterranean Europe. Melancholia is pathological; cultural malaise is “the
price we pay for our advancement in civilization . . . a loss of happiness through
the heightening of the sense of guilt.”75 Freud muses over the possible treat-
ment of melancholics, but never considers curing civilization of its malaise.
Paz’s solitude oscillates between universality and particularity: “Man is
alone everywhere,” he writes, “but the solitude of Mexicans differs from that of
Americans.”76 Paz is as fascinated by the contrast between Mexican and Ameri-
can experiences of solitude as Freud was by the differences between Jewish and
Christian cultures.
Like malaise, solitude is a necessary discontent: Freud saw malaise as
the price we have to pay for civilization, and Paz sees solitude as a prerequi-
site to all worthwhile intellectual work. Without solitude, Mexico would have
no Sor Juanas, no Cosío Villegas . . . and no Octavio Paz! And the originating
causes of cultural malaise, like those of solitude, are ultimately unconscious:

106
 Jews needed Freud to uncover the roots of their sense of guilt, and Mexicans
needed Paz to crack the enigma of their eternal solitude.
Paz’s solitude is less a melancholic state than a variant of cultural mal-
aise, and one can see why The Labyrinth takes Moses and Monotheism instead
of “Mourning and Melancholia” as its source. Melancholia is an individual af-
fliction, but malaise is a construct that traverses and is traversed by history. And
if Freud relied on cultural malaise to analyze the evolution of Judaism, Paz in-
voked solitude to understand Mexican history.
Out of all the points mentioned by Freud in his analysis of Jewish his-
tory, there was one that must have made a deep impression on Paz: the belief
that an advancement in civilization does not bring happiness, but, on the con-
trary, produces endless discontents, burdens the people with a sense of guilt,
and shrouds them in a dull malaise. The Labyrinth presents a similar account
of history as a process that has led Mexicans to an ever-deepening sense of soli-
tude. But solitude, like malaise, can be productive: in the end, The Labyrinth
springs from Paz’s experience of solitude in the same way that Moses and Mono-
theism was born out of an aged Freud’s intense physical and spiritual malaise.
Paz believed there was a cure for solitude: “mythical time,” he wrote,
“the time of poetry, love, and myths liberates us from solitude and returns us to
a state of communion.”77 Freud ends his Moses on a characteristically pessimis-
tic note, lamenting the limitations of Geistigkeit and of his ability to know; Paz,
on the other hand, ends his book by assuring his readers that “plenitude awaits
us at the end of the labyrinth of solitude.”78
The three concepts Paz borrowed from Moses and Monotheism—
Oedipus, Geistigkeit, and malaise—have an important element in common:
they are abstract ideas that could hardly be expressed as visual images, complex
notions that resist translation into pictorial form—Kahlo herself was aware of
this limitation, as she explained in a talk about her painting.79

conclusion

The Labyrinth of Solitude is an original adaptation of Moses and Monotheism

to the Mexican context—an effort to use psychoanalytic concepts to theorize
cultural identity. What Freud did with Judaism, Paz repeated with Mexican-
ism. But why would Paz choose a work famous for its esoteric speculation as
the basis for his book? Couldn’t he have chosen another, simpler Freudian text

Chapter 3 | m o n o t h e i s m s 107
dealing with the same themes? Why not take Totem and Taboo or Civilization
and Its Discontents as a point of departure? Wouldn’t these texts make things
considerably easier for him? But there is compelling reason behind Paz’s choice
of Moses over other Freudian texts.
In Freud and the Non-European, a brilliant little book, Edward Said
posits Moses and Monotheism as a model for thinking about national and ethnic
identity. Said notes that Freud’s inquiry into the origins of Judaism opens with
a shocking hypothesis: Moses was an Egyptian, and thus the founder of the
Jewish religion was a non-Jew. Formulated in slightly different terms, Freud’s
inquiry into the identity of his people places the Other at its center. And if the
founding father of Judaism is an other, then Jewish identity is predicated on
alterity. “In excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity,” Said writes, “Freud
insisted that it did not begin with itself, but rather with other identities (Egyp-
tian and Arabian).”80 This analysis “mobilized the non-European past in order
to undermine any doctrinal attempt that might be made to put Jewish identity
on a sound foundational basis, whether religious or secular.”81
This radical move of constructing a cultural identity placing the Other
at its center is what led Octavio Paz to choose Moses and Monotheism as his
model. In The Labyrinth, he too sets out to construct a theory of Mexican cul-
tural identity that originates in an experience of alterity. In a gesture that has
not been sufficiently analyzed, Paz devotes the opening chapter of his book not
to Mexico but to California: his famous essay on the Pachuco, the Mexican-
American who does not fit comfortably into either of the two national identi-
ties. To think about Mexico, Paz takes California as his Egypt and the Pachuco
as his Moses—a Mexican-American Moses.
Paz’s revision of Moses and Monotheism was part of a larger trend: in the
first half of the twentieth century many Latin American intellectuals gravitated
to psychoanalysis as a model for theorizing national identity. Figures from the
Mexican Samuel Ramos to the Peruvians Honorio Delgado and Jose Carlos
Mariátegui and the Argentinian Ezequiel Martínez Estrada turned to Freud’s
writings in search for the conceptual tools to examine their nation’s history and
culture. In those years, psychoanalysis emerged as the preferred model for re-
flecting on collective identity, for diagnosing its pathologies and offering thera-
peutic solutions. Psychoanalysis allowed intellectuals to cure the nation of its
neuroses: a project that found its most eccentric expression in the work of Gre-
gorio Lemercier, the subject of the next chapter.

108
P L A S T I C S U R G E RY

As I was writing this book, I often mentioned to friends and colleagues that I
was working on Freud’s relation to Mexico. Inevitably, their first associations
led to surrealism. “Of course!” one exclaimed, “it all began with André Breton’s
visit in 1938.” This would seem to be a logical hypothesis: Breton came in con-
tact with a group of Mexican artists that included Manuel Álvarez Bravo and
Frida Kahlo, whose work depicted dreams, puns, and other products of the
unconscious—a find that led him to call Mexico a natural home for surrealism.
But there is a problem with this premise: while it is true that Breton
was an avid reader of Freud and wrote the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” un-
der the influence of The Interpretation of Dreams, few of his Mexican follow-
ers shared his enthusiasm for analytic theory. Leonora Carrington, Wolfgang
Paalen, and Lola Álvarez Bravo depicted dream sequences, erotic images, and
ancient myths—all topics that fascinated Freud—but they did so without re-
ferring explicitly to psychoanalytic theory, and there is little evidence to suggest
that they shared Breton’s enthusiasm for Freud. There was one notable excep-
tion to this trend: the Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo.
During the Spanish Civil War Varo moved to Paris, where she came
into contact with Breton and his circle. In 1941 she settled in Mexico City,
where she lived until her death in 1963. The diaries she kept during these two
decades reveal a sustained curiosity about psychoanalytic practice: they include
a series of imaginary letters to psychiatrists—some of them chosen at random

109
from the phone book—as well as a number of “psycho-humorous experiments”
such as a proposal for a psychoanalytic clinic where patients could choose ei-
ther to live out their own fantasies or to sabotage those of their fellow inmates.82
Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (figure 3.5; plate 3), painted in 1960,
is Varo’s most explicit work about analysis. It depicts a woman exiting her doc-
tor’s office—a plaque on the doorframe identifies him as “Dr. von F.J.A.,” a
name Varo explained as a condensation of “Freud, Jung, and Adler”—and step-
ping into a small courtyard. There, she “throws her father’s head into a well,” an
act Varo considered “the correct thing to do upon leaving the psychoanalyst,”
as she explained in a letter to her brother. In her right hand, she carries a basket
containing “a clock, symbolizing the fear of arriving late,” as well as “other psy-
chological refuse.”83 She is draped in an elaborate cloak: only her eyes, forehead,
and hair are visible; the rest of her body is concealed under folds of thick fabric.
A Venetian-looking mask, made of the same fabric, hangs over her neck: if she
were to put it on, she would look like a woman in carnivalesque purdah.
The scene takes place in a most unusual setting: the woman stands in
the middle of a closed circular courtyard without a visible exit. There is a door
to the left, but without a knob or lock it appears to be sealed shut. The court-
yard is enclosed by towering, fortified walls, and the only openings to the out-
side world are well above eye level. There seems to be no way out of this circular
labyrinth, except perhaps through the well—an exit that would require a peril-
ous and potentially deadly underwater plunge.
Though the painting is called Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst, the
protagonist seems unable to leave her analyst’s compound: she is trapped in a
walled courtyard and is doomed to walk around in circles—a visual depiction
of the feelings of frustration experienced by many patients on the couch. The
overall impression is one of claustrophobia. Perhaps a more appropriate title
for this work would be Woman Not Leaving the Psychoanalyst. In any case, Varo
illustrates a very Freudian idea: the impossibility of ever bringing an analysis to
a full conclusion; if analysis is terminable and interminable, then analysts are
leavable and unleavable.
But what led this woman to seek psychoanalytic treatment? Does she
suffer from a clearly identifiable psychopathology? What traumas would her
case study reveal? Perhaps she suffers from an obsessional neurosis forcing her
to conceal every inch of her body under countless folds of fabric. If this were
the case, the painting seems to illustrate the aftermath of a successful therapeu-
tic session: the woman has removed the mask covering her face, the first step

110
f i g u r e 3.5
Remedios Varo, Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (1960). Courtesy Alexandra Gruen,
Mexico City.
 in a therapeutic striptease that would ideally culminate in her ability to exhibit
her body in public (what a different painting this would be if the woman leav-
ing the psychoanalyst wore a bikini)! Perhaps she is a paranoiac taking cover
from imaginary enemies. Perhaps she suffers from claustrophobia and the can-
vas represents her feelings of being closed in, surrounded by thick walls and
trapped in a small space. Perhaps she is a borderline psychotic, and the dan-
gling head over the well represents one of her hallucinations—and a death wish
against her father. Perhaps she is a pervert, a dominatrix in disguise, and her
basket contains an assortment of toys that could be put to creative sexual uses:
threads to tie down a lover; needles to draw blood; a clock to time the various
punishments. Perhaps she is simply a bashful neurotic, so embarrassed to be
seen consulting an analyst that she wears an elaborate disguise to her sessions.
In any case, the painting confirms one of Freud’s discoveries: behind the unre-
markable appearances of the men and women we cross on the street every day
lie the darkest pathologies—compulsions, phobias, perversions—invisible to
all except the psychoanalyst.
But what does Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst tell us about the fate
of Freud’s ideas in Mexico? Varo painted this work in 1960, almost forty years
after Salvador Novo published the first reviews of psychoanalytic texts in Mex-
ico City’s literary journals. Mexico had undergone monumental changes in
that period, and so had attitudes toward analysis. In the 1920s, only a handful
of young, avant-garde intellectuals were familiar with Freud’s texts. Since then,
interest in psychoanalysis had soared: Erich Fromm was now teaching at the
National University; the Mexican Psychoanalytic Association was holding reg-
ular meetings; analytic books were now read by students, medical doctors, and
laymen alike. The most respected Mexican intellectuals, from Octavio Paz to
Santiago Ramírez, invoked analytic theories to explain the complexities of the
Mexican character. By 1960, Freud had entered the mainstream.
Along with other canvases painted by Varo in the last years of her life,
Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst illustrates the changing attitudes toward
psychotherapy in 1960s Mexico. The paining is best read alongside another
work from the same year: Visit to the Plastic Surgeon (figure 3.6; plate 4), which
represents a different kind of clinical practice and shows a woman hiding her
unusually long nose under a veil. She is about to ring a bell of a locale identified
as a “Clínica Plastoturgencia,” a Spanish mot-valise agglutinating the words for
“plastic,” “turgescent,” and “emergency” that could be translated as a “Clinic for
Plastic-Turgescent-Emergencies.” Next to the door, a display window exhibits

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f i g u r e 3.6
Remedios Varo, Visit to the Plastic Surgeon (1960). Courtesy Alexandra Gruen, Mexico City.
a female torso bearing not two but six breasts, a surgical-surrealist body that
Janet A. Kaplan reads as “the doctor’s latest creation.”84 A sign on the window
proclaims “Let’s overcome nature. . . . In our glorious, plasti-nylonified epoch,
there are no limits: audacity, taste, elegance and turgescence is our motto. On
parle français.” This painting was commissioned by Dr. Jaime Asch, a plastic
surgeon with a successful practice in Mexico City, who apparently was be-
mused by Varo’s caricature of his profession.85
Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst and Visit to the Plastic Surgeon illus-
trate remarkably similar scenarios: both are portraits of veiled women stand-
ing at the threshold of a doctor’s office. One is leaving, the other arriving; one
consults a psychoanalyst, the other a plastic surgeon. We know exactly why the
long-nosed woman is visiting the plastic surgeon—for a much-needed rhi-
noplasty—but we can’t tell why her neurotic counterpart has consulted the
psychoanalyst.
Taken as a pair, the two paintings establish a curious parallel between
psychoanalysis and plastic surgery: both are reconstructive medical proce-
dures, though one targets the body and the other the psyche. Perhaps the veiled
woman consulted the psychoanalyst for the same reason her counterpart called
on the plastic surgeon—to get some work done.
These paintings illustrate the new status of psychoanalysis in 1960s
Mexico: no longer the exclusive domain of experimental poets and avant-garde
thinkers, it had become a staple of the bourgeois lifestyle. As Varo knew from
her experience with collectors, rich women—and no doubt some men—rou-
tinely chose one of these two options for dealing with midlife and other ex-
istential crises: exterior remodeling or internal refashioning; paying either a
plastic surgeon to work on their bodies or a psychoanalyst to work on their
minds. (Ugly neurotics, one supposes, could opt for both.)
Unlike Novo, Paz, or Kahlo, Varo did not engage in a sustained reading
of Freud. Nevertheless, her paintings—like the cartoons Miguel Covarrubias
published in Vanity Fair—tell us a great deal about the popular perception
of analysis. In the frivolous world of the Mexican bourgeoisie—a world Luis
Buñuel depicted in films like The Exterminating Angel—the practice that
Freud once considered as revolutionary as Darwin’s discoveries had evolved
into a luxury service: plastic surgery for the psyche.

114
 | 4 |

ILLUSIONS

Novo used Freud to invent a new form of autobiographical writing; Ramos,

to develop a philosophy of Mexicanness; Paz, to interpret the nation’s history.
Freud would find a very different reader in the figure of Gregorio Lemercier,
a Benedictine monk whose enthusiasm for psychoanalysis led him to place
his entire monastery in group therapy. In previous chapters we have seen how
Freudian ideas led to the development of new directions in literature, philos-
ophy, and history; now we will discuss how Freud’s theory of religious experi-
ence inspired one of the most radical attempts to reform Mexican Catholicism.
Of all the Mexican readers of Freud, Lemercier was, without a doubt,
the most eccentric. His experiment became famous around the world: journal-
ists from France to Argentina traveled to Mexico to visit “the monastery in psy-
choanalysis,” and wrote passionate articles about the unlikely combination of
religious life and analytic practice. Lemercier’s Freudian project exerted a great
influence on art and literature of the 1960s and 1970s: novelists, playwrights,
filmmakers, and even architects devoted works to Lemercier’s community, and
launched a passionate debate about the merits of religious psychotherapy.
Freud, a proud atheist, mused on the possible relation between psycho-
analysis and religion: he anticipated an eventual clash between these two sys-
tems of thought, and predicted the triumph of his theories over superstitions
and illusions. Two decades after Freud’s death, Lemercier attempted a synthesis

117
f i g u r e 4.1
Grégoire Lemercier. Robert Serrou, “Mexique: Le monastère en psychanalyse,” Paris Match
888 (April 16, 1965): 67.

between these two worldviews—a wildly utopian experiment that even Freud
could have never anticipated.

gregorio lemercier

Grégoire Lemercier (figure 4.1)—who called himself Gregorio as a tribute to

his adopted country—was born in Belgium in 1912. In his twenties he entered
the Abbey of Mont César, in Louvain, where he was ordained in 1938. There
he met a young monk, Ignacio Romerovargas Yturbe—his “Mexican friend,”
as he would later call him in his memoirs—who told many stories about his
native country and eventually convinced Lemercier to accompany him back to
Mexico. The two—along with a third monk from the Belgian abbey—arrived
in Mexico in 1944 and built three monasteries: one in Sonora, a second near

118
 Cuernavaca, and a third—the one that would become famous—in the village
of Santa María Ahuacatitlán: they called it Santa María de la Resurrección (fig-
ure 4.2), and inaugurated it in 1950.
Over the next decade, Cuernavaca became a center of progressive Cath-
olic thought. In 1952 Sergio Méndez Arceo, a liberal theologian and social ac-
tivist, was appointed bishop: his progressive views, links with political activists,
and passionate engagement with workers’ groups earned him the nickname
“the red bishop.” In 1960, Ivan Illich, an Austrian philosopher and Catholic
priest, moved to Cuernavaca to open the Intercultural Documentation Center
(CIDOC), a research center focusing on the problems of the third world. The
simultaneous presence of Lemercier, Méndez Arceo, and Illich in Cuernavaca
turned this small provincial city into a radical Catholic think tank that would
eventually attract the attention of both the Vatican and the CIA.
Lemercier opened the doors of his monastery to the poorest Mexicans.
To assert their vow of poverty, the monks wore outfits resembling the uniforms
of Mexico City’s garbage collectors. But Santa María was open to all social

f i g u r e 4.2
A monk at the monastery. Robert Serrou, “Mexique: Le monastère en psychanalyse,” Paris
Match 888 (April 16, 1965): 65.

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 119
classes—some monks came from rich families in Mexico City; others from
dirt-poor villages around Cuernavaca—and even welcomed nonbelievers. It
was frequented by novelists in search of a quiet place to write, and by university
students working on their dissertations. Some guests were atheists, and Lemer-
cier was fond of discussing Catholic theology, political history, Marxism, and
Nietzschean philosophy with his more intellectual visitors.
In 1959 Lemercier experienced a hallucination—he saw a multitude
of bright, colored lights in his cell—and, concerned about his mental health,
went to see a psychiatrist in Mexico City. The doctor attributed the vision to
stress, and suggested he see a psychoanalyst. Lemercier agreed, and he began an
intensive analysis, four days a week, fifty minutes per session. This experience
was a revelation, and in his memoirs he describes psychoanalysis as “the most
trying askesis of my life.”1
Analysis opened up a new world for Lemercier. He discovered the un-
conscious and its many subterfuges, the complexities of character types and the
terrifying power of the drives. Convinced that an exploration of the psyche was
the best complement to religious life, Lemercier placed his entire monastery in
group therapy. Two doctors—Gustavo Quevedo (figure 4.3), a Mexican who
had studied in Buenos Aires, and Frida Zmud (figure 4.4), an Argentinian—
treated groups of eight monks twice a week in eighty-minute sessions. Both
analysts were nonbelievers, a factor Lemercier considered crucial for the suc-
cess of the therapy. In order to be closer to his patients, Quevedo moved to a
villa in the grounds of the monastery.
Lemercier became a champion of psychoanalysis in and out of Mexico,
promoting it as an ideal tool for helping novices and monks decide for them-
selves whether their vocation was genuine or not. Many young men, he wrote,
enter a monastery to flee personal and family conflicts. Analysis can give them a
better grasp of reality, and thus allow them to face their problems. “Psychoanal-
ysis,” Lemercier wrote, “is a method of self-knowledge that allows monks and
future monks to challenge and strengthen their faith.”2 After undergoing anal-
ysis, only those monks who are emotionally mature and serious about religious
life will remain—and monasteries will become much healthier communities.
When the Second Vatican Council convened in 1962, Lemercier trav-
eled to Rome as Bishop Méndez Arceo’s special counselor. At a session devoted
to the ecclesiastical response to the doctrines of Marx and Darwin, he distrib-
uted a pamphlet titled “The Church and Psychoanalysis,” which recommended

120
f i g u r e 4.3
Gustavo Quevedo, the monastery’s resident analyst. Robert Serrou, “Mexique: Le monastère
en psychanalyse,” Paris Match 888 (April 16, 1965): 70–71.
f i g u r e 4.4
Psychoanalyst Frida Zmud leading a session of group analysis at the monastery of Santa
María de la Resurección, 1965. Robert Serrou, “Mexique: Le monastère en psychanalyse,”
Paris Match 888 (April 16, 1965): 68–69.

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 121
Freudian therapy for those living in religious communities. The essay warned
that “the teaching Church’s rejection or suspicion of psychoanalysis can con-
tribute to alienating a growing number of influential persons from Christian-
ity,” and concluded that it was “necessary for priests and religious [men and
women] to submit to psychoanalytic treatment, not [only] for personal prob-
lems, but even those who are stable and without neurosis.”3

the monastery in the news

Lemercier’s monastery gained fame around the world as a successful experi-

ment in modernizing Catholicism, and putting religious communities in touch
with the realities and concerns of the twentieth century. Even before the adop-
tion of psychoanalysis, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and social activist,
praised Lemercier’s community in his book The Silent Life (1957):

The first appearance of “Primitive Benedictism” on this continent was in Mex-

ico when Dom Gregorio Lemercier founded his Monastery of the Resurrection
at Cuernavaca, Morelos. This small community made up entirely of Mexican
Indians (except for the Superior) is one of the most remarkable and coura-
geous experiments in modern monastic history. Struggling against desperate
odds, living under very primitive conditions in true poverty and simplicity, de-
pending on the labor of their hands and the Providence of God, the monks of
Cuernavaca are perhaps closer to St. Benedict than anyone else on this side
of the Atlantic.4

But it was the experiment with psychoanalysis that made the monastery a cause
célèbre. In 1965 Henri Fesquet, a French author who would later write a chron-
icle of the Second Vatican Council, published an article in Le Monde on “A
Methodical Use of Psychoanalysis in a Benedictine Monastery in Mexico,” ap-
plauding its results. “Psychoanalysis,” he wrote, “has awakened in many monks
unsuspected talents for literature, music, and art.”5 Later that year René Lauren-
tin, a French priest, wrote a more nuanced article for Le Figaro. “Does psycho-
analysis empty out monasteries?” he asked, noting that forty out of sixty monks
had left after the introduction of group therapy, but ultimately concluded that

122
it was not analysis that made the monks flee: many of them, he observed, were
novices who simply realized they were not cut out for religious life.6
In 1966 Paris Match ran a feature article on “The Monastery in Psy-
choanalysis” that included an interview with Lemercier, color photos of the
grounds, and profiles of the monks-turned-analysands. The journalist intro-
duced Frida Zmud as “the first woman in the world to know all the monks’
secrets,” and described the residents as “the world’s most modern monks,” com-
bining traditional Catholic rituals with ultramodern ideas. “What strikes one
the most,” the journalist enthused, “is the monks’ joie de vivre.”7
In March of the same year the Argentinian journal Panorama ran an-
other upbeat article on Lemercier’s experiment: the text was by Vicente Leñero,
a young Mexican writer who, some years earlier, had spent a week at the monas-
tery to complete a novel (Los albañiles, published in 1963, was awarded the Bi-
blioteca Breve Prize, the most prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world, thus
proving that Santa María was fertile ground not only for psychoanalysis but
also for literary creation).8

m o n k s i n p s y c h o a n a l ys i s

While intellectuals from Paris to Buenos Aires debated the merits and short-
comings of the “monastery in psychoanalysis,” Lemercier published his own
version of the story in the book Dialogues with Christ: Monks in Psychoanaly-
sis (1966), which includes a short autobiography, a defense of the monastery,
a selection of his homilies, and a celebration of the many virtues of psycho-
therapy. “The long askesis of psychoanalysis,” he wrote, “led me to a spiritual
life I had not been able to attain in thirty years of monastic life.”9 He went on
to enumerate the many benefits his monks had derived from psychotherapy: a
more mature “sense of responsibility,” “physical health,” “spiritual blossoming,”
“purification of faith,” “perseverance,” and, most surprisingly, the flourishing of
artistic capabilities:

As far as artistic sensibility is concerned, therapy humanized the works of

Brother Gabriel, known internationally for his architectural projects (the res-
toration of Cuernavaca’s cathedral and other churches, the construction of the

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 123
monastery’s chapel, religious crafts, etc.); it transformed Brother Baz, an ex-
cellent portraitist who, before joining the monastery, led a parasitical life, and
now works relentlessly; it has brought fulfillment to Brother López, who makes
excellent ceramics; it has awakened the artistic aptitudes of Brother Mendiola,
a young mechanic, who has discovered an unsuspected talent as a sculptor; it
has begun to unleash the musical abilities of Brother Bernaro, who spent a very
long time enclosed within himself and is now the key member of the commis-
sion for sacred music in the parish of Cuernavaca.10

In addition to turning monks into artists, Lemercier credits psychoanalysis

with “rekindling hope in so many of my brothers who, fleeing the blows of life,
sought refuge in the monastery.” Therapy helped monks achieve emotional ma-
turity, taught them how to love, and turned them into better members of the
community.11

acting out

But not everyone considered the monastery as a psycho-religious utopia. Some

articles in the popular press told a very different story: they claimed analysis
had worked so well that the monks had rid themselves of all repressions, un-
leashed their libido, and turned the monastery into a perpetual orgy.
Meanwhile, the Church became alarmed at the growing popularity of
Lemercier’s psychoanalytic experiment. In 1961 the Pope issued a Monitum—
an official warning—prohibiting monks and priests from seeking psychoana-
lytic treatment except in case of emergency and after having consulted with
their superior.12 In 1963 the Vatican opened an official investigation of Santa
María de la Resurrección, and in 1965 Lemercier was tried by the Holy Office
and sentenced to leave Mexico and return to his native Belgium. The monk
fought back, and asked Bishop Méndez Arceo to intervene with the Pope, who
agreed to appoint a commission of cardinals to review the case. In 1967 the tri-
bunal handed down its final verdict: Lemercier was censored, ordered to stop
analytic treatment in the monastery, and forbidden from ever discussing psy-
choanalysis in public or in private.13
Thus ultimatum forced Lemercier to choose between psychoanalysis
and the Church and, perhaps not surprisingly, he chose the former. On June

124
12, 1967, he published an open letter in Excélsior announcing his break with
the Church and his plans to transform the monastery into an “Emaús Psy-
choanalytic Center,” a lay organization designed to bring therapy to schools,
factories, and any other group settings where neuroses were common. Most
monks followed suit and renounced their vows so they could continue analytic
treatment.14
Lemercier changed his name to José, got married in 1968, and led a
quiet life as a layman until his death in 1987. Emaús closed its doors in 1980, but
even today many writers, artists, and intellectuals from Mexico City remem-
ber “the monastery in psychoanalysis,” and speak fondly of Lemercier as a
heroic figure in the 1960s cultural scene.

artists, writers, and the psychoanalytic

monastery

Lemercier’s experiment captured the imagination of writers and artists, and

inspired a surprising number of novels, plays, and other artistic elaborations.
The first was Pueblo rechazado (rejected people—one of the translations of the
Hebrew term Emmaus), a play written in 1968—a few months after Lemercier
left the Church—by Vicente Leñero, who, as we saw earlier, had already writ-
ten a journalistic piece about the monastery. The piece presents the prior as a
spiritual hero: a man of principles whose progressive and ambitious ideas un-
leashed the ire of the most conservative and obscurantist sectors of Mexican
society. As in Greek tragedy, a chorus comments on each scene of the drama,
but Leñero’s piece features a polyphony of choruses: a chorus of Catholics de-
nounces analysis as a heresy; a chorus of monks, caught between their prior and
his opponents, voices doubts about the analytic adventure; a chorus of journal-
ists launches scandalous accusations; and finally—perhaps the most eccentric
dramatic element—a chorus of psychoanalysts chastises the monastery’s thera-
pist for meddling with religion: “The point of departure is, in itself, reprehen-
sible,” they lash out. “In the beginning is the error: analyzing a community of
monks!”15
Leñero paints the prior as a daring visionary who falls victim to mali-
cious gossip. One of the scenes has the chorus of journalists igniting a scandal
in an effort to sell papers:

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 125
¡Noticia, noticia! ¡El psicoanálisis ha entrado en el monasterio! ¡Insólito! ¡In-
creíble! ¡Extraordinario! ¡Noticia, noticia! ¡Ahora un psiquiatra confiesa a los
monjes! ¡Indaga su vocación! ¡Explora sus sentimientos! ¡Noticia! ¡Noticia!

[Extra, extra! Psychoanalysis has entered the monastery! Unheard of ! Unbe-

lievable! Extra, extra! Now a psychiatrist hears confession! He questions their
vocation! And explores their feelings! Extra! Extra!]16

The play concludes with a dramatic scene in which all characters turn against
the prior: the choruses of journalists and Catholics close ranks, lamenting the
nefarious consequences psychoanalysis has brought to the monastery: the
Catholics, who at one point had supported Lemercier, now repeat the libelous
charges fabricated by the reporters and call for the prior’s excommunication:

Coro de periodistas: El monasterio es un centro de depravación. Una

cueva de enfermos sexuales.
Coro de católicos: Enfermos, herejes, traidores.
CP: El prior iniciaba a sus monjes en prácticas aberrantes y expulsaba a los
indóciles.
CC: Blasfemos, invertidos, apóstatas.
CP: Los obliga a lecturas pornográficas. Los embriaga, los droga, los estafa.
CC: Renegados, drogadictos, miserables.
CP: Todo está corrompido en la colina. No merecen sus lágrimas ni sus
rezos. La iglesia no ha perdido a un apóstol, católicos; la Iglesia se ha librado
de un loco.
CC: Excomunión. Excomunión. Excomunión. Excomunión.

[Chorus of journalists: The monastery is a den of iniquity; a ref-

uge for sexual deviants.
Chorus of Catholics: Perverts, heretics, traitors.
CJ: The prior initiated his monks to aberrant practices and expelled those
who refused to obey.
CC: Blasphemers, inverts, apostates.
CJ: He forces them to read pornography, gives them alcohol and drugs,
swindles them.
CC: Renegades, addicts, wretches.

126
CJ: All is corruption on the hill. They don’t deserve your tears or your
prayers. Catholics, the Church has not lost an apostle; the Church has rid it-
self of a madman.
CC: Excommunicate him. Excommunicate him. Excommunicate him. Ex-
communicate him.]17

Unflappable, the prior stands by his belief in analysis. His last words in the play
are “I have courage and faith. I don’t need anything else for the journey.”18
Despite its use of choruses and other dramatic conceits, Pueblo re-
chazado presents an accurate synthesis of the local debates provoked by Le-
mercier’s psychoanalytic experiment at Santa María. The prior’s monologues
are taken verbatim from Lemercier’s Dialogues with Christ; the speeches pro-
nounced by the Catholics are transcribed from Church documents, including
the famous Monitum against psychoanalysis; and even the journalist’s hysteri-
cal accusations are culled from articles published in the popular press. The play
is an eloquent testimony to the intense debate provoked by Lemercier: to some,
he was a heretic and a pervert; to others, including Leñero, he was a daring re-
former who chose Freudian doctrines to modernize the Church.
Leñero was the ideal author for a work about Lemercier. He considers
himself a Catholic writer and belongs to an informal group of Catholic intel-
lectuals in Mexico City. Politically, he is progressive and his alignments have
usually been with the left: one of his plays was an adaptation for the stage of
The Children of Sanchez, Oscar Lewis’s brutal and controversial exposé of the
culture of poverty in Mexico. And, perhaps most importantly, he had experi-
enced life in the monastery firsthand. Leñero is also married to a psychoanalyst,
and thus had a certain familiarity with therapeutic practice.
The history behind the play is as fascinating as its subject matter: Le-
ñero wrote Pueblo rechazado for a cultural festival that was to take place during
the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico. It premiered on October 15, 1968, two
weeks after the massacre of Tlatelolco, when the army fired on a peaceful rally
and killed hundreds of students—the bloodiest event the country had seen
since the Revolution ended in 1920. When the play opened, the city was still
in shock, and Leñero’s tale of an authoritarian Church and a complicit popula-
tion acquired more sinister overtones, reminding the audience of the powerful
ruling party, its reactionary supporters, and the recent wave of military brutal-
ity. Lemercier, like the students, attempted to reform a powerful institution
only to be crushed by it.

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 127
 Two years after the premiere of Leñero’s play, Luis Suárez, a journalist
who was a regular contributor to the journal Siempre, devoted a chapter to the
monastery in his book Cuernavaca ante el Vaticano (Cuernavaca before the Vat-
ican), an analysis of the three figures in this Mexican City—Lemercier, Méndez
Arceo, and Illich—whose attempts to reform the Church had alarmed the Vati-
can, and prompted investigations by the Holy Office. The chapter, “Lemercier’s
Innovation,” is a transcription of a series of interviews, conducted between
1966 and 1968, chronicling Lemercier’s conflict with the Vatican, the founda-
tion of the Emaús Psychoanalytic Center, his break with the Church, and his
life as a layman. Suárez paints Lemercier as an indefatigable reformer whose in-
ventive ideas threatened the most conservative sectors of the Catholic Church.
Suárez notes that Lemercier’s “unshakeable devotion to applying psy-
choanalysis to religious life has made him famous—and sometimes infamous—
around the world,” and devotes much of his text to the monk’s new life as a
layman and director of the Emaús Psychoanalytic Center. He is especially in-
terested in Lemercier’s revised views on the relation between psychoanalysis
and religion:

—¿Cuál es su opinión sobre el analista?

—Personalmente creo que el psicoanalista es llamado a ser como el sacerdote
de los tiempos futuros.
—¿Va a sustituir al sacerdote?
—En parte sí.

[What is your view of the analyst?

—Personally I believe the analyst is called to be the priest of the future.
—Will he replace the priest?
—In part, yes.]19

When asked if the outcome of events should be considered a victory or a defeat

of analysis, Lemercier responds: “this is a complete victory for both psycho-
analysis and the Emaús community.”20
Suárez talks with Lemercier about many other subjects: the trial by
the Holy Office, his feelings after leaving the Church, his recent marriage to a
young woman. He even asks him about his impressions of Leñero’s play about
the monastery, to which he responds with mixed feelings:

128
. . . creo que Vicente Leñero, quien terminó aquí su novela premiada Los al-
bañiles, supo presentar bien el tema de la libertad de búsqueda, que es el ob-
jetivo central de su obra, según me lo declaró. No considero que el tema del
psicoanálisis haya sido tratado a fondo en Pueblo rechazado. La presentación de
la figura del analista no corresponde a la realidad de la figura del Doctor Que-
vedo. Reconociendo el valor documental de la obra me abstengo de hablar de
sus aspectos dramáticos porque no me siento competente.21

[I believe Vicente Leñero, who finished his prize-winning novel Los albañiles
in the monastery, achieved a good representation of the theme of the freedom
to explore, which, as he told me, is the central theme of his play. I don’t believe
Pueblo rechazado portrays the subject of psychoanalysis in all its complexity.
The character of the analyst does not correspond to the real-life Doctor Que-
vedo. I consider the play as a valuable documentary, but I don’t feel competent
to speak about its dramatic features.]

Suárez portrays Lemercier as an extremely charismatic leader whose efforts

to revitalize monastic life through the use of psychoanalysis were crushed by
a reactionary Church. His book stresses the common destinies of Lemercier,
Méndez Arceo, and Illich: three heroic Davids who stood up against an eccle-
siastical Goliath but could not achieve victory over such a formidable enemy.
All three were investigated by the Holy Office: Illich and Lemercier eventually
left the Church; only Méndez Arceo remained a Catholic and continued his
attempts to reform the institution from within.
A year after the publication of Cuernavaca ante el Vaticano, Mauricio
González de la Garza released Padre prior (1971), a 650-page novel about Le-
mercier’s monastery. Like Leñero, González de la Garza had firsthand experi-
ence of Santa María de la Resurrección: even though he considered himself an
atheist, he spent several years living with the monks, though he devoted his
time to reading and writing instead of praying, like so many of the intellectuals
who used Santa María as an informal writers’ colony. González de la Garza took
credit for introducing Lemercier to psychoanalysis, and claimed to have spent
many hours teaching the prior about Freudian theories.
González de la Garza was an avid reader of Freud, and was well ac-
quainted with the general principles of psychoanalytic theory. He impressed
Lemercier with his insights into the monks’ emotional life and, despite the fact
that he had no formal training, became the monastery’s first informal—and

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 129
“wild”—analyst: meeting with the monks, listening to their problems, asking
leading questions, and offering constructions and interpretations. But his ten-
ure as resident analyst ended after a few months, when Lemercier recruited
two professional analysts—Quevedo and Zmud—to take charge of the ther-
apy. González de la Garza felt betrayed, left the monastery, became one of the
prior’s most vocal critics, and went on to write one of the most scathing books
about Santa María de la Resurrección.22
Padre prior, published in 1971, is a roman à clef about the rise and
fall of the monastery. The main actors are barely disguised behind fictional
names: González de la Garza turned himself into a protagonist named Alex
Cáliz; Lemercier appears as Rodrigo Lesorcier; Méndez Arceo becomes
Bishop Filemón Leal; Doctor Gustavo Quevedo surfaces as Doctor Gumer-
sindo Cabada; and Ignacio Romerovargas Yturbe, the aristocratic Mexican
monk who brought Lemercier to Mexico, is transformed into a character with
an equally polysyllabic name, Javier García González Pérez Rincón Gallardo.
The novel depicts the monastery as a dysfunctional institution inhab-
ited by a group of depressed, alcoholic, and neurotic monks. Alex, a philosophy
student from Mexico City, arrives in search of a quiet place to work, and soon
strikes up a friendship with the prior. He introduces him to the work of Freud,
and the two spend hours discussing the relation between psychoanalysis and
religion. At various points of the novel, they launch into detailed exegeses of
The Future of an Illusion and Moses and Monotheism. Impressed with the young
man’s psychological insights, Lesorcier takes him as a confidant and discloses
the monks’ deep and complex psychological problems. “Perhaps you can tell
me,” the prior asks in one scene,

what I can do with a monk who bathes himself in excrement. I think he also
eats it. But you would never guess from looking at him. . . . This young man has
reasons to be ill. Let me tell you he was born in jail, and it is only natural that
with such a background he would do strange things. On the one hand he rubs
himself in excrement; on the other he has a morbid obsession with spying on
Brother Calixto, the muscular young man you’ve met before.23

After hearing about this curious obsession, Alex simply responds: “Father, the
unconscious is the devil.”24
The novel includes a passage describing the young man’s initiation as
the monastery’s informal therapist. The prior asks Alex to meet with a monk

130
who has been having problems. Alex agrees, but with a caveat: “I’ll see him, but
only as a friend. I want you to know that I’m not trying to engage in psycho-
therapeutic experiments or wild psychoanalysis. . . . All I’m going to do is listen
carefully to the monks and use my common sense.”25 He meets the monk, the
discussion goes well, and soon he finds his services sought by many other resi-
dents of the monastery.
Lesorcier becomes enthralled by psychoanalytic theory, decides to un-
dergo an analysis, and even considers traveling to London to consult Anna
Freud. In the end he settles for a Mexican therapist, Doctor Gumersindo
Cabada. After experiencing the benefits of the cure firsthand, he orders com-
pulsory group therapy for everyone in the monastery. His interest in psycho-
analysis acquires the proportions of an obsession: “One day this will be known
as the Monastery of Psychoanalysis,” he tells Alex, who responds, dryly: “Father,
you’re on a psychoanalytic honeymoon.”26
Toward the end of the novel, Doctor Cabada replaces Alex as the resi-
dent psychoanalyst and substitutes individual meetings for group therapy ses-
sions. The results are disastrous: the monks, who had made some progress
under Alex’s supervision, fall back into their neurotic patterns. One of the
brothers, Fray Tomás, lashes out against group therapy:

Group analysis is nothing but a pretext for engaging in perversions. I’m a priest,
and I’m ashamed to be living in a place where depravity has become the only
norm. How is it possible, Father, that we’ve come to this? Even upright young
men have been corrupted. Your so-called psychoanalysis brings nothing but
corruption and degeneracy. Monks are now sleeping in twosomes and three-
somes. I feel humiliated. What have you done with God?27

Lesorcier responds to this diatribe by offering a psychoanalytic diagnosis:

Fray Tomás, Fray Tomás. As usual you can’t understand things. Why do you at-
tach such importance to sex? Let them be. They’re “acting out,” experiencing a
period of liberation; stability will come later.28

As the novel draws to a close, more monks rise in protest against Lesorcier.
“That’s not psychoanalysis,” thunders one Fray Camilo, “it is a mere pretext
for finding out who likes whom . . . plus you know they’re selling beer in the

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 131
monastery and your hippies brought in LSD.”29 The narrator adds his voice to
the chorus of complaints: “What would happen,” he asks, rhetorically, “if the
world discovered that what the monastery called group psychoanalysis was a
mere pretext for all kinds of sexual acrobatics?”30
Padre prior is a strange novel. The first half offers a vivid account of ev-
eryday life in the monastery, painting detailed descriptions of the grounds, the
architecture, the monks, their routine and their conflicts. In the best passages,
the reader feels as if he were living in Santa María and conversing with Lesorcier.
But toward the end of the book the narrative devolves into a diatribe against
the prior: he appears as corrupt, emotionally unstable, and prone to fits of rage,
while Alex emerges as an intelligent, stoic and unflappable hero—a black-and-
white dichotomy that acquires cartoonlike dimensions in the final pages of the
narrative.
While it is impossible to read Padre prior as an objective description of
Lemercier’s experiment with psychoanalysis, the novel does offer some inter-
esting insights: it presents a firsthand account of life inside the monastery; it
expresses the objection voiced by monks who resisted therapy; and it collects
some of the most lurid accusations leveled against the monastery in the popu-
lar press.
Lemercier’s psychoanalytic experiment inspired not only novels and
plays but also a film. Two years after the publication of Padre prior, Francisco
del Villar, a director and producer, released El monasterio de los buitres (Vul-
tures in the monastery, 1973), a steamy melodrama based on the Lemercier
episode that brought together an all-star cast: Enrique Lizalde, a young actor
who had played Lemercier in Pueblo rechazado; Irma Serrano, a bombshell also
known as “the tigress,” who played a voluptuous seductress intent on corrupt-
ing the monks; Enrique Álvarez Felix, the son of diva María Felix; and Héc-
tor Bonilla, a popular movie star. The director of photography was Gabriel
Figueroa, who had worked on the best films produced during the golden age
of Mexican cinema, and the script was a collaboration between Leñero and del
Villar. The film exploited the most dramatic aspects of Lemercier’s experiment:
the publicity poster (figure 4.5), for instance, shows a group of hooded monks
worshipping a wooden cross while, under them, a naked couple carouses in the
garden, like tropical avatars of Adam and Eve. The film was billed as the story
of Emilio, a young man who entered the monastery in search of God only to
discover a place filled with “lechery, homosexuality, alcoholism, and avarice.”31
The publications of works inspired by Lemercier’s adventure contin-
ued into the 1980s: in 1985 Manuel Capetillo, who had also been a monk at the

132
f i g u r e 4.5
Publicity poster for the film El monasterio de los buitres (Mexico City: Producciones del
Villar, 1973).

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 133
monastery (he arrived in 1956, when he was eighteen years old) and later left the
Church to become a writer, published Monólogo de Santa María (Monologue
of Santa María), another novel about the experiment with group analysis.32 Ca-
petillo had a modernist sensibility and his narrative, full of lyrical passages, ba-
roque elaborations, interior monologues, and literary references, is technically
more ambitious than Padre prior, but less rich in details about everyday life in
the monastery. Like Padre prior, Monólogo de Santa María is a roman à clef:
Cuernavaca becomes Cuernabala; Gregorio Lemercier, Gregorio Mercader;
Santiago Ramírez, Santiago Mímez; Santa María de la Resurrección, Santa
María de las Muertes (Santa María of Deaths).
Capetillo depicts the prior as a savvy businessman and an indefatigable
promoter of his monastery. “The monk Mercader,” he writes, “drew people’s at-
tention because of his many innovations: liturgical, handcrafted, psycho-anal,
mercantile, and, speaking of the global context, financial.”33 The narrator goes
on to describe the prior as a monastic multitasker: “with one hand he preached
charity and love to his monks; with the other he controlled the distillery that
was to produce the holy liquor of cloistered life; with one foot he stomped on
the floor, asserting his power and urging the monks to learn skills that were
both beautiful and useful, like silverwork, that fount of artistic creations and
stylized images—Saint Francis, the Last Supper, the Holy Virgin—all de-
signed by a young architect monk.”34 The last phrase refers to the monastery’s
celebrated religious crafts that were one of Lemercier’s innovations, and were
prized by Mexican and foreign collectors.
Capetillo embellished his novel with various modernist literary devices.
In a metanovelistic gesture, he even turns Mauricio González de la Garza—fel-
low writer and former resident of Santa María—into a character in his book.
He appears as “the philosopher Mauricio, devoted to the Occult Science of
Thinking and Practical Life . . . [who] descended from the Royal Mount”—
an oblique reference to his hometown, the northern city of Monterrey—and
spends “long hours in the cell of the prior, devoted to occult practices.”35 In a
strategy reminiscent of the nouveau roman, the characters change names ev-
ery time they are mentioned: Mauricio appears as Mario, Mauro, and Le Gar-
çon, as we can see in the following passage summarizing his involvement in the
monastery:

If you were to ask me about Mario, I would tell you he arrived in the monastery
as a guest. It was 1960 and he planned to stay for a month—he liked the calm

134
setting—to complete his philosophy thesis. . . . He had taken courses at the
School of Analytic Psychology and has just finished his own analysis with Dr.
Genovés Remito, so Mauro accepted the prior’s request to help the monks who
needed psychotherapeutic treatment.

Le Garçon told Brother N. and me—we were the first to become interested
in therapy—that despite his effeminate body movements, he was no longer a
homosexual. The monastery thus began to offer individual therapy sessions to
the monks. Le Garçon traveled to Mexico on Wednesdays, consulted the ana-
lyst Dr. Sumer, and returned to Cuernabala to nurse his patients’ souls. Back
then he considered himself an atheist and often praised Soviet socialism: “if
this monastery were in the USSR, you would be better protected than in any
capitalist country, as long as you did not interfere with social development.”36

Overall, the novel presents a more balanced view of Lemercier’s innovations

than Padre prior. The narrator looks upon Mercader’s passion for analysis with
mild amusement, and pokes fun at the analysts’ New Age aesthetics:

There was a little house next to the monastery . . . in it lived Mario Le Garçon,
who met with each one of the monks individually. There, in a cozy setting, we
received mental cures, surrounded by tapestries, rugs and cushions that made
the place seem like a gypsy camp in which a fortuneteller practices her mysteri-
ous craft.37

Capetillo’s narrator offers some original insights into the personality of the
prior: he mentions, for instance, that Mercader was obsessed with a voodoo-
like ceremony he had witnessed in Africa, and tried to re-create it in the mon-
astery: “The monks launched into the monotone chants the prior had learned
in Africa; teenagers formed a circle and began to move with the same slow pace
and solemnity found in the millenary Egyptian carvings. . . .”38 The scene had
a parallel in real life: Lemercier had traveled to Congo in his youth and intro-
duced elements of African rituals to his Mexican monastery: the beating of
bongo drums, for instance, which Paris Match took for a “grand tambour mexi-
cain [a large Mexican drum].”39
In addition to novels, essays, films, and plays, the story of Lemer-
cier’s psychoanalytic monastery also inspired some highly original modernist

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 135
architecture. Fray Gabriel Chávez de la Mora, one of the first novices to arrive
at Santa María de la Resurrección, was a recent graduate from the University of
Guadalajara Architecture School. He had studied with Mathias Goeritz, devel-
oped a passion for the clean lines and simple forms of modernism, and designed
the buildings for the monastery, including a circular chapel, with walls of vol-
canic stone, a ceiling supported by iron beams radiating from the center of the
room, and a clerestory that filled the space with natural light. Fray Gabriel also
built the resident analyst’s villa described in Capetillo’s novel, as well as a tower
and other structures. He was one of two monks who chose to remain in the
Church after Lemercier’s departure, and went on to become Mexico’s foremost
architect of religious buildings. Among the many churches and cathedrals he
built, the most famous is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico
City, designed in collaboration with Pedro Ramírez Vázquez.40 Fray Gabriel
remained close to Lemercier: he officiated at the former prior’s marriage in
1968—in the chapel he had designed for the monastery—and then again at his
funeral in 1987.41 As of this writing, he is still alive, teaching modern architec-
ture at various universities and running a Catholic school in Mexico City. Fray
Gabriel often credited the psychoanalytic therapy he received at Santa María
for unleashing his creative talent. When a journalist asked if Lemercier’s psy-
choanalytic experiment had been useful, he responded, assertively: “Of course
it was useful: look at me now!”42
Lemercier’s experiment became an important catalyst for eccentric lit-
erary and artistic experiments: it inspired a modernist complex by an architect
monk, a play by a Catholic writer, a novel by a former wild analyst, an essay
by a scholar of Church doctrine, a film by a commercial director, and an ex-
perimental narrative by a defrocked monk. Curiously, none of these works in-
cludes explicit depictions of analytic sessions—the closest we get is Capetillo’s
description of the folksy room in which the sessions took place, but even then
there is no discussion of how the analysis actually unfolded. The psychic pro-
cesses that play out in an analytic session, it seems, are extremely difficult to
represent in text or images.

t h e a n a l ys t s p e a k s

Not all commentary on Lemercier’s experiment came from writers and art-
ists. In 1971 the psychoanalyst Frida Zmud published a case study presenting

136
f i g u r e 4.6
Fray Gabriel Chávez de la Mora in the chapel he designed for the monastery. Courtesy Fray
Gabriel Chávez de la Mora.

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 137
f i g u r e s 4.7–4.8
The chapel at Lemercier’s Monasterio de la Resurrección, designed by Fray Gabriel Chávez
de la Mora. Courtesy Fray Gabriel Chávez de la Mora.

138
some of the material she had uncovered during her treatment of the monks.
She waited three years to release her observations, she explained, because “the
sensationalism caused by this process several years ago, has forced me until now
to keep absolutely silent and to abstain, in spite of frequent results, from using
the material which I obtained over a period of several years.”43
She painted the monastery as an idyllic retreat, surrounded by bougain-
villeas and other tropical flowers, and inhabited by monks “with clean-shaven
heads, covered completely with hoods, and swaddled in robes reminiscent of
foetal membranes.” Every day the monks performed the same chores, over and
over again, “enveloped in a warm breeze, precisely as a foetus is protected and
gratified by the pleasant climate of the womb.”44
Zmud wanted to know what fantasies and desired had led the monks to
enter the monastery, and this fundamental question became the driving force
behind the group sessions. She discovered that most of them came from bro-
ken families, and that they had chosen religious life as a way to escape a world
that had been the source of much pain. “Past experiences,” she concluded, “had
made them see the outer world as a threat and as a persecution.”45
As the analysis unfolded, an unusual Oedipal scenario appeared: the
monks saw Lemercier as their spiritual father and Zmud as an analytic mother.
Torn between these two figures, they directed inordinate amounts of aggres-
sion toward her: “The attacks were violent, full of contempt, and were aimed
at manically abusing and vilifying the therapist.” After a few years most of the
monks—except one, who left the group—were able to overcome these aggres-
sive feelings, and replace them with a positive transference that also led them
to a better relationship with the outside: “The relations with the outer world
have improved considerably. . . . The loyalty conflicts, present at the beginning
of the treatment, became of secondary importance. The group unites around
its analyst leader.”46
Like Lemercier, Zmud emphasizes that analysis awakened an unsus-
pected capacity for sublimation in the monks, and that their neuroses gave way
to creative achievements. In one example, “one of the patients, the most help-
less and schizoid of all, the humble sweeper of the convent, had dreamed of
some day becoming an artist and painter. Until then his inhibitions had pre-
vented him from putting his aptitude to the test. Finally he made up his mind,
and he now lives on the income of his artistic work and has creative talents.”47
When the monastery was transformed into the Emaús Center, all of the
monks in Zmud’s group left the Church so they could continue their analysis

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 139
with her. Eventually they followed her to Mexico City, where they lived in a
communal house for some time before finding jobs and moving on with life.
Zmud closes the article by relating what happened to these men after they ter-
minated their analysis:

I would like to conclude by relating the fate of the members of the group.
When the monastic community disintegrated, the patient who had abandoned
analysis requested a transfer to another Benedictine convent; a year later he
committed suicide by swallowing a corrosive liquid. I have previously referred
to the one who was at the beginning the most inert and most seriously ill, and
who became an accomplished artist and now supports himself with the income
from his drawings. Two others have become painters, and one works in a craft’s
workshop. Three of the members of the group entered the University and have
continued their studies in Psychology and Economics. The remaining one has
an administrative position in a factory.

At the beginning of this talk I mentioned the physical aspect of the monks. I
referred to their attire and shaven heads. The contrast with their present ap-
pearance is remarkable: dressed as ordinary people, with their hair grown back,
their physical aspect now gives evidence of their internal achievement, having
earned the title of “persons,” or “men.”48

At various points in her paper, Zmud seems to confirm the portrait of

the monastery painted by novelists and playwrights as a den of iniquity: she
discusses the monks’ addictions to alcohol, amphetamines, LSD, and inhal-
ants; stresses the degree to which they suffered from depression and destructive
feelings; and hints at their “perverse acts.” But unlike Lemercier’s critics, who
blamed the psychoanalysis for the monastery’s troubles, Zmud locates the ori-
gin of the problems in the monks’ family life. Her point of view is in complete
agreement with that of Lemercier, who believed that too many young men enter
monasteries as an attempt to flee from their problems, and that analysis can be
a useful tool to help novices realize whether they belong in a monastery or not.
Zmud has great faith in the powers of psychoanalysis, in its ability to
transform dysfunctional patients into autonomous and well-developed in-
dividuals. Unlike most of the literary narratives, which present a tale of de-
generacy, her case study constitutes an optimistic plot of improvement and
self-realization. A successful analysis, as Freud once said, helps one to work

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better and to love better (though Zmud never tells us what happened to the
monks’ love life after they terminated analysis).

t h e s e x ua l l i f e o f m o n k s

The stories told by these varied authors fall into two groups: Leñero, Suárez,
and to some extent Capetillo portray Lemercier as a visionary reformer who
used psychoanalysis to make Santa María de la Resurrección a unique monas-
tery, admired around the world for its efforts to open up Catholicism to the
modern world; another group, including González de la Garza and del Villar,
depict the prior as a nymphomaniac who used analysis as a pretext to lure the
monks into his sexual games. Both versions of the story suggest that Lemer-
cier’s experiment touched on an extremely sensitive subject in 1960s Mexico—
sexuality and its relation to traditional Catholic values—and thus unleashed
intense passions in both supporters and detractors of the monastery.
Lemercier was well aware that the entire edifice of psychoanalysis was
built upon Freud’s theory of sexuality, and understood that therapy would in-
evitably bring the monks’ sexual life into the open. In the article he distributed
to the bishops and cardinals participating in the Second Vatican Council, the
prior explained his rationale for inviting analysts to his monastery:

In light of Freud’s chief contribution, which traces life and love to their sexual
origins—thus rediscovering insights found in biblical texts from Genesis to
The Song of Songs—we could not yield to prudery in sexual matters, especially
when it came to monks whose religious sentiments entailed a rejection of sex
in its biological dimension. These considerations led us to choose a woman
analyst for . . . new members, who were thus asked, from the beginning, to face
their unknown.49

Unlike the analysts criticized by Freud in his article on “Wild Psycho-

analysis,” Lemercier understood that sexuality went beyond genitality and that
monks, even when they managed to live in chastity, continued to have a sexual
life. He also realized that “prudery,” mixed with the prejudices of a traditional
Catholic society, often led monks to live a life of denial, pretending they had
no sexual impulses whatsoever—a disavowal that was often the source of much

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 141
unhappiness and neurotic behavior. Lemercier’s critics accused him of inciting
the monks to have sex; his project, however, was much more complex: he be-
lieved that monks, rather than ignoring their sexual impulses, should discuss
them openly, in the context of psychoanalytic sessions. Dialogues with Christ
insists on the “‘abnormal’ character of religious life: the vow of chastity leads
not only to sexual frustration, but also to the absence of natural affective ties.”50
Freud, in The Future of an Illusion, argued that religious belief could
serve as a protection of sorts against psychoneuroses. “Devout believers,” he
wrote, “are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic
illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of
constructing a personal one.”51 This prescription did not hold at Santa María,
where monks were both believers and neurotics—or, as Freud might have put
it, they suffered from both individual and collective neuroses. It was this state
of affairs that led Lemercier to seek the help of psychotherapists.

eunuchs on the couch

Lemercier realized that many men enter monasteries not because of a true reli-
gious vocation, but out of a desperate attempt to flee personal problems, espe-
cially those of a sexual nature. In one of the most striking passages in his book,
he uses a series of biblical metaphors to describe the sexual identity issues faced
by his monks. The scriptural foundations for monastic life, he writes, can be
found in Matthew’s Gospel, in a passage on eunuchs: “For there are some eu-
nuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some
eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have
made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. He that is able
to receive it, let him receive it” (Matthew 19:12, King James Version). The text,
notes Lemercier, “is followed by the warning ‘he who has ears . . .’ which seems
to limit its audience to a specific group: the monks.”52
Lemercier then offers the following gloss on Matthew’s discussion of
eunuchs:

I believe chastity is the essential element—the only one—of monastic life: the
monk is essentially a eunuch. But if we read the text on eunuchs attentively, we

142
cannot help but observe that Jesus establishes a distinction between eunuchs
of the third kind and those belonging to the first two groups: only those in the
third category are capable of becoming eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven.

An extremely important fact becomes abundantly clear from experience: all

three kinds of eunuchs seek to enter monasteries. This is not surprising, con-
sidering that in our society religious life is the only honorable “career choice” for
eunuchs of the first two kinds. Faced with this problem, psychoanalysis offers
deeper insights than traditional psychology . . . [and] reveals that many broth-
ers who consider themselves eunuchs of the third kind actually belong to one
of the first two categories—a situation that, needless to say, has grave reper-
cussions on the life on individual monks and on the life of the community as
a whole.

The result is an equivocal atmosphere, filled with ambiguities—a fact that

explains, at least partially, why scholars of monastic traditions have seldom
analyzed affective relations between monks. The few texts that have been pub-
lished on this subject adopt a negative viewpoint and are mostly concerned
with preventing sexual acts, which are perceived as threats . . .

Psychotherapy allowed me to face the reality of this problem without attempt-

ing to sidestep it. . . . How could monks who do not love themselves ever un-
derstand, without anxieties, the words of Gospel: “He who does not love his
brother . . .”? It was not a question of rejecting anyone, not even eunuchs of the
first two kinds: thanks to the self-awareness generated by therapy and the ensuing
self-acceptance, they become capable not of becoming eunuchs—they are eu-
nuchs already—but of accepting their condition “for the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Facing up to this problem is a difficult but worthy task: it requires us to ac-

knowledge that all else in monasteries—solitude, silence, work, etc.—must be
studied and understood as a consequence of the founding words of monastic
life: “There are eunuchs . . .”53

This is one of Lemercier’s most revealing texts, and one need not be an expert
exegete to realize the prior is writing about a very worldly issue: homosexual-
ity. Since religious life is one of the only “career choices” available to gay men

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 143
in Catholic countries, monasteries are filled with gay men who don’t always
have a real vocation. Lemercier proposed to use psychoanalysis to ensure that
his monastery would consist exclusively of “eunuchs of the third kind,” monks
who renounce heterosexual sex out of a genuine interest in religious life. In this
ideal world, sexual preference would become irrelevant: all monks, whether gay
or straight, would choose to live an enlightened life as eunuchs, in the company
of other men.
Lemercier’s discussion of eunuchs closely follows Freud’s section on in-
version in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: Freud distinguished be-
tween “absolute” inverts (“their sexual objects are exclusively of their own sex”)
and “contingent” ones, who switch sexual objects “under certain external con-
ditions”54 —two categories that correspond exactly to Lemercier’s eunuchs of
the first and second types.
It was Lemercier’s enthusiasm for analysis as a tool to explore the
monks’ sexual life that led his critics to launch the most fantastic accusations
against him. When he proposed a psychoanalytic study of affective life, he was
accused of embracing heretical doctrines; when he called for an open discus-
sion of sexuality, he was lambasted for giving free rein to sex; and when he
addressed the question of gay monks, he was charged with promoting homo-
sexuality. Lemercier’s move was extremely progressive in a pre-Stonewall world:
not only did he open the monastery’s doors to gay men, but he insisted on the
need to bring same-sex desire out in the open and analyze it. His monks were
eunuchs on the couch.

psychophilia, psychophobia

In México profundo [Deep Mexico], a deeply influential book, Guillermo Bon-

fil Batalla argued that there is not one Mexico but two: in the capital and other
metropolitan areas, one finds a modern country that can sometimes seem as
developed as Europe or the United States; but in remote areas of the coun-
tryside there lingers a very different place, a “deep Mexico” that is profoundly
traditional and lives mired in a preindustrial past. After reading the many dif-
ferent—but equally passionate—reactions to Lemercier’s monastery, one gets
the sense that when it comes to psychoanalysis, there are also two Mexicos, cor-
responding to the division theorized by Bonfil Batalla.

144
 The modern Mexico found in large cities responded enthusiastically to
psychoanalysis: all the artists, writers, and architects who spent time at Santa
María came from metropolitan areas and embraced Lemercier’s experiment.
They were drawn by the prior’s interest in philosophical ideas, his enthusiasm
for modernity, and his progressive politics. Some of these bourgeois bohemians
were readers of Freud; others were progressive Catholics, in search of a way of
reconciling spirituality with the reality of the 1960s.
But there was also a very different Mexico that did not look favorably
upon Lemercier’s innovation: many monks and friends of the monastery came
from dirt-poor regions of the countryside. They had been brought up with
the most traditional form of Catholicism: a rigorous practice based on Latin
prayers and ancient rituals that left no room for scholarly endeavors or intellec-
tual questions. Lemercier had insisted from the very beginning on the need to
open the monastery to the most dispossessed Mexicans; they turned out to be
his most ardent critics.
Consider the case of José García Huerta, a thirty-five-year-old man
from the state of Puebla, who entered Santa María de la Resurrección shortly af-
ter it had become the Emaús Psychoanalytic Center in 1967. A simple man from
the countryside, he sought refuge from personal problems in what he thought
was a traditional monastery. He had never read Freud, and after attending a
group therapy session he fled the monastery in a panic. About a month later he
went to the offices of Sucesos, a Mexico City tabloid that had recently published
a sensationalist article attacking Lemercier’s monastery as a “sexual nuthouse
for perverts.” The editor in chief jumped at the opportunity of publishing an
interview with a former patient, and penned a melodramatic article lambasting
the prior. The following excerpt will give the reader an idea about the tone of
the attacks against Lemercier:

—They destroy us from day one—declared García Huerta, unable to conceal

his anxiety.

And he continued:

—I remember the psychoanalyst J. L. González yelling at us during a collec-

tive therapy session, telling us: “you are all crazy and have to face up to it.” . . .
And then there were the discussions of homosexualism [sic] led by José Macías,

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 145
Jacinto, and Benjamín. . . . We were forced to participate in the bacchanalia.
It was unbelievable: drugs, alcohol, the practice of sodomy. . . .55

The journalist adds: “We can’t ascertain how neurotic José García Huerta
might have been before his stay at the Emaús Psychoanalytic Center; but dur-
ing our conversation with him he displayed a marked emotional imbalance; ev-
erything about him expressed frustration. García Huerta has now returned to
Puebla. His future? What will become of him? Who knows!”56
Ironically, it was uneducated monks and visitors like José García Huerta
who sided with the most reactionary factions of the Church against Lemer-
cier. If Bonfil Batalla theorized the existence of a modern and a “deep” Mexico,
the Lemercier episode revealed another equally polarizing division: a Freudian
Mexico in the cities; a psychophobic Mexico in more traditional quarters.
We might ask if Lemercier’s efforts to bring psychoanalysis into his
monastery were not doomed to failure from the beginning. Aren’t psychoanal-
ysis and religion two irreconcilable systems of thought? Didn’t Freud repeat-
edly dismiss religion as, at best, an illusion, and, at worst, a collective neurosis?
And didn’t he argue that in the end psychoanalysis would dissolve religious
belief ?
Freud presented his most explicit views on religion in The Future of an
Illusion (1927), where he referred to spiritual doctrines as “illusions, fulfillments
of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind,”57 developed as
coping mechanisms to compensate mankind for the sufferings imposed by civ-
ilization, and requiring a suspension of disbelief on the part of the faithful.
“Where questions of religion are concerned,” Freud writes, “people are guilty of
every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.”58
In Freud’s view, religion infantilizes believers: gods were created as fa-
ther substitutes, and thus worshippers are relegated to the position of children.
But “men cannot remain children for ever,” and “they must in the end go out
into the ‘hostile life’”—a step Freud calls “the education to reality.” The essay
closes with a call for an “irreligious education”: raising children without super-
stitions or illusions, and teaching them from an early age to embrace a scientific
worldview that would only leave room for worshipping a single deity: “our god,
logos.”59
Freud anticipated an eventual clash between psychoanalysis and reli-
gion, and wondered what might happen when believers discovered his theories.

146
He suspected that analysis would inevitably dissolve religious beliefs by expos-
ing them as illusions: “If the application of the psychoanalytic method makes
it possible to find a new argument against the truths of religion, tant pis for
religion.” But he did leave the door open for a slightly different scenario: “de-
fenders of religion,” he wrote, could also “make use of psychoanalysis in order
to give full value to the affective significance of religious doctrines”—an accu-
rate description of what Lemercier tried to achieve by bringing psychoanalysis
into the monastery: to explain the psychological factors at work in religious
life.60
Lemercier was aware of Freud’s views on religion, but this did not stop
him from embracing psychoanalysis. He admired the Viennese analyst and
subscribed to the basic tenets of psychoanalytic theory, but disagreed with his
interpretation of religious belief. The problem, he argued, was that early ana-
lysts—Freud included—had not gone deep enough in their investigation of
religion: “they accepted their own unbelief as a dogma, without submitting it
to an analysis as rigorous as the one they applied to religious belief, and without
pausing to reflect on the possible religious significance of their own unbelief.”
As a result, psychoanalysts capable of analyzing religious belief “are still rare,
because most of them have not had a chance to analyze their own religious feel-
ings, whether they are manifested as belief or as unbelief.”61 Lemercier chose
Zmud and Quevedo because, though the two were nonbelievers, they were in-
terested in exploring the psychology of religious sentiment.
In the end, the encounter between psychoanalysis and religion at Santa
María de la Resurrección played out as Freud had anticipated: Lemercier was
drawn to psychoanalysis as a useful tool for studying and understanding reli-
gious sentiments, but the adventure culminated with his rejection of religion—
at least in its institutional form—in favor of a Freudian worldview. There could
be no better metaphor for this shift than the transformation of the monastery
of Santa María de la Resurrección into the Emaús Psychoanalytic Center. Out
with the monks, in with the analysts!

conclusion

Out of all the cultural projects inspired by psychoanalysis in twentieth-century

Mexico, Lemercier’s was the one that attracted the most widespread attention:

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 147
Novo, Adler, Paz, and Kahlo read Freud individually and responded to his the-
ories by writing books that were read by a small community of readers (even the
best-selling Labyrinth of Solitude sold only a few thousand copes in its first edi-
tion); Lemercier’s monastery, in contrast, attracted a diverse crowd of novelists,
playwrights, filmmakers, visual artists, academics, philosophers, architects, and
students who went on to publish books and direct films and plays about Santa
María. It was the one psychoanalytic experiment that touched on issues that
were extremely important in 1960s Mexico: the role of religion in the modern
world and the place of sexuality in a changing society.
Lemercier and his followers launched a utopian project: they hoped to
use analysis to reform the Church by putting monastic life in touch with the
new realities of the twentieth century. The books, films, and paintings inspired
by Santa María offer ample evidence that this unusual experiment with psycho-
analysis was extremely productive of culture, and sparked the imagination of
several generations of artists and writers.
In retrospect, the Lemercier episode seems like a period piece from the
1960s, combining all the movements that would peak at the end of the decade:
liberation theology, the sexual revolution, gay rights, the student movement,
the various efforts to combine Marx and Freud, even the rise of folk art and
New Age spirituality. Each one of these trends found expression at the monas-
tery, and they all contributed to making Santa María de la Resurrección one of
Mexico’s most wildly ambitious—and eccentric—utopian projects.
Lemercier’s experiment also demonstrates the extent to which the gen-
eral attitude toward Freud and psychoanalysis had changed since Novo discov-
ered the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in the early 1920s. In little over
four decades, psychoanalysis evolved from a recondite avant-garde theory to an
extremely popular doctrine capable of attracting the interest of students, social
activists, intellectuals—and even Benedictine monks!
As a reader of Freud, Lemercier was quite different from the figures we
encountered earlier. Like Novo, he was interested in Freud’s theories of sexual
life and saw analysis as a gateway into modernity. But while Novo embraced
a psychoanalytically inflected libertinism, Lemercier used Freud to theorize a
form of sexually enlightened chastity. Like most avant-garde figures, Novo was
a revolutionary: he wanted to demolish tradition and invent a new way of liv-
ing, thinking, and writing. Lemercier, in contrast, was a reformer: his monastic
utopia did not seek a radical break with the past but merely a series of reforms

148
within the framework of one of the most tradition-bound institutions in the
world: the Catholic Church.
Like Ramos, Lemercier developed an interest in poor Mexicans. But
their attitudes toward them could not have been more different: while Ramos
gazed in horror at pelados and decried their pernicious influence on Mexican
culture, Lemercier took the same subaltern group as an ideal and went as far as
to take garbage collectors—or at least their dress—as models for his monks.
Ramos believed that psychoanalysis would dissolve feelings of inferiority and
eventually eliminate pelados as a class. Lemercier, in contrast, made his monas-
tery—and the world—a better place for the urban poor.
Lemercier was a more sophisticated reader of analytic theory than Ra-
mos: whereas Profile of Man and Culture presents a psychological vision of
Mexican society structured by a series of binary oppositions—inferiority ver-
sus superiority; local versus foreign; normal versus pathological—Lemercier
displayed a more complex understanding of the psyche: like Freud, he acknowl-
edged there was no clear boundary between the normal and the pathological,
two bookends in the wide spectrum of psychic life. Lemercier turned to anal-
ysis as a tool to dismantle simplistic oppositions between believers and nonbe-
lievers, rich and poor, cultured and uncultured, and even between partisans and
detractors of Freud. A man of his time, he was an exemplary dialectical thinker.
And if Ramos limited his analysis to Mexican society, at no point did
Lemercier try to present his monastery as a particularly Mexican phenomenon.
His vision was universal, and he believed the experiment of introducing psy-
choanalysis into religious life could be a model for other communities around
the world. Here again he thought like Freud, who believed analysis uncovered
universal structures of the human psyche, irrespective of cultural, national, his-
torical, or linguistic contexts.
At first sight, Paz and Lemercier would appear to be radically different
readers of Freud: Paz was interested in abstract theories of cultural identity;
Lemercier, in contrast, was concerned with finding a pragmatic use for psycho-
analysis. Paz used psychoanalytic concepts to delve into Mexico’s ancient past;
Lemercier focused on the present. Nevertheless, the two discovered Freud in a
foreign land—Paz, a Mexican, read Freud in France; Lemercier, a Belgian, did
so in Mexico—and both shared an interest in solitude: Paz devoted his Laby-
rinth to this experience, while Lemercier urged his monks to live in solitude but
as members of a community. In the end, the two arrived at similar conclusions:

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 149
Paz believed solitude could not be avoided, but the key was to find a balance
between contemplative life and engagement with the contemporary world. Le-
mercier, too, sought to reconcile the solitary life of the monk with the reality of
the modern world. The concluding words of The Labyrinth—“we must learn
to be contemporaries of all men”—could well have been Lemercier’s maxim.
Perhaps the most illuminating comparison is that of Varo and Lemer-
cier. Varo painted Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst in 1960, the same year in
which Lemercier became interested in Freud. But their vision of psychoanaly-
sis could not have been more different. As we saw, Varo’s paintings represent
psychotherapy as a bourgeois indulgence, a sort of plastic surgery for the soul
coveted by women with too much money and time on their hands. Lemercier
was well aware that in some quarters psychoanalysis had become a pastime for
the wealthy, but insisted that one of the ambitions of the Emaús Psychoana-
lytic Center was to “open up psychoanalysis to all social classes, even to those
who are most lacking in resources. . . . In this way, psychoanalysis ceases being
a privilege of the rich.”62
Lemercier considered psychoanalysis a “school of freedom,” “a method
of self-knowledge,” and even “a school of love.”63 He had a utopian view of
psychotherapy as a practice that would not only relieve monks of their neu-
rotic sufferings but also unleash their creative potential and artistic gifts. But he
was also aware that analysis was a subversive procedure that would inevitably
demolish all illusions and challenge religious belief. Delving into the psyche, he
wrote, brings about a “self-knowledge that can sometimes be brutal”—brutal
enough to lead a lifelong believer to abandon the Church.64
Legend has it that Freud, upon docking in New York in 1909, looked
at the American crowds and said: “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the
plague.” Lemercier, too, understood that he was bringing a kind of plague to
the Church: a radical system that puts all beliefs, ideas, and assumptions into
question; a key to the Pandora’s box of the unconscious; a procedure to unleash
what has been repressed by civilization. Vatican officials realized Lemercier was
bringing them the plague—like Marxism, psychoanalysis, with its insistence
on questioning and reasoning, became a dangerous threat that could under-
mine Rome’s grasp on the faithful. If Varo showed that Mexican elites turned
analysis into a luxury treatment, Lemercier’s experiment demonstrated that
psychoanalysis, as Freud had predicted, was ruthless in its demolition of illu-
sions and received ideas. To paraphrase Paz, psychoanalysis became an acid to
dissolve petrified images.

150
 Varo and Lemercier’s projects reflect the two extremes of life in Mexico
during the 1960s: at one end there was the bourgeois world painted by Varo,
inhabited by narcissistic, wealthy individuals living in a bubble detached from
the problems of the real world; at the other end there was the radical world of
student movements, sexual experimentation, Marxist activism, and Freudian
quests for self-knowledge. It was the hope of Lemercier that his model would
prevail.
Almost all the protagonists in the first part of Freud’s Mexico—Novo,
Ramos, Paz, Varo—were alive at the time of Lemercier’s psychoanalytic adven-
ture. Surprisingly, I have found no evidence that any of them ever visited the
monastery or expressed interest in Lemercier’s project. Even though they were
all readers of Freud, by the time Lemercier opened Santa María de la Resurrec-
ción, life had taken them in very different directions.
Novo was approaching sixty, had lost his youthful creativity, and had
adopted reactionary political views. He seldom wrote about Freud and would
have had no use for a psychoanalytic monk in Cuernavaca. Ramos was in the
final year of his life—he died in 1959—had not written about psychoanalysis
for almost two decades, and was comfortably settled as the chair of philosophy
at the University. Paz spent most of the decade of the 1960s as the Mexican
ambassador to India. Did word reach him in New Delhi about the “monastery
in psychoanalysis”? What did he think of this fellow Freudian, who had put
analysis to such an eccentric use? Though Paz might have shared Lemercier’s
psychoanalytic and political views, he would have been highly critical of any
efforts to bring about social reforms from within the Catholic Church. From
an early age he had embraced an enlightened secularism, and he wrote some of
the most eloquent pages against the nefarious effects of ecclesiastical power in
Mexican history, most notably in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe
(Sor Juana: Or the Traps of Faith, 1982).
We can only imagine the conversations Paz and Lemercier could have
had about Freud, Mexico, and the fate of psychoanalysis in the tropics. And
though their paths never crossed, they stand out as the two most original think-
ers in Freud’s Mexico.

Chapter 4 | i l l u s i o n s 151
HOTEL

After the psychoanalytic monastery, Mexico would see a psychoanalytic hotel:

in 1993 an Austrian traveler opened an inn at the beachside resort of Playa del
Carmen: she called it “Posada Freud” (Freud Inn), and later expanded it into
a hotel. The promotional materials explain the unusual name: “Why Hotel
Posada Freud? Because your dreams will come true!”
The Web site features a section on the hotel’s history in which the Aus-
trian owner recounts her arrival in Mexico, her marriage to a local, and her de-
cision to open a guesthouse by the beach. She also reflects on the historical ties
between the two countries: “Austria and Mexico had a longstanding relation-
ship,” she writes before summarizing Maximilian von Hapsburg’s imperial ad-
venture: “He went to Mexico in 1864, [accompanied by] 7,000 other Austrians,
intending to bring peace and stability, which turned out to be a big illusion, and
only ended with his execution in Querétato on June 19, 1867. They say his last
words were ‘Viva México!’”65
“Hotel Maximilian” might have been a more appropriate name for this
establishment, owned by an Austrian who sees her Mexican adventure as a
kinder repetition of the archduke’s imperial project. But why Hotel Freud? Un-
like Maximilian, the analyst never traveled to Mexico, and fin-de-siècle Vienna
could not be more different from a Caribbean beach frequented by backpack-
ers. Perhaps the hotelkeeper had in mind an experiment even more utopian
than Lemercier’s monastery: couches replaced by hammocks and neuroses
soothed by an oceanic feeling—psychoanalysis on the beach!

153
 | Part II |

FREUD’S MEXICO
 | 5 |

FREUD’S
S PA N I S H

After seeing how a diverse group of Mexican readers responded to psychoana-

lytic theories, we will now explore Freud’s ideas about Mexico, a country he
never visited but one which occupied an important place in the Austrian imagi-
nation. But before considering the adult Freud’s vision of this country, we will
discuss his first encounter, as an adolescent, with the Spanish-speaking world.
Few of Freud’s disciples knew that their mentor could speak, read, and
write Spanish. It was a well-kept secret, one that Freud would occasionally di-
vulge, but only under the right circumstances: when his translator sent him the
first Spanish versions of his books; when a young Peruvian forwarded a copy
of the first psychoanalytic book published in Latin America; when a Mexican
judge mailed him an article on psychoanalysis and the law. In all of these cases,
Freud avowed he could read Spanish, usually with a mixture of surprise and joy,
like a little boy revealing his aptitude at an exotic sport: “In my youth,” he wrote
to one of his Latin American disciples in 1934, “I had the pleasure of learning
your beautiful language, and thus I’m in the position to appreciate [your ar-
ticle].”1 On each of these rare occasions, Freud marveled at his own ability to
understand a tongue so far removed from his everyday life and seems to have
experienced a moment of derealization—much like when, in 1904, upon visit-
ing the Acropolis for the first time, he had trouble acknowledging that the mag-
nificent site before his eyes was indeed real.2

157
 But how did Freud learn Spanish? And when did he get to use it? This
was a language that occupied a very special place in Freud’s affective life: unlike
the other languages he knew—German, French, English, and, like most cul-
tured Europeans in his time, Latin and Greek—Spanish was a private language
employed exclusively for the rituals of a playful secret society.
Freud learned Spanish as a teenager, when he was about fifteen years
old. In a letter to Martha Bernays, the girl who would later become his wife, he
tells the story of this curious linguistic enterprise: he studied without a teacher,
along with one of his friends from the Vienna Gymnasium, a Romanian boy his
own age named Eduard Silberstein. The two schoolboys shared a fascination
for Cervantes, a rich imagination, and a gift for languages. With the help of a
language textbook, they taught themselves Spanish.3
From the very beginning, Spanish was a language of fantasy for the two
boys: they formed an “Academia Española,” a secret society devoted to the use
of Castilian. Though the Academia had no members other than the two boys,
it possessed an impressive bureaucratic structure: bylaws, articles, rules, official
documents, and even a wax seal, featuring the initials “AE.”4

f i g u r e 5.1
Wax seal of the Academia Española. © Sigmund Freud Copyrights. Image courtesy Library
of Congress.

158
 Soon after they met, Eduard left Vienna to study in Leipzig, and the
two boys began to exchange letters. Their missives were supposed to be writ-
ten entirely in Spanish, “the official language of the Academia Española,”5 but
they often slipped and wrote in German. Their multilingual correspondence
continued for almost a decade, until the two reached their mid-twenties and
life took them in very different directions. Only Freud’s letters survived, and
in 1989 they were published by Walter Boehlich in an annotated edition. Since
then, the volume has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Spanish,
though the letters themselves have received scant scholarly attention.
The Academia Española was a game, and most of the letters exchanged
between the two boys reveal an extremely imaginative psychic life. They did
not sign the letters as Sigmund and Eduard, but as “Cipión” and “Berganza,”
the names of the canine protagonists in “The Colloquy of the Dogs,” one of
Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels. Freud took the name of Cipión, and began his
missives with the salutation “¡Querido Berganza!” In some letters, his signa-
ture, “Cipión,” was followed by either “p.e.h.d.S.,” shorthand for “perro en el
hospital de Sevilla,” (dog in the hospital of Seville) an allusion to the setting of
Cervantes’s tale, or “m.d.l.A.E.” (“miembro de la Academia Española,” member
of the Spanish Academy).6
The letters are written in an extremely curious style: they employ ar-
chaic terms like “Vuestra Merced,”7 borrowed from Cervantes’s seventeenth-
century texts, that seem almost campy when used by teenage boys in the 1870s;
they feature an unusual form of broken Spanish: grammatically accurate for
the most part, but full of strange unidiomatic expressions that read as literal
translations from the German. In a postcard written on December 12, 1871, for
instance, Freud tells Eduard: “Le ruego a Vm., que viene mañana debajo á la
setima clase, porqué no habrá tiempo de venir á el. / Quedo su atento servidor /
Cipion.”8 The American edition renders this request as “I beg Your Honor to
go down to the seventh class tomorrow, as I shan’t have the time to go to it. / I
remain your devoted servant / Cipion,”9 an English approximation that evokes
the archaic tone of Freud’s language, but sacrifices a number of fascinating fea-
tures of the original Spanish: Freud translated the German verb “herunter-
zukommen” literally as “venir debajo” (to come below), and then transposed
German syntax—including the splitting of separable prefixes—into Spanish.
He wrote without a dictionary, and when he was at a loss for the right term, he
invented curious neologisms by taking German words and giving them Spanish

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 159
 endings. In one letter he writes: “yo no he enviado arco de geigolina, como V.
pedía en su carta [I have not sent a geigolina bow, as you requested].”10 Geigo-
lina is not a Spanish word, but its meaning becomes clear when we think of
“Geige,” the German word for violin.
Playful is certainly the best characterization of the letters. The entire
project of the Academia Española was an elaborate literary game, and Freud
never missed an opportunity to extend the ruse. During a trip to England to
visit relatives, he signed a letter to Eduard as “perro en la isla de Ingl[aterra]
[dog in the Isle of England]”;11 and in another, he proposes making their cor-
respondence even more Spanish by “translating” the names of all Austrian and
German cities into Castilian equivalents: Germany would become “the Seville
hospital,” Berlin would appear as Madrid, and the Romanian port of Brăila
as Cadiz (even before implementing this rule, Freud had routinely referred to
Freiberg as “Montelibre” in his letters).12
At one point the boys began altering generic idiomatic expressions to
make them more Spanish—and more undecipherable. “Members of the Span-
ish Academy,” Freud wrote Eduard in one letter, “must never say that some-
body ‘has died,’ but rather that he has departed from Seville.”13 In the world of
the Academy, even life and death had to be given Spanish inflections. Spanish
words and Castilian place names allowed the two boys to communicate in a
coded language that no one else could understand.
Occasionally, the friends would break the cardinal rule of the Academy
requiring that all correspondence be written in Spanish, and dabble in other
tongues. In an 1871 postcard, Freud uses Latin to complain about a terrible
toothache (“Magnis doloribus me dentes afficiunt atque ne—promissa teneam,
impediunt,” [a great pain in my teeth afflicts me to the point of impeding me
from keeping my promise] he quips),14 and in another letter he gossips about
another boy’s arrogance in both Spanish and Italian, telling Eduard that the
snob “Saludaba de un dedo . . . Salutava d’un ditto.”15 One of the last letters is
written entirely in English: it opens with “My dear Edward,” and closes with
the haughty admonishment that “‘wonderful’ is an exclamation of ignorance
and not the acknowledgement of a miracle.”16 Other letters include Greek
words: a zoological dissection is characterized as a “zooktonos,” or beast-killing
science.17
Freud played not only with a palette of languages, but also with the
form of the letters he sent to Eduard. He often described the Spanish Acad-
emy as a type of edifice, and one of his longer epistles is structured like a house

160
 divided into three textual floors (including a “first floor” assigned to “literary
and friendly correspondence in general and of our own in particular”).18 And
once he composed a short message about school meetings as a papal bull titled
“bulla ‘no podemos’ praesente cadavere.”19 Freud, like a typical adolescent, seems
to be trying out different identities: one day he could be a Spaniard; the next, a
Greek speaker . . . an architect, or even His Holiness the Pope!
A number of letters are written in a mixture of Spanish and German, a
curious Spandeutsch combining the vocabulary and syntax of both languages.
We find a telling example of this curious bilingualism in Freud’s account of his
interest in a girl named Gisela Fluss, a young girl from Freiberg whom Freud
met around 1872:

Ich muß bedauern, meine Kraft verteilt zu haben, und wie das nicht wiederho-
len, was in meinem Tagebuche ohnedies steht. Deshalb will ich nur sagen, que
he tomado inclinacion para la mayor llamada Guisela que partirá mañana y esa
ausencia me devolverá una firmedad de la conducta que hasta aquí no he cono-
cido. . . . Und nun, ich bin des trockenen Tones satt, ist das Leben nicht eines
der sonderbarsten Dinge, die auf der Welt existieren?20

[I regret that I have divided my forces and do not intend to repeat what is, in
any case, recorded in my diary, so let me just say, that I took a fancy to the eldest,
by the name of Gisela, who leaves tomorrow, and that her absence will give me
back a sense of security about my behavior that I have not had up to now. . . . And
now—I have had enough of this dry tone—isn’t life one of the strangest things
in the world?]21

In this letter German and Spanish serve different purposes: German conveys
abstract ideas, rational thoughts, and philosophical questions (“I have divided
my forces”; “isn’t life one of the strangest things in the world?”). Spanish, on
the other hand, expresses affect; it is the language of love and attraction. The
sole mention of Gisela causes Freud to switch from German to Spanish, mid-
sentence. The first clause, “let me just say,” a rhetorical expression that by it-
self lacks affective content, is written in German, while the second, detailing
Freud’s feelings for Gisela, is in Spanish: “Deshalb wir ich nur sagen que he to-
mado inclinacion por la mayor llamada Guisela.” Spanish was the language of
the “inclinacion” that dare not say its German name.

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 161
 These early Freudian texts raise a number of questions that I propose
to tackle in this chapter: why would two German-speaking boys choose Span-
ish as the “official language” for their correspondence? Why did they base their
literary game on “The Colloquy of the Dogs,” one of the most difficult and ar-
cane of Cervantine novellas? And, above all, what did Spanish mean to Freud,
who would grow up to develop a theory in which everything, from dreams to
involuntary tics, is overdetermined with unconscious meanings and affective
content?
The few psychoanalysts who have written about Freud’s correspon-
dence with Eduard Silberstein have focused on a rather obscure detail: a ref-
erence found in several letters to a person the two boys call “Ichtyosaura,” a
prehistoric animal that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “an extinct
marine reptile of the Mesozoic era resembling a dolphin,” and which appears
as the protagonist of “Der Ichtyosaurus,” a comic poem by the nineteenth-
century author Joseph Victor von Scheffel.22 Several critics, starting with Er-
nest Jones and continuing with Kurt Eissler and Walter Boehlich, have argued
that this was a code name for Gisela Fluss. The letters to Eduard, they argue,
document his first adolescent love—or at least his first youthful infatuation.23
Other scholars, including Ángela Ackermann Pilári, the Argentinian critic who
edited the Spanish edition of the Freud‒Silberstein letters, disagree with Jones’s
insistence on reading “Ichtyosaura” as a pet name for Gisela Fluss, and claim
that there is no evidence to support his assertion.24
In any case, scholars have exaggerated the importance of both Gisela
Fluss and Ichtyosaura in the letters. A careful reading of these documents does
not uncover a fascination with Gisela Fluss—or with any other girl, for that
matter. It is true that Freud wrote Eduard he fancied Gisela Fluss—“he tomado
inclinacion para la mayor llamada Guisela”25 —but we should not make too
much of this declaration: Freud himself acknowledged that he had no inten-
tion of ever acting on his “inclination” for Gisela: “Instead of approaching her,”
he wrote Eduard, “I have held back, and nobody, not even she, knows any more
about it.”26 Freud’s fancy for Gisela seems no more real than the papal bulls
or academic bylaws he composed for Eduard: it was merely a rhetorical game,
much like Renaissance sonnets, in which the loved one is merely an excuse to
devise a literary composition.
So much for Gisela. Ichtyosaura, on the other hand, inspired one of
the most elaborate creations of the Academia Española. In 1875 Freud and
Eduard composed a “Hochzeitscarmen,” an epithalamium about the marriage

162
of Ichtyosaura, signed “by a Homerian of the Academia Española.” Boehlich
reads this poem as evidence that Freud was truly in love with the girl concealed
behind the saurian pseudonym, and was heartbroken when she married an-
other man. “All his concealed sorrow,” Boehlich writes, “was nothing compared
with the sorrow of this separation.”27 But we just have to read the poem to real-
ize that, regardless of the true identity of Ichtyosaura, Freud did not write to
express pain or disappointment. The “Hochzeitscarmen” is a mock epic, pre-
senting a parodic portrait of the bride, her groom, and the wedding. It opens
with the following verses:

Sing me, oh Muse, the praises of Ichtyosaura communis,

Once great in the Lias and other Formations,
To the Academía so bright an example,
That for her presence they offered a prize.28

The epic tone suggests the poem will intone a celebration of Ichtyosaura and
an ode to her accomplishments, but after a few grandiloquent verses, the lan-
guage drops to a parodic register, as we can see in the following description of
her body:

Not too large was her stature, unlike the poplar’s,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Spherical she appeared and gloriously rounded,
Rounded her face, wittily sparkling her eyes,
Rounded her girth, and if the poet be free
To probe with a curious eye what is normally hidden from view,
He will find the sphere’s principle pervading the forms.
Blessed night reveals to the fortunate groom.29

The poor Ichtyosaura was not only plump but also cursed with voluminous
buttocks!
The “Hochzeitscarmen” includes other details about Ichtyosaura that
are equally unflattering: she butchers the French language (“Heard her stam-
mer the tongue of the Gauls through proudly full lips”); and her only talents
are mending socks (“To the clicking of needles the stocking soon grows in her

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 163
hands”) and slicing fish (“Nimbly she cuts through the herring and laves it in
water”). The poem concludes with a blessing of sorts—or is it a curse?—on
the newlyweds: “And so may they both live out their allotted span, / Like the
insects and worms that inhabit the earth, / Blesséd with splendid digestion and
lungs, / Never plagued by the spirit, such is the Academía’s wish.”30
Boehlich performs an impressive display of hermeneutic acrobatics to
argue that the “Hochzeitscarmen” betrays Freud’s intense pain and disappoint-
ment at losing Gisela to another man, but most readers will surely find that the
caricature of a plump, sock-mending and kosher-observant saurian beast is a
jovial, playful tale that could not be further away from the narcissistic wounds
evoked by this critic.31
Freud’s choice of a beastly nickname for Ichtyosaura shows that the
young man did not think too highly of the girl who inspired the poem. The
Ichthyosauria, Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English Lan-
guage tells us, were “an order of Mesozoic marine reptiles most abundant in the
Lias, having an ichthyoid body, elongated snout, short neck, dorsal and caudal
fins, limbs modified into paddles by the flattening of the bones, multiplication
of the phalanges and addition from one to four digits, eyes very large and pro-
tected by a ring of bony sclerotic plates, and numerous teeth set in groves and
adapted for catching fish.” This was one ugly beast, and Freud, mischievous
teenager that he was, probably gave this zoological nickname to a girl in his
circle who was not known for her charms or her beauty.
Though Gisela and Ichtyosaura receive only fleeting mentions, Freud’s
letters reveal a sustained fascination with another childhood friend: Eduard Sil-
berstein, his partner in the creation of the Academia Española. In their search
for Freud’s first love, most critics have been sidetracked by the obscure refer-
ences to girls in the correspondence, neglecting the rich and detailed account
of this passionate friendship. In almost every letter, Freud expressed intense
feelings for his friend—including the ups and downs of a typically adolescent
relationship—in the most lyrical and poetic passages. Like Poe’s purloined let-
ter, the object of Freud’s adolescent passion is so conspicuous that it has been
missed by overzealous critics intent on cracking the correspondence’s secret
hermeneutics.
Freud writes to Eduard with an unusual expressiveness, with a pas-
sion so intense that his messages read more like love letters than friendly mis-
sives. His letters “express an adolescent longing to pour out his ambitions and
fears to a single, intimate friend,” as Phyllis Grosskurth has argued.32 And, as

164
 S. B. Vranich observes, “nowhere else in the childhood of Freud do we find such
a strong identification.”33
The relationship was intimate indeed: Freud sent Eduard a photo-
graph of himself (with a poem inscribed on the back),34 and then asked—no
fewer than five times35 —that Eduard reply in kind. Eduard wrote nocturnes to
Freud,36 and at one point the two schemed to room together in Berlin so they
could share “the simplicity and Arcadian poetry of the A.E.” while attending
university, but the plan fell through (had it not, Silberstein would have gone
down in history as Freud’s college roommate). Freud tells his friend that he
longs to be with him and with no one else: “as long as I have time to spend, I
should prefer to spend it with you alone. I suspect we have enough to tell each
other to dispense with a third for an audience.”37 The correspondence is so
full of sweet nothings that at one point Freud noted they had become like hus-
band . . . and husband: “You are my friend of many years,” he wrote in 1873,
“wedded [angetraut] to me by common destiny and the Academia Castellana.”38
Despite its bureaucratic structure, encumbered by obscure ordinances and by-
laws, the Academia was so politically progressive that it foreshadowed the wed-
ding of common destinies that would become known as gay marriage in the
twenty-first century.
Like any lover, Freud tries to keep his correspondence with Eduard se-
cret. He once signed off with the dramatic warning: “No mano otra toque esta
carta [Let no other hand touch this letter].” (figure 5.2)39 And in several letters
he urges his friend to be discreet: “I trust you do not show my letters to anyone,
if they should ask to see them, because I want to be able to write with complete
candor about whatever comes into my head”40 (concerned about leaks, a suspi-
cious Freud asks his friend: “to whom do you show my letters?”).41 Confiden-
tiality is a constant concern in the correspondence: Freud longs to be reunited
with Eduard so the two can resume their “secret studies”42 and “secret walks,” 43
and even refers to “Cipión” and “Berganza” as “our own . . . secret names.”44 For
these two boys Spanish became a cloak of stealth to protect their confidences.
Freud expressed his feelings for Eduard with unusual clarity and elo-
quence for a teenager. Consider, for instance, the following passage from a
letter dated September 9, 1875, in which Freud, anticipating his reunion with
Eduard, overflows with glee. “I am delighted,” he writes,

that you recently had occasion to use the noble lengua castellana . . . and I am
longing for the hours and walks next year during which, after a twelve months’

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 165
f i g u r e 5.2
Freud’s warning to Eduard: “Let no other hand touch this letter,” September 4, 1872. ©
Sigmund Freud Copyrights. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

separation interrupted by a three days’ meeting, we shall be able to exchange

words for words, and, God willing, thoughts for thoughts as well: I really be-
lieve we shall never be rid of each other; though we became friends from free
choice, we are as attached to one another as if nature had put [us] on this earth
as blood relations; I believe we have come so far that the one loves the very per-
son of the other [der eine im andern schon die bloße Person liebt] and not, as be-
fore, merely his good qualities, and I am afraid that were you, by an unworthy
act, to prove quite different tomorrow from the image [Bild ] I keep of you, I
could still not cease to wish you well. That is a weakness [Schwäche], and I have
taken myself to task for it several times.45

This is one of Freud’s most passionate love letters. In contrast to the passages
about Gisela, which are short, flat, and formulaic, his affection for Eduard
gushes forth as he pours lyrical phrases and poetic images onto the page. Gisela
was the passive object of a shy “inclinacion,” but Eduard appears as the willing
partner in a fantasy of “longing,” “exchanges,” “attachments,” “weaknesses,” and
adolescent love. This outpour of charged words is prefaced by a mention of
Spanish, “[la] noble lengua castellana,” but curiously, the entire passage is writ-
ten in German, as were most of Freud’s other elaborations of his affection for
Eduard—a flagrant violation of the fundamental precept of the Academia
Española requiring its members to communicate exclusively in Spanish.

166
 Freud expressed his fancy for Gisela in Spanish, but used German to
write his love for Eduard. Spanish was the language of Cervantes’s stories and
of the Academia Española, the imaginary institution invented by the two boys:
it was the language of literature, of fanciful stories and fictional characters.
Freud’s choice of Spanish to write about his romantic interest in Gisela sug-
gests that this love story—like the romance between Don Quixote and Dul-
cinea—was a figment of the imagination, a fantastic invention. His affection
for Eduard, on the other hand, was real, and the feelings it unearthed were
too intense and too overwhelming to express in any language other than his
native tongue. Spanish was the language of fantasy; German, the idiom of re-
ality. In contrast to Freud’s Spanish, awkward and halting as befits a language
learned from a textbook, his German, even at the tender age of nineteen, was
elegant and lyrical, a prefiguration of the later Freud’s masterful prose. And
nowhere did Freud’s German flow as delicately—adorned by pastoral images
and playful turns—as when he wrote about his love for Eduard. The contrast
between Freud’s wooden Spanish and his expressive German is apparent in his
choice of words: Gisela was the object of “inclinacion,” a cold, affectless term,
whereas Eduard was the focus of Freud’s “Liebe,” a passion filled with Sturm
und Drang.
But the friendship between the two boys was not always so rosy: it in-
cluded, like most adolescent loves, episodes of insecurity, doubt, and jealousy.
The most dramatic scene occurred early in 1875, when Eduard wrote to Freud
about his interest in a sixteen-year-old girl he had met in Leipzig, where he
was studying. Although Eduard’s romance was as harmless—and as unreal—
as Freud’s own “inclinacion” for Gisela, Freud became upset and attempted to
dissuade his friend from pursuing the exchange of “secret correspondence” that
threatened the exclusive epistolary arrangement between the two friends.
“It is very wrong of you,” Freud lectured Eduard, “and causes great harm
to yourself and deep sorrow to me, to encourage the imprudent affection of
a sixteen-year-old girl and—the inevitable outcome—to take advantage of
it.” Abandoning the playful complicity and camaraderie found in most letters,
Freud adopts a grave tone and erects himself as a superego of sorts, passing
judgment on Eduard’s behavior and warning him about the catastrophic con-
sequences of his flirtation: “Do not become the cause of the first transgression
of a young girl—one who has barely outgrown childhood—against a justi-
fied moral precept, by arranging meetings and exchanging letters against her

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 167
parents’ wishes. . . . Is this not too great a price to exact for the satisfaction of a
romantic whim?”46
Freud goes on to lecture his friend for several paragraphs, and con-
cludes with the following piece of rather forceful advice:

I should be overjoyed if instead of laughing at my sermonizing—which, alas,

I cannot avoid—, you were to heed my advice and eschew both rendezvous
and secret correspondence. And if you feel you are too weak, then hasten back
to Vienna. . . . How ashamed I would be if you returned to Vienna and I had
to keep an episode of your life in Leipzig from our friends and my parents. So
much in sober vein. You will appreciate my requests and my anxieties.47

In this letter we find a young Freud tormented by jealousy, and willing to use
every rhetorical weapon at his disposal to turn Eduard away from the girl: he
paints a catastrophic scenario of lost honor and disgraced maidenhood that
evokes the pseudo-chivalrous scenes in Don Quixote, a book that Freud gave
as a present to Eduard in 1875;48 he appeals to his friend’s reason, sense of duty,
and respect for social decorum; and, in case all of these fail, he resorts to emo-
tional blackmail, warning Eduard that he will have to share the details of his
flirtatious exploits with “our friends and my parents.”
Freud wrote all the passages quoted above in German, another example
of how he turned to his native tongue whenever he needed to express intense
affects and complex emotions: the torrent of insecurities and anxieties un-
leashed by adolescent jealousy were too overwhelming to communicate in any
language other than his own. As Freud once explained: “I felt the urge to speak
my mind fully and that I could only do in the mother tongue.”49
Historians of psychoanalysis, from Jones to Boehlich, have been too
quick to heterosexualize the young Freud, and their attitude is understand-
able: it is difficult to conceive of Doctor Freud, so often pictured as a bearded
gentleman holding a cigar, as anything but the embodiment of Viennese mas-
culinity. But the correspondence with Eduard Silberstein reveals an altogether
different Freud: a boy in the midst of adolescence, a transitional period during
which identity is extremely malleable, having left behind the infinite possibili-
ties of childhood but not yet confined to the rigid paths of adulthood. As a
teenager, Freud was racked by libidinal ambivalence—he was attracted to both

168
boys and girls—but also, less typically, by a linguistic ambiguity that led him
to switch from German to Spanish, depending on the intensity of his affection.
Freud loved girls in Spanish and boys in German. Like his command
of the language of Cervantes, his affection for girls was clumsy, rigid, and aca-
demic. His passion for boys, in contrast, was expressed fluently and naturally
in the language of Goethe and German Romanticism. Freud explored his at-
traction to both genders in two languages that sometimes came together in
an unusual patois: a bilingual bisexuality—a linguistic-affective ambiguity that
makes his letters to Eduard Silberstein a treasure trove of symptoms of what
William J. McGrath has called “adolescent Sturm und Drang.”50

f r e u d ’s d o g s

Like most adolescents, Freud had a vivid imagination and he often played at
being someone else: when he wrote to Eduard he was no longer Sigmund but
Cipión, one of the canine protagonists of “The Colloquy of the Dogs.” The
question of why Freud might have identified with this literary character to
the point of adopting its name and signing his letters as “perro en el hospital
de Sevilla” has puzzled Cervantine critics: How did Cervantes come to medi-
ate the special friendship between the two boys? Why did Freud choose such
an obscure novella instead of the more canonical Don Quixote? How do these
dogs relate to Freud’s emotional attachment to Spanish?
“The Colloquy of the Dogs” is the last of the Exemplary Novels, a collec-
tion of twelve novellas Cervantes wrote between 1590 and 1612, and published
in 1613. It tells the story of two dogs who meet at a hospital in the city of Va-
lladolid and, having acquired the gift of speech, spend a long night engrossed
in conversation. One of the dogs, Cipión, listens and asks leading questions,
while the other, Berganza, recounts his picaresque adventures while serving a
long list of masters—including a shepherd, a rich merchant, a constable, a sol-
dier, a gypsy, a Moor, a poet, and a group of actors—and living in places as
diverse as a slaughterhouse, a bourgeois house, a pastoral field, and a hospi-
tal. Regardless of whom he was serving or where he was living, the dog found
himself beaten, starved, tricked, abused, and—in an episode I will analyze
later on—sexually harassed. The moral of Berganza’s tale is that human beings,

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 169
 regardless of gender, race, social class, or nationality, are invariably selfish, cruel,
and corrupt.
Despite its colorful cast of characters—talking dogs, lecherous witches,
and duplicitous peasants—“The Colloquy of the Dogs” is one of Cer-
vantes’s darkest and most difficult texts. In contrast to the lighthearted prose
of Don Quixote or the straightforward plots of novellas like “La gitanilla” or
“La española inglesa,” the “Colloquy” features a labyrinthine plot, constantly
interrupted by Berganza’s digressions, Cipión’s protestations, and endless meta-
physical disquisitions on subjects ranging from the inherent evil of human na-
ture to the etymology of the word “philosophy.” Frustrated by these countless
distractions, Cipión compares Berganza’s sentences to the tentacles of an oc-
topus. Alban Forcione, one of the most astute readers of the “Colloquy,” has
argued that the story’s very structure resembles an octopus, with its prolifera-
tion of narrative tentacles tangling the reader’s mind. The story’s syntax and
vocabulary are equally difficult, rendering entire passages hermetic even to the
most seasoned Cervantistas.
Given its syntactic and linguistic complexity, it comes as a surprise that
a fifteen-year-old Austrian boy would choose the “Colloquy” to teach himself
Spanish. Since the publication of the correspondence with Silberstein, scholars
have puzzled over Freud’s fascination with Cervantes’s novella, and have raised
a number of questions that remain, for the most part, unanswered: Where did
Freud first encounter the “Colloquy”? How much of its complex language did
he understand? And why did he identify with one of Cervantes’s canine pro-
tagonists to the point of adopting its name?
In an article on the influence of Cervantes on Freud, León Grinberg
and Juan Francisco Rodríguez suggest that there are certain parallels between
the “Colloquy” and Freud’s later psychoanalytic theories: the novella features
two protagonists, one who listens attentively while the other speaks, interrupt-
ing only to request clarifications or to help the other along with his narration.
In the first pages, Cipión tells Berganza: “Speak until daybreak . . . for I will
very gladly listen to you, without stopping you unless I think it necessary.”51
Grinberg and Rodríguez believe the relation between the two dogs evokes a
“psychoanalytic atmosphere,” with Berganza playing the role of the patient: “we
observe how Berganza begins to enquire about his true identity, alongside his
therapist Cipión, about his real parents and origins and his life story”52 The
critics point out that Freud identified with Cipión, the analytic listener, and
let his friend Eduard assume the role of Berganza, the talking subject. Another

170
respected Cervantista, E. C. Riley, believes that “the choice of roles was obvi-
ous. Freud/Cipión was the dominant one and the more didactic of the two, the
driving force in their game and epistolary exchange.”53 Along the same lines,
S. B. Vranich noted that Cipión is clearly “the one who tried to understand,
counsel, and guide, and who listened patiently while Berganza unburdened
himself, recounting his life’s misfortunes, traumas, trivias, confused thoughts
and dreams.”54 Grinberg and Rodríguez even claim that one of the most promi-
nent themes in the “Colloquy,” the difficulty in distinguishing between fantasy
and reality, corresponds to one of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.55
Other critics have suggested that Freud’s youthful interest in Cervantes
prefigured his later “capacity to identify with great men” (or, in this context,
with great dogs!).56 Grinberg and Rodríguez read the young man’s identifica-
tion with Cipión as an expression of “his quixotic dream of being a great man
and conquering the world by creating psychoanalysis.”57 Joseph Beá and Víctor
Hernández add that Freud and Cervantes had much in common: “both ad-
mired military heroes . . . and both actually transformed themselves into heroes,
able to ‘conquer’ the enemy with understanding and the word.”58
In addition to Cervantistas, psychoanalysts have also puzzled over
Freud’s interest in the “Colloquy.” Kurt Eissler, an influential analyst and one
of the founders of the Freud archives, has interpreted the young man’s identi-
fication with Cipión as a “symptomatic product” that reveals the inner con-
flicts and anxieties of a turbulent adolescence.59 William J. McGrath, another
analytically minded critic, argues that the “Colloquy,” like Don Quixote, “pro-
vided [Freud’s] phantasy life with a pantheon of heroes who were to affect his
thoughts and feelings for many years to come.”60
None of these interpretations, however, accounts for the link between
Freud’s interest in the “Colloquy” and his intense friendship with Eduard Sil-
berstein. But as we will see, the two activities that consumed much of the ado-
lescent Freud’s time; reading Cervantes and writing to Eduard were closely
related experiences.
There are several elements in the “Colloquy” that echo the main themes
in Freud’s correspondence with Eduard. Like the Academia Española, the “Col-
loquy” is an exclusively masculine world. The only two members of the Aca-
demia are boys, and the two protagonists of the “Colloquy” are male dogs. The
Academia is a platform for male bonding, and so is the use of language for Ci-
pión and Berganza, who spend all night sharing their life stories (only Berganza
gets to speak, but in the framing story Cervantes hinted that there would be a

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 171
sequel, never written, in which Cipión would recount his own life). All of Ber-
ganza’s masters are male, and throughout their conversation both dogs privilege
masculine role models.
More importantly, every single woman Berganza encounters during
his picaresque adventures turns out to be a corrupt, lying cheat—a representa-
tion of femininity that parallels the negative portrayal of girls in the Freud‒
Silberstein correspondence. The first female character to make an appearance
in the “Colloquy” is a “very beautiful girl” who, after distracting Berganza with
her good looks, steals his food; then there is a lecherous maidservant who
sneaks men into her master’s house; a madam who blackmails her clients; and
finally, a band of gypsy girls who “employ . . . trickery and deception” to filch
money from strangers.61
But of all the unsavory women Berganza encounters, one stands out
as a monument to the horrors of femininity. Near the end of the story, as Ber-
ganza performs circus tricks on the street, he is approached by an old witch
named Cañizares who lures him to her home, promising to tell him the story
of his birth. She tells Berganza that he is really a human being, and that he
was changed into an animal by an evil spell. She attempts to kiss him on the
mouth—a gesture the dog finds repulsive (Cipión agrees and tells him: “You
were right, because there’s no pleasure, only torture, in kissing or being kissed
by an old woman”)62 —and, with the pretext of revealing the details about his
mysterious canine metamorphosis, Cañizares subjects the dog to a bizarre rit-
ual, undressing and rubbing her body with a mysterious ointment. If Berganza’s
previous adventures had instilled in him a certain degree of misogyny, the sight
of Cañizares’s naked body sends him into a panic. “I was very frightened,” he
tells Cipión, “to find myself locked up in that narrow room with that awful
figure before me, which I’ll describe to you as best I can.” He then proceeds to
paint the following horrific portrait:

She was more than seven feet tall and a veritable sack of bones covered with
a dark, hairy, leathery skin. Her belly, which was like a sheepskin, covered her
private parts and hung half-way down her thighs. Her breasts were like the ud-
ders of a wrinkled, dried-up cow; her lips were black, her teeth were like fallen
tombstones, and her nose was hooked and misshapen. With her wild eyes, di-
sheveled hair, sunken cheeks, scraggy neck, and shriveled breasts, she was, all in
all, a bag of diabolical skin and bones.63

172
 Of all the misadventures Berganza experiences during his canine life, the en-
counter with the witch Cañizares’s body stands out as the most traumatic. He
was “overcome with fear” and wanted to bite her, but “could find no place on
her person where [he] could do it without revulsion” (Cervantes used the term
“asco,” which could also be translated as “disgust”).64 Overwhelmed by this ab-
ject sight, Berganza explodes, flies into a rage, and attacks the witch in what is
surely the most sadistic scene in the entire novella. “I shook myself free, and
grabbing hold of the long folds of her belly, I shoved and dragged her all around
the courtyard while she cried out for someone to save her from the jaws of that
malignant spirit.”65
Alban Forcione shows that the Cañizares episode is the focal point in
the “Colloquy”: the witch embodies the themes of monstrosity and grotesque-
ness so crucial to the story. “Berganza’s description of the naked body of the
moribund Cañizares,” writes Forcione, “is certainly the most shocking of the
numerous passages in a work that cultivates the ugly at all levels, and its most
ugly detail in the description of her gigantic belly.”66 The female body emerges
as the epitome of the monstrous: it is her exaggerated womanly attributes—her
sagging breasts, her genitals covered by dangling folds of fat—that render the
witch so horrific.
The “Colloquy” is ultimately a tale of male bonding in which Cipión
and Berganza spend the night together at the hospital in Valladolid, telling
stories and using language to get intimate. Their platonic communication is
repeatedly haunted by the specter of women, who appear as deceitful, unreli-
able, and frighteningly carnal. Even the lone female dog in the novel—a little
yapping lap dog who makes her appearance in the last page, jumping out of her
mistress’s arms to bite the luckless Berganza—sparks an outburst of sadistic
fantasies in the male protagonist: “If I came across you in the street, you rotten
little beast, I’d either ignore you or tear you to pieces with my teeth.”67 The two
male dogs bond by conversing, but also by expressing their horror of female
sexuality.
Readers might object that this interpretation exaggerates the impor-
tance of female characters in the “Colloquy.” After all, one could argue that in
this dark tale all human beings, male and female, appear as selfish and corrupt.
Even Cañizares might be more horrifying because she is a witch than because
she is a woman. Isn’t it far-fetched to focus on one episode as proof that the
“Colloquy” revolves around a horror of femininity? Wouldn’t it be more appro-
priate to read it as a misanthropic tale, denouncing the vanities of humankind?

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 173
 That would be so, were it not for a crucial fact that has been mostly
overlooked in the discussion of Cervantes’s influence on Freud: “The Collo-
quy of the Dogs” is actually a story within a story, a tale framed by the plot of
the previous novella, “El casamiento engañoso” (The deceitful marriage). The
dialog between Cipión and Berganza is actually folded into the plot of this pen-
ultimate novel—another dark tale presenting women in a less-than-favorable
light.68
“The Deceitful Marriage” tells the story of the soldier Campuzano, who
is recovering from an illness at the hospital in Valladolid, where he runs into an
old friend named Peralta and recounts his recent woes: he was tricked into mar-
riage by a woman named Estefanía, who presented herself as a wealthy aristo-
cratic lady but turned out to be a deceitful wench who left him in abject poverty
and gave him the terrible case of syphilis that landed him in hospital. At the
end of his autobiographical narrative Campuzano tells his friend that from his
hospital bed, he saw—and heard—two dogs engrossed in conversation. Not
wanting to miss a word, he transcribed their dialog into a notebook, and of-
fered to entertain his friend by having him read the strange colloquy. It is at this
point that the reader turns the page and finds the opening of “The Colloquy
of the Dogs.”
Like the “Colloquy,” “The Deceitful Marriage” revolves around a mon-
strous female character, in this case a liar who tricked Campuzano into mar-
riage. One of the novella’s main themes is the duplicity of women: Estefanía
seemed to be a rich, aristocratic, and upright lady, but she turned out to be a
penniless, promiscuous cheat. “All that wicked woman has said to you,” another
character tells him, “is downright falsehood. She has neither house nor prop-
erty, not even any other clothes than those she carries on her back.”69 If Campu-
zano had been tricked by a man, he might have lost his riches; but he was duped
by a woman, and lost not only money but also his health. The deceitful Este-
fanía has left him, as he tells Peralta in a particularly sharp translation, “reduced
and emaciated frightfully . . . a rheumatic cripple, suffering the most excruciat-
ing torture and agony.”70 The moral of the story is that women—like appear-
ances—are not to be trusted.
Campuzano’s tale presents an opposition between the beneficial effects
of masculine conversation, on the one hand, and the devastating consequences
of feminine seduction, on the other. By recounting his woes to Peralta, Cam-
puzano is engaging in a form of the “talking cure,” a therapeutic procedure de-
signed to complement the medical treatment provided by the hospital. Talking
to another man is a form of therapy, but talking to women—as the plot of the

174
 story demonstrates—can land one in the sick ward. Harry Sieber has written
that “Campuzano is a victim of language,” and I would add that he is a victim of
a very specific type of language: feminine language.71
Cervantes presents the masculine conversation between Campuzano
and Peralta as a tale of seduction. Throughout the story, Campuzano draws out
the suspense of his narrative, interrupting his tale to announce that he is about
to recount even more fantastic and more outlandish adventures. Each inter-
ruption piques his friend’s interest and heightens his desire to hear more. This
procedure—which Harry Sieber has described as a narrative “strip tease”72 —
reaches its most dramatic point when Campuzano waves the manuscript of
“The Colloquy of the Dogs” before his friend’s incredulous eyes. Peralta can
barely contain his curiosity, and the narrator tells us that “All these preambles
and embellishments the Ensign told before narrating what he had seen kindled
Peralta’s desire until he asked him, with no lesser embellishments, to immedi-
ately recount the untold marvels.”73
As Sieber points out, there is a parallel between Estefanía’s seduction of
Campuzano and Campuzano’s seduction of Peralta. But while Estefanía uses
her body to attract attention, Campuzano uses words to “kindle Peralta’s desire.”
Campuzano’s surrender to Estefanía’s flesh lands him in hospital, but Peralta’s
submission to his friend’s words has much more beneficial effects: by giving
in to his “desire,” he gets to enjoy the story of “The Colloquy of the Dogs.”
Through these narrative tricks, the reader of the Exemplary Novels—whose ap-
petite for narratives has been whetted by the various interruptions and digres-
sions—is also drawn into this web of masculine seduction.
“The Deceitful Marriage” and “The Colloquy of the Dogs” thus share a
number of important narrative elements: they are both tales of platonic bond-
ing in which two male characters achieve intimacy by recounting their misfor-
tunes (upon first listening to the dogs, Campuzano observes that they speak
like “varones sabios” or “wise males,” thus insisting on the masculine character
of their dialog);74 both stories portray women as dangerous, lecherous, and de-
ceitful cheats, to be blamed for the protagonist’s traumas; and both stories dis-
tinguish between masculine and feminine languages: men use words to engage
in edifying conversation, while women use them to trick, seduce, and trauma-
tize men. Both novellas narrate a peculiar form of male bonding founded on a
shared horror of female sexuality.
If we now return to Freud and Silberstein, we can see what drew the
two adolescents to “The Colloquy of the Dogs.” Their correspondence has
much in common with the dialog between Cipión and Berganza: the two dogs

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 175
 marvel at their ability to speak and to use the Spanish language, and so do the
two friends, who constantly write admiringly about the “noble lengua caste-
llana”; Cipión and Berganza express a fear of eavesdroppers, and Freud repeat-
edly warns Eduard to keep their correspondence private.75
Like Cervantes’s male characters, Freud and Eduard engage in an elabo-
rate ritual of male bonding revolving around the use of language. They, too,
use Spanish to recount their adventures, even if as teenagers their lives were
less worldly than those of the soldiers, licentiates, and dogs in Cervantes’s uni-
verse. Finally, the two boys share a crucial trait with the protagonists of “The
Colloquy of the Dogs” and “The Deceitful Marriage”: their letters express a
predominantly negative view about women that at times manifests itself as an
outright horror at female sexuality.
There are many dark representations of women in Freud’s correspon-
dence with Silberstein. We have already analyzed Freud’s extreme reaction
at learning of Eduard’s innocent courtship of the sixteen-year-old girl from
Leipzig: his response, warning his friend about the terrible consequences of
succumbing to feminine charms, could well be taken from one of Campuzano’s
speeches. And when Eduard’s incipient romance soured, Freud wrote him a
long letter on March 7, 1875, that would also be at home in one of Cervantes’s
novellas. Freud carefully analyzed Eduard’s failed relationship with the girl
(this is surely his earliest published interpretation of the psychological effects
of love), and ultimately blamed the girl’s mother for the failure. His interpre-
tation makes her into the cunning architect of a “deceitful marriage” of sorts.
Freud writes Eduard that the girl’s mother is “a shrewd woman” who
“does her utmost to bring out the innate but latent coquetry of the sixteen-year-
old daughter of Eve” by encouraging the teenager to lead boys on. “Your part in
the whole business,” he tells Eduard, “was that of a dressmaker’s dummy mascu-
lini generis, that is, of a tailor’s dummy,” in other words a pawn in an elaborate
ploy of procurement in which any man would do.76
Freud’s interpretation makes the girl’s mother into a Celestina, a witch-
like go-between who tricks hapless men into unhappy marriages. The Celestina
had been a stock figure in Spanish literature since the medieval Book of Good
Love, and Cervantes invented many characters, from Cañizares to Estefanía,
that are avatars of this treacherous woman. Freud portrays the girl’s mother as
yet another incarnation of the dangerous matchmaker: a calculating, Machia-
vellian figure eternally on the lookout for unsuspecting male victims. Freud’s
last mention of the girl’s mother—in a letter from March 13, 1875—sums up
his opinion of this woman: “If [the] mother is cruel enough to wish ruin upon

176
 the poor child by turning her from a decorous china doll into an indecorous
flirt, then do not be party to her plan.”77
But there is an even more striking example of the negative image of
women found in Freud’s correspondence with Eduard. In a letter dated Au-
gust 22, 1874, Freud makes a most unusual suggestion: that the two friends
make a human sacrifice to prove their allegiance to the Spanish Academy. “An
old superstition has it,” he writes, “that no building is sound whose foundations
have not cost a human sacrifice.” And since Freud had repeatedly presented the
Spanish Academy as a building, he asked his friend to take the necessary steps
to ensure that its foundations were indeed solid.78 He playfully suggested that
“to the competence of our own AE renovada y confirmada [renewed and con-
solidated] . . . we sacrifice 2 victims, 2 princesses or reinas, que antes en nuestro
reino han imperado [queens who previously reigned over our realm].”79
The wellbeing of the Academia Española required the sacrifice of two
female victims, probably the two girls that Freud and Eduard had playfully
courted—including Gisela Fluss, suggests Ángela Ackermann Pilári.80 A ritual
murder of this sort would solidify not only the foundations of the Academy,
but also the friends’ platonic bond, by ensuring that no girls would ever come
between them. The Academia Española was a secret society into which women
could enter only as dead bodies.
Of course the sacrifice in question was a product of the young Freud’s
overactive imagination: he was merely playing with Spanish words, with liter-
ary plots and Cervantine themes, and there was never any indication that the
two boys took active steps to find a flesh-and-blood sacrificial victim. Several
critics, however, have pointed out that Freud was probably drawn to the Ex-
emplary Novels because Cervantes’s plots often revolved around the inability
to differentiate between fantasy and reality—a problem that is at the core of
the other maladies of the psyche that became the archive of psychoanalytic re-
search. And, like Cervantine tales, the two boys’ project to turn women into
sacrificial victims also blurred the line between real and imagined events. What
began as jest would eventually culminate in tragedy.
The two boys continued to write letters, in Spanish, German, and
Spandeutsch, until their mid-twenties. Freud wrote his last letter to Eduard on
January 24, 1881, about a decade after the two had first begun their epistolary ex-
change.81 In the last years of their friendship, Freud’s letters became less roman-
tic, less playful, and less intimate. One gets the sense that Freud’s early passion
for Eduard gave way to an interest in research and scientific work. As he became
increasingly serious about his scholarly work, he drifted away from Eduard.

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 177
The rift deepened after Eduard chose to return to Romania to work in the fam-
ily business, a decision that greatly disappointed Freud, who had grand intellec-
tual ambitions for his friend (already in 1878, Freud expressed his unhappiness
at Eduard’s plan to study law rather than science: “you would undoubtedly have
become a Humboldt had that cursed jurisprudence not diverted your energies
from the contemplation of nature,” he wrote).82 Years later, Freud remembered
the end of their friendship as follows: “The drifting apart which had gradually
developed between us became apparent again when I advised him from Wands-
bek against marrying a stupid rich girl whom he had been sent to have a look at.
And then we lost contact with each other. He obviously got used to the money-
bags . . . he is prepared to marry the girl so as to establish his independence as
a merchant. . . . That is the story of my friend Silberstein, who has become a
banker, because he didn’t like jurisprudence.”83 As is obvious from the tone of
his description, even after the end of their relationship Freud continued to ex-
hibit an intense hostility toward Eduard’s girlfriends.84
In the 1880s, after the friendship ended, Freud would rise to become
an ambitious young doctor and medical scholar, while Eduard settled on a
petit-bourgeois existence in Brăila. Along with their platonic bond, the former
friends apparently renounced their fear of women: Freud married Martha Ber-
nays in 1886, and Eduard wed Pauline Theiler some years later. But despite hav-
ing drifted apart, the destinies of the two founders of the Academia Española
would cross again in an episode that would rekindle their youthful anxieties
about femininity.
Around 1891, Eduard’s wife Pauline began to exhibit neurotic symp-
toms. He had heard that Sigmund, his former childhood friend, was now an
established doctor in Vienna, so he sent her to him for treatment. Pauline trav-
eled to Vienna to meet with Freud, who had opened a consulting room at 8,
Maria Theresienstrasse, a few blocks away from his later address at Berggasse 19.
At this point the story took a decidedly novelistic turn: on May 14, 1891, Pau-
line went to Freud’s building accompanied by her maid, climbed three flights of
stairs, and jumped to her death from one of upper floors. It has never been es-
tablished whether this sad incident occurred before or after her consultation.85
The daily Neues Wiener Tagblatt reported Pauline’s death as follows:

Suicide. Yesterday at about 4:30 in the afternoon, a young woman made her way
to one of the rear wings of the institutions in Maria Theresa St. where doctors
reside to go in for a course of treatment. The patient left the girl accompanying

178
her to wait, climbed up three flights and threw herself down over the balus-
trade. Having shattered her skull, the unlucky girl was immediately dead. The
ensuing police inquiry has revealed that the deceased was a foreigner who was
seeking treatment due to a severe nervous disorder. The deed was most likely
conceived in a moment of mental derangement. The body will be taken in the
coffin to the Scotts.86

Seventeen years after the two friends vowed, in jest, to sacrifice a girl to ensure
the stability of their relationship, their sadistic fantasy became reality, and Pau-
line Silberstein their sacrificial victim. A plan that had no doubt been repressed
from consciousness returned to haunt the two grown men. As James Hamilton
has shown, Freud found this episode so traumatic that he obliterated all refer-
ences to Pauline Silberstein from his published work or private correspondence.
He must have found the episode deeply disturbing, in part because, like his later
theorization of uncanny experiences, it blurred the distinction between fantasy
and reality.
Various critics have commented on the extremely negative perception
of femininity presented in Freud’s correspondence with Eduard. Grinstein ob-
serves that “Freud’s letters indicate how troubled he was about his own hetero-
sexual strivings,”87 while William J. McGrath goes further and argues that “the
adolescent Freud found the thought of heterosexual intercourse frightening.”88
Eissler seconds the opinion, writing that “the adolescent [Freud]’s unconscious
or preconscious fantasy about women . . . says: women are dangerous monsters,
a fear-arousing species whose phallic nature seems obvious.”89
To see how this perception of women related to Freud’s early views
on sexuality, we will now turn to another episode in his correspondence with
Eduard—an episode that does not involve dangerous romances or exotic lit-
erature but, rather, an unusual type of animal—the eel—that helped shape
Freud’s early views on sexual development.

eels

The letters to Silberstein contain a curious episode that sheds light on the
young Freud’s intense affective life: his first trip to Italy, a land that years later
would gain almost mythical dimension in his imagination (“Unser Herz zeigt

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 179
f i g u r e 5.3
Freud’s drawing of a mollusk, in a letter to Eduard Silberstein, April 5, 1876. © Sigmund
Freud Copyrights. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

nach dem Süden [our heart points to the south],” he wrote years later in a fa-
mous letter).90 Freud had been studying zoology in Vienna, and in the spring of
1876 he spent several weeks in Trieste, researching marine animals at the Royal
Zoological Station.
Freud arrived in Trieste in March 1876 and stayed for about one month.
During this time, he wrote Eduard three letters describing his daily activities,
his research project, and his general impressions of Italy. He was enraptured by
the port city, but had little time to enjoy its beauty: almost every hour of the
day was devoted to his work (“I sit at [my] table,” he tells Eduard, “from eight
to twelve and from one to six, working quite diligently,” except for evenings and
Sundays, which he devoted to exploring the port and its surroundings. 91
Freud was always imaginative and playful in his correspondence with
Eduard, but the letters from Trieste overflow with joy as he describes the sun-
shine over the Adriatic coast, the fishermen bringing in the morning catch, his
attempts to speak Italian, or dinner at a lively osteria. “I, a landlubber for eigh-
teen years,” he confesses, “am transplanted suddenly to the shores of one of the
most beautiful seas.”92
The form of these letters differs radically from that of Freud’s ear-
lier correspondence: Freud not only pens long descriptions of his Italian sur-
roundings, but also tries his hand at drawing various details of his everyday

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f i g u r e 5.4
Freud’s drawing of various marine animals, in a letter to Eduard Silberstein, April 5, 1876.
© Sigmund Freud Copyrights. Image courtesy Library of Congress.
f i g u r e 5.5
Freud’s drawing of an Italian girl’s hairstyle, in a letter to Eduard Silberstein, April 5, 1876.
© Sigmund Freud Copyrights. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

life for Eduard’s enjoyment. In one letter, he sketches his room, his desk, the
various marine animals (figures 5.3 and 5.4) he has been studying, and even
the hairstyle popular among Italian girls (figure 5.5). His experience of the
south was so emotionally intense that words alone no longer sufficed to ex-
press it, and his letters broke free from written language, overflowing into
plastic representations. Later in life Freud produced a good number of sci-
entific drawings, but the Trieste sketches stand out as the only instance in

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 181
which he drew not to explain a theory or illustrate an article, but for pure plea-
sure: they were a gift to Eduard, another product of their inventiveness and
complicity.
The trip to Trieste was a turning point for Freud: for the first time in
his life, he had the opportunity to conduct original research, and he spent his
time at the Royal Institute trying to elucidate some of the mysteries concerning
the life cycle of eels. The love of scientific work and passion for knowledge that
characterized his adult life appeared for the first time here. At the end of his
stay, Freud published his first article, a scientific paper bearing the inordinately
long title “Beobachtung über Gestaltung und feineren Bau der als Hoden be-
schriebenen Lappenorgane des Aals” (Observations on the form and finer
structure of the lobed organs of the eel described as testes).93
In his letters to Eduard, Freud gives a detailed account of his daily rou-
tine. Work began early in the morning, as zoology students rushed to meet the
fishermen and select the raw materials for their research. “Every day,” he wrote
Eduard, “I get sharks, rays, eels, and other beasts, which I subject to a general
anatomical investigation.” Each student focused on a different kind of marine
animal: one “gets the worms and the crabs” while a second “abducts the ascid-
ians, which he searches for fleas: copepods, small crustaceans that live on them
as parasites.”94 To help Eduard visualize his endeavors, Freud included a draw-
ing of an eel in his letter (figure 5.6; plate 5).
In the same letter Freud describes his eel experiments—which involved
vivisections and dissections—in gory detail: “I serve the beast-killing (zookto-
nos) science,” he writes, “hands stained with the white and red blood of marine
animals, cell detritus swimming before my eyes, which disturbs me even in my
dreams, in my thoughts nothing but the great problems connected with the
words ducts, testicles, and ovaries, world-renowned words.”95
Freud spent the entire month in Trieste dissecting eels—four hundred
of them, as he reported in the resulting article—and studying a problem that
had fascinated naturalists since antiquity: the mating ritual of these unusual
animals. For over two millennia, scientists have puzzled over the mystery of eel
reproduction, proposing the most wildly speculative hypotheses.
In his History of Animals, Aristotle was at a loss to explain how these
animals reproduce. “Eels,” he wrote, “are not produced from sexual intercourse,
nor are they oviparous.” He noted that they seem to emerge out of nowhere, as
if by spontaneous generation—“after rain they have been reproduced in some
marshy ponds, from which all the water was drawn and the mud cleaned out.”

182
f i g u r e 5.6
Freud’s drawing of an eel in a letter to Eduard Silberstein, April 5, 1876. © Sigmund Freud
Copyrights. Image courtesy Library of Congress.
In the end he concluded that they “originate in what are called the entrails of
the earth,” and spring from the ground.96
Some centuries later, Pliny the Elder gave a slightly different hypothesis
in his Natural History. “To reproduce themselves,” he wrote, “eels rub their bod-
ies against the rocks: from the shreds of skin thus detached come new ones.”97
Much more imaginative was Oppian of Corycus, a poet who lived under Mar-
cus Aurelius in the second century CE, and devoted a section of his Halieutia,
or fishing poem, to the “loves of Roman eels,” painting them as lecherous ani-
mals that had the terrible custom of copulating with snakes:

Full of eagerness, drunk with desire, the Roman eel comes out of the sea to go
and meet her mate. Urged by devouring passions, the odious, lustful snake goes
crawling to the water’s edge. Seeing a hole in a rock, he vomits his fatal poison:
he empties his teeth entirely, clearing them of the black, pernicious fluid with
which they are armed to kill; for, flying to his love, he wishes only to be gracious
and amiable. Arriving on the beach, he stops and intones his whistling love
song. As soon as she hears his voice, quicker than an arrow, the black Roman eel
darts towards the shore while the snake throws himself into the sea foam and
swims to meet her. Their mutual desire is satisfied. They are together. Panting
with pleasure, the female draws the snake’s head into her mouth.98

The association of eels with voracious sexuality has endured: in 1983

the English novelist Graham Swift constructed the plot of Waterland around
the sexual life of these creatures, and included the following meditation on the
uncanny persistence of eel libido through the ups and downs of world history:

How long have eels been doing this? They were doing it, repeating this old,
epic story, long before Aristotle put it all down to mud. They were doing it
when Pliny posited his rock-rubbing theory. And Linnaeus his viviparity the-
ory. They were doing it when they stormed the Bastille and when Napoleon
and Hitler contemplated the invasion of England. And they were still doing it,
still accomplishing these vast atavistic circles when on a July day in 1940 Fred-
die Parr picked up out of a trap one of their number (which later escaped and
lived perhaps to obey the call of the far Sargasso) and placed it in Mary Met-
calf ’s navy blue knickers.99

184
Freud never went as far as to smuggle an eel into his friends’ knickers, but he did
spend an entire summer studying their reproductive behavior.
In addition to the question of origin, there was a second mystery con-
cerning eels that Freud tried to crack: their sex. Aristotle believed that “the eel
is neither male nor female,”100 and thereafter scientists had struggled to distin-
guish between male and female eels. This was the main problem that preoc-
cupied Freud during his stay in Trieste, as he explained in one of his letters to
Eduard. “For a long time,” he wrote his friend, “only the females of this beast
[the eel] were known; even Aristotle did not know where they obtained their
males and hence argued that eels sprang from the mud. Throughout the Middle
Ages and in modern times, too, there was a veritable hunt for male eels.”101
Eels lack any visible organs or external traits to identify their sex, and
in order to determine if a specimen was male or female, Freud had to “dissect
them and discover either testicles or ovaries.”102 To help Silverstein understand,
Freud drew these organs in a letter (figure 5.7). Finding the elusive male eel

f i g u r e 5.7
Freud’s drawing of eel testes in a letter to Eduard Silberstein, April 5, 1876.
© Sigmund Freud Copyrights. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 185
turned out to be much more complicated than he had initially thought: “I have
been tormenting myself and the eels in a vain effort to rediscover the male
eels, but all the eels I cut open are of the gentler sex,” he laments in a letter to
Eduard.103
In the end Freud was unable to find the elusive male eel, but he gath-
ered enough material to publish a scholarly article in the journal of the Vienna
Academy of Sciences. Despite his youthful enthusiasm and hard work, he was
unable to crack the mystery of eel reproduction, which would not be solved un-
til 1922, many years after he had given up on zoology and graduated to analyz-
ing the enigmas of human sexuality. Scientists eventually discovered that young
eels possess both male and female sex organs, and it is only in adulthood that
they acquire distinctive sex traits. Freud—like most other European research-
ers—had dissected only young hermaphroditic eels, and thus never came across
a fully developed male eel.
The mysteries of eel reproduction were eventually elucidated after a
surprising discovery. Scientists had been unable to observe how these animals
mate because their spawning grounds lie thousands of miles away from Europe,
in the Sargasso Sea. In order to reproduce, European eels must undertake an
extraordinarily complex transatlantic journey that often takes them through
rivers, lakes, fields, roads, and even patches of dry land. Once they reach the
Sargasso Sea, they plunge to the depths of the ocean, where they are believed
to die after spawning. After their eggs hatch, the elvers begin a reverse migra-
tion back to the land of their origins. Léon Bertin, author of Eels: A Biologi-
cal Study, writes that “all who have observed the . . . migration of the elvers
remark on their vigour and perseverance, which no lock-gates, sluices, barri-
ers or waterfalls can discourage.”104 Eels are remarkable animals indeed, and
Bertin muses that they “are on the whole extremely tough creatures. No other
fishes known are capable of rivaling them in their resistance to such diverse
surroundings.”105
Though Freud was unable to solve these mysteries, his eel experiments
exposed him for the first time in his life to the complexities of gender and sex-
ual identity. As he struggled to understand the sexual differentiation of these
marine animals, the young Freud encountered some of the same questions he
would ask, many years later, about human sexuality.
In addition to anticipating the future direction of his research, the eel
episode echoes the most salient themes in Freud’s correspondence with Eduard.
His scientific research was driven by a quest for masculinity: he was searching

186
 for male eels, just as earlier he had been in search of a male partner for his Span-
ish games (though finding a male Spanish speaker turned out to be much easier
than finding a male eel!).
And the fear of female sexuality that permeates the correspondence be-
tween the two boys reappears in Freud’s marine research, transformed into the
“torture” and sadistic treatment of female eels. Eissler has pointed out that eels
are zoological descendants of the Ichthyosaurus, the monstrous beast Freud
made into a caricature of femininity in his epithalamium, and that the young
boy considered girls, like eels, as “a different species.”106 In his letters to Eduard,
Freud compares the eels on his dissecting table to the women he encountered
on the streets of Trieste, referring to girls as “specimens” and describing their
“anatomical features” and their physiology, and even lamenting that “it is not al-
lowed to dissect human beings.”107 The eel, an animal that has been considered
voraciously sexual since antiquity, is one more avatar of the dangerous women
haunting the Freud‒Silberstein correspondence.
The eel—a hermaphroditic animal—caps the long list of ambigu-
ous gender figures found in the Freud‒Silberstein correspondence: there is
the young Freud, who seems more interested in Eduard than in girls; there is
Eduard, who has a difficult time deciding between girls and Freud; and there
are the repeated references to Fernán Caballero, the nineteenth-century Span-
ish novelist, who in reality was not a “caballero” but a woman named Cecilia
Bohl de Faber, a literary cross-dresser who is one of the only women who is
not perceived as dangerous.108 Like all these characters, the adolescent Freud
seemed to be experiencing an instance of “gender trouble,” a transitional period
during which his desires, fantasies, sexual identity, and gender identification
were ambivalent and in flux. Like eels, Freud had a hermaphroditic youth—
even if in his case it was only a matter of psychic hermaphroditism.

c o n c l u s i o n : s pa n i s h b e y o n d s i l b e r s t e i n

Of all the languages Freud spoke fluently, Spanish had a place apart. English and
French were languages he used professionally: as a student he attended Char-
cot’s lectures in French, and later in life he analyzed many English-speaking
patients. Like most educated men of his time, Freud also had a good grasp of
Latin and Greek, and he often borrowed terms from these languages—“eros,”

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 187
“phobia,” “psyche”—to explain his psychoanalytic theories. But Spanish was
different: Freud did not read scientific literature written in this language, and
he did not use it in his articles or books. The reader finds the occasional phrase
in English, French, or Italian in works from The Interpretation of Dreams to
Moses and Monotheism, but he would be hard pressed to find a Spanish word
in these texts.
As is evident from his letters to his translators and Latin American
readers, Freud never forgot his Spanish, and maintained fond memories of
his youthful linguistic adventures until the end of his life. Yet Spanish always
remained a private language whose use was limited to a single interlocutor:
Eduard Silberstein. After the two friends lost touch, we have no indication
that Freud ever wrote a letter or spoke a word in the language of Cervantes. If
French and English were professional languages, Spanish belonged to the realm
of play. Freud later theorized that the passage from childhood to adulthood in-
volved a renunciation of the pleasure principle in favor of the reality principle.
In his own case this passage had a linguistic dimension: as play gave way to work,
Spanish ceded ground to English as his favored second language. If Spanish
was the language of the pleasure principle, English won as the idiom of reality.
In Echolalias, Daniel Heller-Roazen analyzes the forgetting of lan-
guages and the representation of this loss in Western literature, and notes that
Freud touched briefly on this question in his early work on aphasia.109 But
Freud’s own experience was different, since he never lost a language: he simply
stopped speaking and writing in Spanish. In 1919, when the Peruvian Honorio
Delgado, one of the first Latin Americans to become interested in his work,
sent him an obsequious letter and some articles on psychoanalysis that he had
published in Peru, Freud responded that he was looking forward to reading
more of his work, and added: “Ich lese selbst Spanisch [I myself read Spanish],”
as if to encourage his correspondent to write in that language.110 Delgado re-
sponded with a letter in Spanish, which gave Freud great pleasure. “I’m glad,” he
wrote Delgado on February 22, 1920, “that when I was a young man I studied
your beautiful Castilian language to read Don Quixote in the original: I have
been able to understand perfectly, without a dictionary, your friendly letter.”111
Freud had a similar experience a few years later, in 1923, when the Span-
ish translator Luis López Ballesteros sent him the Castilian versions of The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Freud responded with a warm letter, thanking the Spaniard for an accurate
translation. “As a young student,” he wrote, “the desire to read the immortal

188
Don Quixote in the Cervantine original led me to learn, without a teacher, the
beautiful Castilian language. Thanks to this youthful passion I can now, in my
old age, see the accuracy of your Spanish translation of my works. It has been
a pleasure to read because of the correct interpretation of my thought and the
elegance of its style. It surprises me that not being trained as a doctor or a psy-
chiatrist you have been able to completely and accurately master an extremely
complex discipline that is often obscure.”112
Interestingly, Freud wrote both letters in German: even while he in-
sisted on his continued ability to read and understand Spanish. He could not
bring himself to write in Spanish for anyone else after Eduard.
Though Freud never used Spanish in his published work, Spanish
words and phrases do appear throughout his correspondence, most notably in
two letters to Wilhelm Fliess—a man with whom Freud had a relationship
as intense and as passionate as his friendship with Eduard.113 In a letter from
1896 devoted to theorizing the workings of memory, Freud drew an analogy
between an obscure Spanish legal concept and the workings of memory: rec-
ollections, he wrote, become invested with successive affective charges. “An
anachronism persists,” much in the same way that “in a particular province,
fueros are still in force, we are in the presence of ‘survivals’”114 Four years later,
Freud used a different Spanish term to describe himself as an explorer of the
unconscious: “I am,” he wrote Fliess, “by temperament nothing but a conquis-
tador—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, dar-
ing, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.”115 And in a letter sent
to Romain Rolland on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Freud quotes
a medieval Spanish poem, “El Romance del Rey Moro que perdió Alhama” in
the original as an example of derealization, of an inability to acknowledge an
event as real. Receiving the news that his city, Alhama, has fallen, the Moorish
king kills the messenger and burns the letter: “Cartas le fueron venidas / que
Alhama era ganada: / las cartas echo en el fuego / y al mensajero matara” [Let-
ters arrived / telling him Alhama had fallen / he threw the letters in the fire /
and killed the messenger].116
Out of the few Spanish words Freud used later in life, he seemed espe-
cially fond of “¿Quién sabe?,” a common expression used to indicate doubt or
uncertainty, which translates literally as “who knows?” Freud often resorted to
this phrase at crucial—and often traumatic—moments in his life.
In 1934, Arnold Zweig asked Freud to interpret Nietzsche’s personal-
ity. Freud responded that “one cannot see through anyone unless one knows

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 189
 something about his sexual constitution,” and that with Nietzsche “this is a
complete enigma.” He mentions a rumor that the philosopher had been “a pas-
sive homosexual” and “had acquired syphilis in a male brothel in Italy,” but re-
fuses to speculate, telling his friend: “Whether that is true: quién sabe?”117
More poignant was another instance in 1938, when the Nazi occupa-
tion of Austria was imminent and Freud saw his own life under threat. “It un-
deniably looks like the beginning of the end for me,” he wrote Marie Bonaparte.
“Will it still be possible to find safety in the shelter of the Catholic Church?” he
asked, before exclaiming: “Quién sabe?”118
Freud repeated the same expression a few months later in a letter to
Ernest Jones about the Anschluss. This time he wondered if the political situ-
ation—and the cancer that would eventually kill him—would prevent him
from completing Moses and Monotheism. The book, he wrote, “torments me
like an unlaid ghost,” and he then asked: “I wonder if I shall ever complete this
third part despite all the outer and inner difficulties.” Once again, he answered
his own question with the Spanish phrase: “At present, I cannot believe it. But
quién sabe?”119
These three uses of “Quién sabe?” are extremely telling. In the first,
Freud invokes the expression after confessing his inability to offer a definite
pronouncement on Nietzsche’s sexuality. In the second and third instances,
Freud uses it to express anxieties about the future and his fear of mortality. In all
cases, he lapses into Spanish to express uncertainty, indeterminacy, and anxiety.
Freud had learned Spanish during his adolescence, a period during which his
own subjectivity was still unformed and his life full of uncertainties: Would he
study sciences or humanities? Was he more attracted to girls’ bodies or Eduard’s
mind? Did he live in the fantasy realm of Cervantes or in the real world of
Hapsburg Austria? Should he write in Spanish or German? Once Freud en-
tered adulthood, all these ambivalences gave way to a clearly defined identity:
he chose heterosexual marriage, a career in science, and a resolute acquiescence
to the reality principle. But whenever this apparently immutable identity came
under threat—as it did with the Anschluss—Freud was reminded of the psy-
chic formlessness of his adolescent years, and his unconscious associations led
him back to the language of his youth and of the Academia Española. In these
instances, Freud—who, like Oedipus, wanted to know and find answers to all
questions—had no other remedy than to throw his hands in the air and ex-
claim, in Spanish, “¿Quién sabe?”

190
 Even Freud’s use of the Spanish term conquistador in the letter to Fliess
is ultimately an expression of ambivalence and self-doubt. The passage is often
quoted to show that Freud saw himself as a great man destined to achieve fame
and glory. But Freud, in fact, resorted to this Spanish word in a moment of self-
doubt: his letter to Fliess chronicles his anxieties and his fear of failure. The full
passage reads:

Perhaps hard times are ahead, both for me and for my practice. On the whole, I
have noticed that you usually overestimate me greatly. . . . For I am actually not
a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by
temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it trans-
lated—with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this
sort. Such people are customarily esteemed only if they have been successful,
have really discovered something; otherwise they are dropped by the wayside.
And that is not altogether unjust. At the present time, however, luck has left me;
I no longer discover anything worthwhile.120

In calling himself a conquistador, Freud was in fact betraying his anxieties

about failure, about not being a true man of science and not having made a
significant discovery. This episode is thus consistent with his other lapses into
Spanish during moments of self-doubt and anxiety.
Even in his old age, Freud associated Spanish with his adolescence and
with his passionate friendship with Eduard Silberstein. Spanish continued to
be a private language linked to the memories of his youth, of his first readings
of Cervantes, his first love, and his first attempts at scientific research. Through
Spanish, Freud discovered the Exemplary Novels, made his first male friend,
gave voice to his fear of femininity, and even dissected eels. Through these ex-
plorations, Spanish remained the language of doubt, of ambiguity and ambiva-
lence, the tongue of adolescent formlessness, of gender undifferentiation and
psychic bisexuality. It was a tongue of immense affective intensity: a Pandora’s
box that Freud chose not to open ever again after his last letter to Eduard.
After reading his letters to Eduard, twenty-first-century readers, im-
mersed as they are in debates about gay rights, same-sex marriage, and queer
activism, might wonder if this special friendship would be better analyzed us-
ing a more contemporary terminology: was Freud gay? Bisexual? Questioning?

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 191
Bi-curious? Would he have joined the University of Vienna’s GLBTQ group if
it had existed in the 1870s as it does now?121 Was his friendship with Eduard
typical of fin-de-siècle transitional homoeroticism? And, to invoke a fitting psy-
choanalytic concept, did Freud ever act out his fantasies? How far did the two
boys take their elaborate flirtation?
Freud’s letters to Eduard Silberstein reveal nothing about a physical re-
lationship; both men died many years ago, taking their secrets to the tomb. But
as Freud might have said, sometimes fantasies matter more than deeds, and
what went through the two boys’ minds—and hearts—could well have been
more intense, more real, and more significant than whatever they might have
done together. What we do know is that the two boys played an elaborate hom-
age to Spain, Cervantes, and the two canine protagonists of the “Colloquy,”
and therefore whatever they did, whether in fantasy or in reality, they did in
Spanish, doggie style.

192
INDIA

Though Octavio Paz described his Labyrinth of Solitude as a Mexican version

of Moses and Monotheism, there is one important difference between his essay
and Freud’s last work: Paz does not explore the rise of monotheism, one of the
central themes in Freud’s study. One could argue that Freud was writing about
Ancient Egypt while Paz focused on post-Conquest Mexico, but even then, an
emphasis on monotheism would allow a fresh perspective on the destruction of
Aztec religion and the implantation of Catholicism in the New Spain.
Paz seems to have been aware of this important omission: he returned
to Freud’s Moses in his last major work, In Light of India, published in 1995.
This time, the emphasis was not on the themes he had explored in The Laby-
rinth—Oedipus, Geistigkeit, solitude—but on the question of monotheism, as
it related not to Mexico but to India.
India was, along with Mexico and France, one of Paz’s greatest loves. He
discovered this vast country in 1951, when he spent a few months working at the
Mexican Embassy in New Delhi, and returned in 1962, this time for six years,
after being appointed ambassador to India. The discovery of a culture that was
at once radically other and strangely reminiscent of Mexico invigorated Paz:
he was even more productive than usual, and the poems he wrote in Delhi, in-
cluding Blanco and The Monkey Grammarian, sparkle with energy, pleasure,
and humor. And it was in India that Paz met Marie-José Tramini, who would
become his wife and live with him until his death.

193
 Paz wrote many poems about India and planned to one day write a long
essay about his years there. He didn’t get to it until he was almost eighty, gravely
ill and aware that this would most certainly be his last book, the coda to a long
career that had began with the publication of The Labyrinth in 1950. His first
publication had been about Mexico; his last one would be devoted to India.
Both were responses to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.
Freud was chiefly interested in the psychic and cultural effects of reli-
gions: he linked the rise of monotheism to the advance in intellectuality. Paz,
on the other hand, focused on its political dimension: a monotheistic world-
view, he wrote, goes hand in hand with centralized power, and “one need not
share Freud’s theory that the origin of Jewish monotheism was the theological
absolutism of pharaoh Akhenaton (Amenophis IV) to understand the natural
relation between a single power and a belief in a single god.”122
In order to explore the political effects of monotheism, Paz compares
two very different cultures: India, where a polytheistic religion has survived
into the present, despite the incursions of Islam and Christianity; and Mexico,
where pre- Columbian polytheism gave way to Spanish Catholicism, though
elements of Indian rituals survived in the new religion.
India’s refusal of monotheism explains, in Paz’s view, its diversity and
heterogeneity. “Monotheism,” he writes, “has been the great unifier of differ-
ent peoples, languages, races, and cultures,”123 a powerful centrifugal force that
produces cohesive societies; polytheism, in contrast, accounts for the vast mo-
saic of peoples and customs found in India. Paz believes that the few elements
that hold the country together—including the English language—were intro-
duced by the British, emissaries of a monotheistic culture.
Mexico, on the other hand, had the opposite experience: Aztec reli-
gion was destroyed by the Spaniards, and polytheism quickly gave way to the
belief in a single God. Paz credits Spanish Catholicism with accomplishing
what the Aztecs never achieved: a unification of the disparate groups inhabit-
ing the Mexican territory. Monotheism created a cohesive nation, but also pro-
duced the extremely powerful, almost despotic rulers that Paz decried in The
Labyrinth and Posdata: the belief in one God goes hand in hand with the cult
of an almighty ruler. (In a recent book Enrique Krauze, one of Mexico’s most
distinguished historians, follows Paz’s lead and invokes Moses and Monothe-
ism to explain the popularity of Hugo Chávez; Venezuelans, he suggests, have
adopted him as a paternal figure to atone for the guilt of having sacrificed
Simón Bolívar, the country’s founding father.)124

194
 Despite their radically different historical experiences, Mexico and In-
dia face similar challenges: coming to terms with the past, preparing for the
future, and reconciling tradition with the demands of modernity. In both coun-
tries, Paz sees an explosive resurgence of nationalism as a response to historical
traumas that have not been worked through, and stem from the clash between
polytheism and monotheism. “In countries like India and Mexico, which have
been colonies and have suffered psychic wounds, nationalism is sometimes ag-
gressive and deadly, and sometimes comic.”125
But what role does Geistigkeit—another central theme in Moses and
Monotheism—play in the struggle between polytheism and monotheism in In-
dia and Mexico? How does Freud’s association of polytheism with Sinnlichkeit
and monotheism with Geistigkeit relate to the political reading of religious be-
lief offered by Paz? Does the Mexican poet accept Freud’s hypothesis that
monotheism produces an advance in intellectuality? This would imply that
polytheistic India is somehow less intellectual than monotheistic Mexico—
a notion that seems incompatible with Paz’s exuberant enthusiasm for that
country.
But perhaps there is another way to frame the question. Freud asso-
ciated polytheism with a voluptuous, feminine sensuality and, likewise, Paz
claimed the realm of the senses as a site of privileged experience for poetry.
And at no time in his life did he experience sensuality as intensely as during
his time in India: his poetry overflows with colors, smells, and sounds; and the
erotic scenes painted in The Monkey Grammarian, with their acrobatic gym-
nastics—toes in the air, hands and feet entwined—would lead even the most
experienced reader of the Kama Sutra to raise an eyebrow.
In India Octavio Paz discovered a sensual intensity that he had not
known in Mexico, France, or any of the other monotheistic cultures where he
had lived. Perhaps this is why the poet, at the end of his life, chose to conclude
a long and brilliant career as an intellectual by returning to a scene of sensual-
ity. In Light of India closes with a “Farewell” that is not only an Epilogue: it is a
moving gesture by an eighty-year-old poet who found himself at the end of the
road. Paz, like Freud in 1939, was dying of cancer. In Light of India was his fare-
well, just as Moses and Monotheism had been Freud’s. And to say goodbye—to
his readers, to the world, to life—Paz leaves us with an evocation of his last day
in India, a reminiscence that is also a tribute to what we might call the advance
in Sinnlichkeit:

Chapter 5 | f r e u d ’s s pa n i s h 195
We spent the last Sunday on the island of Elephanta. It had been my first expe-
rience of Indian art; it had also been the same for Marie-José, years after mine
though before we had met. There were many tourists, which at first ruined our
visit. But the beauty of the place conquered all the distractions and intrusions.
The blue of the sea and the sky; the curving bay and its banks, some white, oth-
ers green, ocher, violet; the island fallen in the water like an enormous stone;
the cave and, in the half-light, the sculptures, images of beings that are of this
world and of another that we can only glimpse . . . I relived what we had felt
years ago, but now illuminated by a more serious light: we thought that we were
seeing all this for the last time. It was as though we were leaving ourselves. Time
opened its doors. What was waiting for us?126

Paz began his career by writing an intellectual history of Mexico. He closed it

with an ode to Indian sensuality. His beginnings and farewell were linked by an
arch spanning decades and continents: Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.

196
 | 6 |

FREUD’S
MEXICAN
BOOKS

Freud’s early fascination with Spanish language and Spanish literature prepared
him for the time in his adult life when he would correspond with the numer-
ous disciples in Spain and Latin America who would regularly send him Span-
ish books and articles. Among the numerous Spanish publications in Freud’s
library—including the 16 volumes of his Complete Works translated into Span-
ish—there is one, printed in Mexico City, that stands out as somewhat of an
anomaly: Derecho penal mexicano: Parte general (1937), by Raúl Carrancá y
Trujillo, a textbook on Mexican criminal law.
Out of all the Mexican books Freud could have owned—on pre-
Columbian history, on the Mexican Revolution, on art or literature—this one
stands out as an odd choice: not only was it devoted to a recondite subject that
had little to do with Freud’s interests, but it was also authored by Raúl Carrancá
y Trujillo, an unknown writer who does not appear in standard histories of
twentieth-century Mexican culture. How did Freud come to own such an ec-
centric Mexican book? And what does this volume tell us about the analyst’s
perception of Mexico?
Armed with these questions, and with a desire to crack the mystery of
Freud’s lone Mexican book, I traveled to London, made an appointment to
meet with Michael Molnar, then the Freud Museum’s research director, and
asked if I could have access to the library in order to examine the volume in
question. I was hoping to find a dedication, an inscription, an annotation, or

199
any other paratextual clue that might shed light on the book’s provenance. But
my great expectations were dashed: after listening to my request, Molnar ex-
plained that even though Derecho penal formed part of Freud’s library, the book
was not in London, but on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York City,
where it could be consulted at Columbia University’s Health Sciences Library.
As I learned, Freud’s library had been divided just before his departure
for London in 1938. One part, consisting of almost two-thirds of his books, ac-
companied him to London, while the remainder, a lot of about eight hundred
volumes, was purchased by the antiquarian dealer Heinrich Hinterberger, who
then sold the volumes to the New York State Psychiatric Institute, which in
turn ceded them to Columbia University. Hinterberger advertised the lot in
various publications, keeping Freud’s identity confidential and identifying the
previous owner only as “a famous Viennese scientific explorer.”1
Derecho penal was among the books Freud chose to leave in Vienna,
along with a number of publications in Spanish that had been sent, often with
obsequious dedications, by doctors and psychiatrists from Spain and Latin
America, including the Chileans Fernando Allende Navarro and Juan Marín,
the Ecuadorian Humberto Salvador, and the Argentinians Juan Ramón Bel-
trán, Gregorio Bermann, and Fernando Gorriti. Columbia’s collection can be
thought of as a kind of salon des refusés, a collection of the books Freud rejected
when faced with the need to save the most important part of the library.2 The
only Latin American author who survived the purge and accompanied Freud
to London was Honorio Delgado, a young Peruvian doctor who corresponded
regularly with Freud and was mentioned affectionately in “On the History of
the Psycho-Analytic Movement.”
Derecho penal is the odd book out in Freud’s Spanish collection: all the
others are introductions to psychoanalysis written by doctors or psychiatrists,
and it is easy to see why these authors sent their work to the Viennese analyst;
Derecho penal, on the other hand, was written by a legal scholar and dealt with
a field to which Freud had no apparent connection.
Back in New York, I took the subway uptown to consult the Freud
holdings at Columbia’s Health Sciences Library. This time I was in luck: an at-
tendant brought me Freud’s copy of Derecho penal. Judging from its condition,
it had never been opened by Freud or by anyone else. Disappointingly, it lacked
a dedication or other annotations.
Nevertheless, the book did have some valuable information about the
author, Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, identified on the frontispiece as a “judge, pro-
fessor of criminal law at the University of Mexico, and recipient of a doctorate

200
f i g u r e 6.1
Freud’s Mexican book: Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, Derecho penal mexicano: Parte general
(1937). Photo courtesy Columbia University Health Sciences Library, Archives and Special
Collections Department.

from the University of Madrid.”3 He was in born in 1897 in the southern state
of Campeche to a Spanish father, and as a young student he received a schol-
arship to study in Spain, at the Central University in Madrid, where he com-
pleted his undergraduate and graduate studies before returning to Mexico City
in 1925. He rose quickly through the judicial system and became a university
professor, editor of Criminalia, a journal of criminology, and eventually a
judge. He was an ambitious young man, and wrote his first book—an essay on
“the political evolution of Latin America”4 —while still in his twenties. By age
thirty-five, he had published a novel and four volumes dealing with various as-
pects of Mexican and Spanish law.
Derecho penal includes a chapter that sheds light on how this book
might have surfaced in Freud’s library. Carrancá presents himself as a disciple
of Cesare Lombroso and a firm believer in positivism, and defines criminology
as a new science dependent on a series of “auxiliary disciplines”: anthropol-
ogy, endocrinology, sociology, statistics, medicine, and psychology.5

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 201
 Out of all these “auxiliary disciplines” Carrancá was most interested in
criminal psychology. As he explained in Derecho penal, he was an avid reader of
Freud and considered his work an invaluable tool for legal work:6 like forensic
medicine, psychoanalysis could help lawyers and judges reach a well-founded
verdict.7 The interpretative techniques discovered by Freud could be used “to
analyze the criminal’s psychological traits and to pinpoint the causes for his
transgression.”8 Criminals often suffered from unresolved complexes and other
active neuroses, and psychoanalysis could reveal the unconscious motives that
led them to act out. Carrancá presented himself as an authority, telling his read-
ers that he had published several articles on criminal psychology, and that one
of these had been favorably reviewed by none other than Doctor Freud himself.
The article in question, “A Judicial Experiment with Psychoanalytic
Techniques,” was published three years earlier, in 1934; it was one of a series of
articles Carrancá wrote for Criminalia exploring the possible uses of psycho-
analytic theories in the practice of criminal law, and presenting one of the most
creative—and unusual—readings of Freud anywhere in the world.

prison sex

Carrancá’s first psychoanalytically inspired article, “Sex and the Penal System”
(1933), explored a topic that few had dared to discuss openly in a country that
was still largely dominated by Catholic mores: the sexual life of prisoners. In
1924 Mexico had passed a law allowing inmates to receive weekly spousal visits;
in theory, this ruling meant that most prisoners could satisfy their sexual needs
on a regular basis, but in practice visits were authorized only for male inmates
who had demonstrated “good conduct” and were serving long-term sentences.
In Carrancá’s view, these conditions imposed a terrible hardship on a majority
of the prisoners, and his article made a passionate argument for a loosening the
restrictions.
To learn more about inmates and their sexual needs, Carrancá inter-
viewed two prisoners: Antonio, a middle-class man who had spent eight
months in jail for robbery, and Juan, a working-class inmate sentenced to four
years for murder. Carrancá asked the inmates a series of questions about their
sexual practices and transcribed their responses. Their conversation reveals a
clash of two very different worlds:

202
 Carrancá: How do those who cannot receive spousal visits satisfy their
sexual needs?
Antonio: By means of onanism . . . and by means of the effeminate in-
mates in cells 56, 58, and 60.
Carrancá: How do these effeminate [inmates] make themselves recog-
nizable to other inmates?
Antonio: By their dress, their makeup, and their use of pet names like
“La Eva,” “La Miss Mexico,” “La Brunette,” “La Barbara Lamar,” “La Onion
Peeler.”9
Carrancá: How could the prison authorities help solve your sexual
problems?
Antonio: Since I have no money and I can’t pay a woman to come see me,
I’d ask to be allowed to meet with a woman prisoner of my liking. I’ve been
locked up for eight months, and I’m only twenty-five. Whenever I go see a
film, I see couples—men and women touching each other—I see love scenes
on screen and my body gets overstimulated; the way the prison is set up, I
have no natural means of satisfying my sexual needs.10

Carrancá argued that the inmates were subjected to a cruel and unusual form of
punishment that amounted to forced abstinence. “Every person with a modi-
cum of culture,” he wrote, “knows that sexual satisfaction . . . is not an unneces-
sary luxury but a vital and primal need.”11 Ignoring the prisoners’ needs would
lead to an unusually high degree of “sexual aberrations” among the prison
population: “homosexuality and onanism among men . . . ; lesbianism among
women.”12 If inmates are not allowed to satisfy their sexual needs, their frustra-
tion “will unleash the formerly repressed aberrant instincts, which will domi-
nate the individual with such force that nothing will ever succeed in taming
them again.”13
Carrancá closed his article with a passionate plea to the judicial authori-
ties for a liberalization of the conditions governing spousal visits. He argued
that both men and women should be allowed visits; that these should not be
contingent on the inmate’s conduct; and that their frequency should be deter-
mined in accordance with “the inmate’s sexual temperament.”14
We can clearly see echoes of Freud’s theories in Carrancá’s arguments.
Freud argued that sex is a drive, and that a forced repression of sexual impulses
paves the way for neuroses. His Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality even

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 203
considered the case of prison inmates, who were prone to become “contingent
inverts” after prolonged and “exclusive relations with persons of their own sex.”15
Carrancá, however, tinged his argument with a moralism that is absent
from Freud’s Three Essays. Freud began his remarks by stating that inversion
was no more aberrant than heterosexuality, and that deviations in the sexual
aim—including fetishism, scopophilia, and sadomasochism—were neither
pathological nor examples of degeneration, since they were invariably pres-
ent, to different degrees, in “normal” sexuality. Carrancá, in contrast, presents
homosexuality—as well as onanism—as degenerate practices that should be
stamped out from Mexican prisons. There is a striking difference between
Freud and Carrancá: Freud wants to understand and analyze all forms of sexu-
ality, without passing judgment, while Carrancá—who was a judge, after all—
is less interested in delving into psychological motives than in censoring the
inmates’ sexual practices that fell outside normative heterosexuality.
Despite these differences, Carrancá’s article has the virtue of being one
of the first attempts to incorporate psychoanalytic theories into legal debates.
And notwithstanding his slightly moralistic tone, one has to credit him with
breaking one of Mexico’s most entrenched cultural taboos by launching a seri-
ous, open, and theoretically informed discussion on sexuality.

criminals on the couch

A few months after his article on the sexual lives of inmates, Carrancá wrote a
second essay inspired by Freud: “A Judicial Experiment with Psychoanalytic
Techniques,” published in the February 1934 issue of Criminalia. Here Ca-
rrancá argued that Freud’s œuvre was an invaluable tool for judges and crim-
inologists in elucidating the criminal mind: psychoanalytic theory could be
applied to criminal psychology, and used to reveal the unconscious motiva-
tions and desires behind criminal acts. Carrancá’s article was full of praise for
the father of psychoanalysis. “Sigmund Freud,” he wrote, “that intrepid explorer
of the human soul and its dark, subterranean recesses, offers his psychoanaly-
sis to prosecutors as a sort of magic lantern capable of illuminating the way.
Freud is an Aladdin with a marvelous lamp, a type of ‘open Sesame.’”16 Ca-
rrancá recommends that judges study psychoanalysis and apply its techniques
to criminal cases.

204
 Rather than writing a theoretical comparison between the conceptions
of subjectivity presented by psychoanalysis and criminology, Carrancá chose
a more pragmatic approach: the young judge decided to play the role of the
therapist, turned his office into a consulting room, and invited defendants sent
to him for judicial examination to talk freely about their lives, dreams, frustra-
tions, desires, sexual fantasies, and anything else that might shed light on their
unconscious mental processes. To carry out the analysis, Carrancá even con-
sidered putting a couch in his office, but in the end chose a less intimidating
option: a chair facing away from him so that his patients could speak without
looking at him.
One of his first cases involved a young man identified as “RHV”—like
Freud, he referred to patients by their initials to protect their privacy—and ac-
cused of shooting his wife in a fit of jealousy. On their first meeting, Carrancá
led the defendant into his office, summarized the basics of Freudian methods,
and invited him to sit on the analytic chair, facing away from him, and to tell
him anything and everything that came to mind. Dreams, slips, and sexual fan-
tasies, he told him, were of particular interest for his work. The judge gave the
following account of his first session:

Following Freud’s method . . . I decided to analyze RHV in a simple and straight-

forward setting. . . . I chose to use my own professional office, sheltered from
noise and people, especially in the early hours of the morning. I had R brought
there, and he remained completely alone with me. In order to gain his confi-
dence, I clearly explained my intentions, my interest in him, the way in which
we were to work together. I had taken the precaution of visiting him in prison
beforehand, so that he would not fear me. When our [analytic] work started, I
had already obtained from him a certain degree of trust, the necessary condi-
tion for honesty.

Starting with our first session, I asked R to sit facing away from me, looking at
a white and empty wall. I told him he could close his eyes if he wished. At first
it was a great struggle: he was reluctant to face away from me, fearing I might
play some kind of trick on him (or hypnotize him, as he told me later). After ex-
plaining in detail my purpose, I told him he was completely free to move about
as he wished, and even to turn around and look at me if he so desired (I thus
prepared myself for being surprised in the midst of my note taking). This last
proposal persuaded him, and a good number of our sessions unfolded in this

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 205
manner. Sometimes, at the most interesting point in his confessions, he would
close his eyes, cover them with his hands, or face away from me. We worked
together for several sessions, and I attempted to glimpse into his innermost
thoughts, into his subconscious.17

Carrancá published the case study of this first patient in Criminalia. After
quoting extensively from the defendant’s own account of his childhood, family
dynamics, work history, marriage, and the fit of jealousy that led him to shoot
his wife, the judge offers an analytic interpretation of these events: R had a
very “creative imagination,” and sometimes confused fantasy and reality; he sus-
pected his wife might be cheating on him, and this fear led him to picture her
in bed with another man, a mental image that became as real—and as unbear-
able—as if it had actually occurred; R was overwhelmed by “violent passions”
as he flew into a murderous rage and shot her to death.18
During the legal proceedings, the defense argued that R had com-
mitted a “crime of passion”—a momentary lapse in judgment that was treated
with leniency in Mexican criminal law. The prosecution, in contrast, construed
the killing as a premeditated homicide. Carrancá was not persuaded by either ar-
gument: on the basis of the unconscious material uncovered during his ana-
lytic sessions, he found the defendant guilty of homicide, but ruled that it had
not been premeditated, since he had been “provoked by the victim” and by her
flirtatious demeanor toward other men. R, the first defendant to be psychoana-
lyzed by a judge in Mexico, was sentenced on December 27, 1933, to three years
in prison.19
Carrancá closed his article by noting that he was the first judge in
Mexico—and probably one of the first in the “civilized legal world”—to have
delved into the unconscious of a criminal.20 At the age of thirty-seven Ca-
rrancá was already a bold explorer, intent on breaking new ground in the field
of criminal law. Some years before, the Mexican philosopher José Vasconce-
los called himself “Ulises criollo,” a Mexican—criollo—version of the Homeric
hero. Carrancá hoped to become a “Freud criollo,” an analyst who re-created the
experiments of the Viennese doctor on Mexican soil.
One wonders what Freud might have thought of Carrancá’s creative but
unorthodox use of psychoanalysis. Would he have been pleased to know that
his theories were making ripples throughout the world, reaching even Mexi-
can courthouses? Or would he have dismissed these “judicial experiments” as
the type of unprofessional abuses that had given analysis a bad name in certain

206
 circles? Was this a legitimate application of psychoanalysis? Would he have
seen Carrancá as a faithful disciple or as an impostor?
In 1910 Freud had published a paper criticizing the sloppy methods of
certain therapists: “wild psychoanalysis,” he quipped, was practiced by doctors
who had never undergone proper training, had little or no experience with the
technique of free association, and lacked an understanding of unconscious pro-
cesses. In most cases, these practitioners had reduced Freud’s theory of sexual-
ity to a caricature: they understood sexual drives as simply “the need for coitus
or analogous acts producing orgasm and emission of the sexual substances.”21
Freud thundered that this vulgar approach to sexuality had nothing to
do with psychoanalysis, a complex theory in which “the concept of what is
sexual comprises far more; it goes lower and also higher than its popular sense.”
For this reason, he continued, “we prefer to speak of psychosexuality, thus lay-
ing stress on the point that the mental factor in sexual life should not be over-
looked or underestimated.” And psychosexuality was a complicated affair, one
whose vicissitudes did not always correspond to the patient’s sexual practices:
“We have long known, too, that mental absence of satisfaction with all its conse-
quences can exist where there is no lack of normal sexual intercourse.” Anyone
who does not share these views of sexual life, Freud warned, “has no right to ad-
duce psycho-analytic theses dealing with the aetiological importance of sexual-
ity.”22 He concluded by declaring: “‘wild’ analysts of this kind do more harm to
the cause of psycho-analysis than to individual patients.”23
Would Freud have considered Carrancá a wild analyst? The Mexican
judge certainly fits the profile sketched in the article: in his writings Carrancá
reduced sexuality to its genital component, and his article on prison sex ar-
gues that neuroses can be averted or cured by engaging in regular sexual in-
tercourse—the same argument Freud attributes to a hypothetical wild analyst.
Freud recommended that only those familiar with the “technical rules” practice
psychoanalysis, and that a treatment was an extremely long process that could
not be rushed. Carrancá, in contrast, had little familiarity with the technique
of analysis, and his psycho-legal treatments lasted no more than a few days. It
seems almost certain that Freud would have considered him a practitioner of
wild psychoanalysis—or, in this case, wild psycho-legal analysis.
But contrary to our expectations, Freud had an altogether different re-
sponse to Carrancá’s experiments. Soon after “A Legal Experiment with Psycho-
analytic Techniques” appeared in Criminalia, Carrancá mailed a copy to Freud.
Freud responded with a gracious—albeit brief—letter: telling the Mexican

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 207
judge that he had read his article with great interest, that he approved of the ef-
forts to find new applications for psychoanalysis, and that “it has always been an
ideal desire for the psychoanalyst to win two people for our discipline: teachers
of youth and judges.”24 To my knowledge, Freud never made this last assertion
anywhere else in his writing.
Far from considering Carrancá a wild analyst who might hurt the cause
of psychoanalysis, Freud celebrated his role as a proselytizer, as someone who
might win desirable allies for the cause.
Carrancá, who was understandably proud to have received such a glow-
ing review from the father of psychoanalysis, published a facsimile of the letter
in Criminalia:

13.2.1934
Hochgeehrter Herr
Ich habe zum Glück in meiner jungen Jahren Ihre schöne Sprache lesen gelernt
und bin so im Stande, mich an der Schätzung und dem Interesse zu freuen, das
Sie unserer Psychoanalyse zeigen und an der Anwendungen teilzunehmen die
Sie auf ihren Arbeitsgebiet von ihr machen. Leider habe ich es nicht so weit ge-
bracht auch Spanisch zu schreiben und muß sie bitten sich eine deutsche Ant-
wort gefallen zu lassen.
Es war immer ein Idealwunsch des Analytikers, zwei Personen für un-
serer Deutungsart zu gewinnen, der Jugendlehrer und der Richter.
Ihr herzlich ergebener,
Freud25

[February 13, 1934

Dear Sir,
I had the good fortune of learning to read your beautiful language in my youth;
I was pleased to discover the interest and the appreciation you have shown
toward our psychoanalysis, and to learn of how you have applied it to your
discipline.
Unfortunately I cannot go as far as to write you in Spanish, and I must
ask you to accept a German response.
It has always been an ideal desire for the psychoanalyst to win two
people for our discipline: teachers of youth and judges.
Yours sincerely,
Freud]

208
f i g u r e 6.2
Freud’s letter to Carrancá y Trujillo, February 13, 1934. Reproduced in Criminalia 8 (April
1934): 160.

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 209
Freud’s letter to Carrancá has never been reprinted, and, as of this writing, it
is not included in the correspondence at the Freud archives in the Library of
Congress. It is Freud’s only letter to a Mexican correspondent, and one of the
very few texts in which he addresses the relation between psychoanalysis and
criminology.

the criminal unconscious

At this point it would be worthwhile to open a parenthesis, leaving aside Ca-

rrancá and Mexico so we can consider Freud’s position toward criminology.
How did Freud see the criminal system and the figure of the judge? Did he
believe, like Carrancá, that criminology was compatible with psychoanalysis?
Was his enthusiasm for Carrancá’s variety of judicial-analytic experiments an
honest assertion or simply a polite remark written hastily in a thank you note
to a faraway correspondent?
Since the early years of his career, Freud had expressed an interest in
criminology and invented a number of judicial metaphors to explain psycho-
analytic concepts: he described the superego as a “judge,” argued that civili-
zation was based on a primeval “crime,” and questioned why neurotics feel
inexplicably “guilty.” On at least two occasions he was asked to provide expert
opinions for criminal trials, and thus had the opportunity to examine closely
the workings of the Austrian judicial system. On the basis of these experiences,
he wrote three short essays on the relation between psychoanalysis and crimi-
nology: “Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of Fact in Legal Proceedings”
(1906), “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work” (1916),
and “The Expert Opinion in the Halsmann Case” (1931). In addition, Freud
wrote a memorandum for the defense in the trial of a man charged with assault,
but this document has not survived.26
“Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of Fact in Legal Proceedings,”
the first of these three essays, was originally given as a lecture at the seminar of
Dr. Löffler, professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vienna. Speaking
to an audience of aspiring prosecutors and legal scholars, Freud suggested that
criminology and psychoanalysis have much in common: the judge, like the ana-
lyst, must “uncover the hidden psychical material,” by deploying a set of “detec-
tive devices.” And criminals, like neurotics, go through great trouble to protect
a closely guarded secret.27

210
 Criminals resemble neurotics, but Freud concedes there are important
differences between the two. Although both of these figures have something to
hide, “in the case of the criminal it is a secret which he knows and hides from
[the judge], whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a secret which he himself
does not know either, which is hidden even from himself.” The criminal stages
a “pretence of ignorance,” while the neurotic patient suffers from a “genuine
ignorance” of the originating cause for his illness.28 Both criminals and neu-
rotics deploy defense mechanisms to prevent their secret from being exposed,
but while criminals put up a resistance “that comes entirely from conscious-
ness,” the neurotic equivalent “arises at the frontier between unconscious and
conscious.”29
Freud remarks that for obvious reasons patients tend to be more co-
operative than criminals. “In psycho-analysis,” he writes, “the patient assists
with his conscious efforts to combat his resistance, because he expects to gain
something from the investigation, namely his recovery. The criminal, on the
other hand, does not work with [the judge]; if he did, he would be working
against his whole ego.”30
Finally, Freud asserts that judges are at a disadvantage because their dis-
cipline does not allow them to probe beyond the defendant’s conscious mind.
Without access to the unconscious—and its complex web of desires, fears, and
drives—judges can easily misinterpret the defendant’s behavior. They could,
for instance, “be led astray by a neurotic who, although he is innocent, reacts
as if he were guilty, because a lurking sense of guilt that already exists in him
seizes upon the accusation made in the particular instance.” Judges, in other
words, are unable to perceive the difference between a conscious and an un-
conscious sense of guilt—a distinction that would not be lost upon the psycho-
analyst.31
Professor Löffler invited Freud to present this paper at his seminar be-
cause he, like Carrancá, believed that analysis could be a useful tool for the
criminologist. Freud was skeptical: he did not like the idea of analysis be-
ing used as a tool, and was more interested in comparing the working meth-
ods of criminology and psychoanalysis—only to conclude that his own line
of work was much more sophisticated. Only psychoanalysis, with its capac-
ity to delve into the unconscious, can do justice to the complexities of the
criminal mind.
Almost a decade after the publication of this paper, Freud expanded his
observations on criminology and psychoanalysis in a new essay titled “Some
Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work.” The third section of this

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 211
 work focused on “Criminals from a sense of guilt,” a peculiar type of individual
Freud had encountered in the course of his analytic work.
Freud’s earlier paper presented the case of a defendant who was inno-
cent of a crime but, tormented by an unconscious sense of guilt, behaved as if
he were really guilty. He now considers the case of a criminal who is guilty of
a crime and also tormented by an unconscious sense of guilt. Inverting com-
monsense logic, Freud argues that such delinquents do not feel guilty because
they have broken the law, but, on the contrary, break the law because they are
tormented by an unbearable sense of guilt.
Freud explains this paradoxical assertion as follows: analytic work
shows that committing a crime can bring “mental relief [to its] doer.” He gives
the example of a criminal who “was suffering from an oppressive feeling of guilt,
of which he did not know the origin[;] after he had committed a misdeed this
oppression was mitigated . . . his sense of guilt was at least attached to some-
thing.” Freud calls these neurotics “criminals from a sense of guilt.”32
Freud asks two questions about this peculiar type of criminal: “What is
the origin of the sense of guilt before the deed, and is it possible that this kind
of causation plays any considerable part in human crime?” He answers the first
by stating that analytic work has shown that an obscure sense of guilt can al-
ways be traced back to the Oedipus complex, and to the crimes of patricide and
incest that lie at the origin of civilization.
Freud does not have such a clear answer to his second question about
the role of unconscious guilt in criminology. He suggests that an archaic sense
of guilt is probably present in most criminals, a fact that should be taken into
account by judges as they mete out punishments and attempt to elucidate the
“psychology of the criminal,” but offers no clues as to how this might be done.33
As he had done in the 1906 essay, Freud pits the judge against the ana-
lyst, concluding that the latter is better prepared to deal with the complexities
of the criminal psyche. A judge rules on whether a defendant is guilty or inno-
cent, whereas analysts can trace the origin of a criminal deed back to the early
history of the individual and the infancy of civilization.
Freud published his third and final essay on criminology and psycho-
analysis in 1931: “The Expert Opinion in the Halsmann Case.” A young Aus-
trian student, Philipp Halsmann, had been tried for patricide, found guilty, and
subsequently pardoned. Josef Kupka, a professor of jurisprudence at the Uni-
versity of Vienna, who believed the young man had been wrongly convicted in
the first place, launched a campaign to overturn the original verdict and clear

212
Halsmann’s name. As part of his legal strategy, he asked Freud to write a memo-
randum for the court, a request the analyst honored.
During the Halsmann trial, the prosecution introduced the testimony
of a doctor who argued that Halsmann’s active Oedipus complex was the mo-
tive for killing his father. The prosecutor also argued that after the crime, the
student had undergone a severe “repression” that erased all memories of the
deed from his conscious mind.
Freud objects that the principal characteristic of the Oedipus com-
plex is its universality, thus it is equally present in criminals and in law-abiding
citizens. “Precisely because it is always present,” he writes, “the Oedipus com-
plex is not suited to provide a decision on the question of guilt.” To illustrate
this point, Freud deploys one of his favorite rhetorical strategies: he tells a
joke.

There was a burglary. A man who had a jemmy in his possession was found
guilty of the crime. After the verdict had been given and he had been asked if he
had anything to say, he begged to be sentenced for adultery at the same time—
since he was carrying the tool for that on him as well.34

The Oedipus complex, a universal attribute, cannot be considered proof of par-

ricidal intentions any more than the possession of a penis could be taken as
proof of motive for adultery.
Freud also objects to the prosecution’s use of the psychoanalytic con-
cept of repression: the doctors had argued that after the murder, Halsmann had
“repressed” all memories of the deed, and thus was unable to consciously recol-
lect any details related to the crime. “I must say,” Freud quips, “that a repression
of this kind occurring out of the blue in an adult who gives no indication of a
severe neurosis . . . would be a rarity of the first order.”35
Interestingly, Freud does not attempt to speculate on whether Hals-
mann was innocent or guilty; the focus of his paper is to criticize the prosecu-
tion’s inaccurate use of psychoanalytic concepts.
A common thread runs through these three essays on criminology:
Freud highlights the similarities between the judge and the analyst, individu-
als charged with uncovering a well-kept secret. But while judges must remain
within the bounds of conscious thought, and can attain only a limited under-
standing of the defendant’s mind, psychoanalysts—aided by the couch, the

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 213
 analytic frame, and the various techniques for interpreting free associations—
can glimpse into the unconscious and gain a deeper understanding of the crimi-
nal psyche.
If we now return to Carrancá’s experiments in psycho-legal analysis, we
see that Freud had every reason to be enthusiastic in his response to the Mexi-
can author. In his three articles on criminology, Freud lamented that judges
lacked the tools to delve into the criminal unconscious. Carrancá seems to have
followed to the letter Freud’s suggestion that judges had much to learn from
analysts, and that they would never fully comprehend the psychology of law-
breakers without taking into account the complexities of the criminal mind.
Carrancá had read Freud’s three essays on criminology. His article “Psy-
choanalysis and the Examination of Criminals”—the third and last he wrote
for Criminalia on a psychoanalytic theme—quotes at length from Freud’s 1906
essay, mentions the analogy between the criminal and the neurotic, and argues
passionately that judges should use psychoanalysis to elucidate the unconscious
motives behind the criminal act. Carrancá stops short of recommending that
judges follow his example and psychoanalyze the defendants, but he does call
for the creation of a “Laboratory of Criminal Psychology” to probe into the
criminal mind.36
Carrancá summed up his view of the relationship between criminal law
and psychoanalysis in Derecho penal mexicano: Parte general. He argued that
“crimes stem from an inability to adapt to society, that they are the result of the
various complexes (Oedipus, Electra, Cain, Diana, castration, etc.),” and that
the judge—aided by psychoanalysis—can elucidate how unconscious phe-
nomena led an individual to commit a crime.37
Freud might have objected—as he did in the Halsmann case—to link-
ing the Oedipus complex to criminality, but he certainly would have applauded
Carrancá’s insistence on the need to incorporate the psychoanalytic theory of
the unconscious into the practice of law.
We can now present a hypothesis as to how Derecho penal came to be
part of Freud’s library: the Mexican judge most probably asked the publisher to
mail a copy to Freud, trusting that the analyst would remember their exchange
a few years before—and explaining the absence of a dedication on the front
page. Freud does not seem to have acknowledged receipt of the book—if he
had, the letter would have certainly been published in Criminalia. Perhaps he
had forgotten the earlier exchange with the judge; perhaps he could not see why
a Mexican publisher would mail him a book on criminal law; perhaps he never

214
read the relatively minor passage devoted to psychoanalysis in what is other-
wise a very technical legal textbook; perhaps Freud, preoccupied with the rise
of National Socialism and the composition of Moses and Monotheism, had no
time for Mexican criminology.
In any case, Derecho penal did not make the cut when Freud selected
the books that would accompany him to London. It could have been discarded,
but luckily, it was sold to the antiquarian who in turn sold it to Columbia Uni-
versity, where it remained, Freud’s lone Mexican book, unopened and unread
for sixty years.

a s ta l i n i s t o e d i p u s

Had the tale of Freud and Carrancá ended here, it would have made an ec-
centric story about the chance encounter between the father of psychoanalysis
and a wildly ambitious Mexican judge; it would have shed some light on the
mutual attraction between psychoanalysis and criminology; and it would have
certainly brought to light one of the most surprising episodes in the reception
of Freud in Mexico. But there would be one more twist—one worthy of a de-
tective novel—in the story.
In 1938, a year after receiving Carrancá’s Derecho penal, Freud left Vi-
enna for London, where he died in 1939. Meanwhile, Carrancá continued to
climb the echelons of Mexico’s judicial system: in the summer of 1940 he was
appointed the judge of the district of Coyoacán, the southern neighborhood
in Mexico City that was home to Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and many other
artists and intellectuals. This was not a particularly troublesome district, and
his first cases involved petty crimes and other minor offenses; he led a quiet life
in this suburban enclave, with plenty of free time he could devote to reading
Freud, until one day he was assigned a high-profile case that would turn out to
be the most important of his entire career.
On August 20, 1940, Carrancá was handed the case of a foreign defen-
dant who went by the aliases of Frank Jacson and Jacques Mornard, and was
accused of a crime that made headlines around the world: the murder of Leon
Trotsky, the Soviet revolutionary who had been exiled in Mexico City since
1937. Jacson had gone to visit Trotsky at his home in Coyoacán on the pretext
of showing him an article, and struck him on the back of the head with an ice

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 215
ax. Jacson was immediately apprehended, and Trotsky died some hours later at
a hospital.
Jacson—his real name turned out to be Ramón Mercader—readily ad-
mitted the murder, but the account he gave the police raised suspicions from
the beginning: he described himself as a disillusioned Trotskyite, a young Bel-
gian revolutionary who had traveled to Mexico to meet the leader of the move-
ment, and had been disappointed to discover that the man he admired had
betrayed his ideals. Trotsky, he told the judge, had asked him to murder Stalin,
a request that so angered him he decided to kill him.
Carrancá soon found a number of inconsistencies in the murderer’s ac-
count. He claimed to be a Belgian citizen who spoke only French, yet a visit by
a diplomat revealed he knew little about Belgium; he declared he had acted
alone, out of disillusionment with Trotsky, but the entire world suspected the
assassination had been ordered by Stalin; he assured investigators he did not
know any of the Mexican Stalinists who had participated in the first attack
against Trotsky’s house, yet he rented an office in the same building—Edificio
Ermita, near Colonia Condesa—where David Alfaro Siqueiros, the ringleader
of an the earlier plot, kept a studio.
Carrancá had a curious case before him: the defendant’s guilt had been
established—Mercader never denied killing Trotsky—but his motives were
unknown. To reach a verdict, the judge had to understand the assassin’s mo-
tives and their impact on his crime; but since the killer refused to talk, Carrancá
had to find a creative way of uncovering his secret.
The “Trotsky case” turned out to be the perfect opportunity for Ca-
rrancá to put into practice his psycho-legal theories. Since Mercader refused to
talk, and would not reveal his identity or explain his motives for killing Trotsky,
the judge decided to probe his unconscious. Freud had once written that noth-
ing was harder to keep than a secret: a person can remain tight-lipped, but in
the end he will always give it away through unconscious gestures. Would the
same hold true for Mercader?
Carrancá could have analyzed Mercader himself, using—as he had
done before—his office as a consulting room for psycho-legal analysis. But in
this case the stakes were too high, and he opted to leave the defendant’s analysis
in the hands of two experts on criminal psychology: Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón,
a thirty-year-old criminologist with a passion for cracking complicated mys-
teries, and José Gómez Robleda, a forensic psychiatrist who taught at the Na-
tional University in Mexico City. Carrancá asked them to apply a battery of

216
f i g u r e 6.3
Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo (third from left) with Ramón Mercader (bandaged) during a
reconstruction of the Trotsky murder. Photo courtesy Raúl Carrancá y Rivas.

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 217
 psychological tests in order to uncover the unconscious motives behind the as-
sassination. The team visited Mercader in prison and set up a schedule of daily
sessions that would include psychoanalysis as well as more traditional psychiat-
ric and medical evaluations.
Quiroz Cuarón reported that during the first meeting Mercader was
uncooperative and refused to talk. The pair of doctors insisted, telling him
the sessions would be beneficial for his mental health. “I will keep my mouth
closed,” the prisoner lashed back in French; “it is as if you were trying to stick a
spoon in my mouth to force things out.”38 Eventually Mercader agreed, though
reluctantly, to work with the two doctors.
The team set up an intensive work schedule: for six months they met
with Mercader six hours a day, six days a week, spending a total of 942 hours
with him. As Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Don Levine has written: “No psy-
chological study of comparable magnitude has ever been made of a political
assassin.”39
Following Freud’s recommendations on technique, the two doctors
asked Mercader to talk freely, and proceeded to analyze his dreams, family re-
lationships, childhood memories, fears, fantasies, slips of the tongue, and sex-
ual history. They subjected him to Rorschach tests, word reaction experiments,
handwriting analyses and drawing exercises, as well as to a host of other proce-
dures that were beyond the realm of Freud’s interests: blood and motor tests,
electroencephalograms, and even an examination of body scars. They tested
his ability to disassemble and reassemble an assault weapon in the dark; they
measured the time he took to put together a jigsaw puzzle; they asked him to
draw his family and then interpreted the sketch as an indication of an Oedipal
conflict (the parents, they noted, towered over a disproportionately small son)
(figure 6.4); they administered dozens of other tests to gauge his intelligence,
quantitative skills, and logical capacities. The team was determined to over-
come Mercader’s secret and to probe into the innermost recesses of his psyche—
and of his bodily organs, if need be.40
The doctors also administered a “word response test”—a procedure
during which the prisoner was given a word and asked to say the first associa-
tion that came to mind; the associations were then mined for their unconscious
content. Interestingly, Freud had considered word response tests in his essay on
“Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of Legal Facts,” but dismissed them as
unreliable, since the associations were made under pressure. Quiroz Cuarón
and Gómez Robleda gave Mercader a series of charged words that elicited

218
f i g u r e 6.4
Ramón Mercader’s drawing of his family. From Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, Psicoanálisis del
magnicidio (Mexico City: Editorial Jurídica Mexicana, 1965), 147.

political associations: he responded to “commerce” with “legal theft”; wealth

was “that which will soon belong to the oppressed classes”; religion, “the opium
of the people”; and Trotsky, “a self-centered egotist.” There is little unconscious
content in these associations, expressions of Marxist dogma.41
The two doctors compiled the results of the numerous tests, added
their own analyses and interpretations, and submitted their findings to the
court. Their 1,332-page brief bore the ominous title “Organic-Functional and
Social Study of the Assassin of Leon Trotsky,” and was divided into two vol-
umes: the first focusing on Mercader’s conscious mind and the second on an
“examination of his subconscious mental functions.”42
The brief opened with a detailed introduction in which Doctors Quiroz
Cuarón and Gómez Robleda summarized their findings. Mercader, they wrote,

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 219
had suffered an “affective trauma” in his early childhood that pushed him into
a “neurotic state” and led him to develop “a very active Oedipal complex.” Test
results suggested that from an early age Mercader felt a violent hatred for his
father and for paternal figures in general—a murderous impulse he eventually
directed against Leon Trotsky.43
When the presiding judge handed down his sentence on April 17,
1943—Carrancá had been removed from the case some months back—his rul-
ing quoted the doctors’ findings and concluded that the motive for the crime
was “an active Oedipus complex.” Mercader was sentenced to twenty years in
prison and, despite his lawyer’s shrewd legal maneuvers, served his full sentence.
He was released in 1960, whisked to the airport, and put aboard a flight to the
Soviet Union, where he was decorated and awarded a military pension. For
years he lived a quiet life under yet a new name: Ramón Pavlovich López. In
the 1970s he moved to Cuba, the land of his ancestors, where he died of bone
cancer in 1978. His ashes were flown to Moscow and buried in the Kuntsevo
cemetery.44
Though Carrancá did not stay on as a judge in the case—following a
motion by the defense he was replaced by judge Manuel Rivera Vázquez, who
wrote the verdict in 1943—his theories on criminology and psychoanalysis
shaped the trial from beginning to end. His articles for Criminalia encouraged
the use of psychoanalysis to penetrate the criminal unconscious, and his wish
was fulfilled in a high-profile case that was closely followed around the globe.
When the judge handed down his sentence, newspapers and illustrated week-
lies throughout Mexico reported that an “active Oedipus complex” had pushed
Mercader to kill Trotsky. If the use of psychoanalytic techniques in legal pro-
ceedings seemed like a radical experience in 1934, by 1943 it had become ac-
cepted practice in Mexico City’s criminal courts.
Had Freud lived to see the psychoanalytically inflected trial of Trotsky’s
assassin, he would have surely objected to the court’s focus on the Oedipus
complex as a motive for the killing—just as he had done in the Halsmann case.
He might have acknowledged, however, that psychoanalytic techniques led to
a breakthrough by offering the most complete psychological portrait of Mer-
cader. Julia Kristeva once remarked that the Oedipus complex is not only about
patricide—it is also an inquiry into one’s origins: Oedipus murdered his father,
but he also solved the riddle of the sphinx. “Œdipe veut savoir,” writes Kristeva.
Like Oedipus, the analysand wants to know, to make sense of the past and un-
derstand the present.45

220
 Understood in this way, psychoanalysis emerges as the perfect tool for
cracking the mystery of Mercader’s true identity. From the moment of his ar-
rest, he lied about his name and origins: one of the objectives of the trial—and
of the extensive psychological tests—was to solve the Oedipal riddle of origins.
The questions Quiroz Cuarón and Gómez Robleda asked were the same as
those posed by Oedipus: who is he and where did he come from? (Though, as
Levine observes, unlike a real analytic treatment, Mercader’s analysis “involved
no confidential relationship of doctor and patient [and] it was virtually unlim-
ited in scope.”)46
Mercader was successful in keeping his secret for many years. He was
tried and sentenced as Jacques Mornard, and he continued to live under this
assumed name until his release from prison in 1960. Whenever a journalist, a
historian, or an investigator would ask his real name, he snapped back that he
had no other name beside Jacques Mornard. But in the end, a psychoanalyst
would unmask him.
After the trial, Carrancá moved on to other cases and did not write
again about Freud or Mercader. The criminologist Quiroz Cuarón, on the
other hand, maintained his interest in both psychoanalysis and the Trotsky case,
and spent many years after the trial working diligently to discover the assassin’s
true identity.
In 1950, ten years after the murder, he was invited to represent Mexico
at the World Congress on Criminology, to be held in Paris. He took with him
the assassin’s fingerprints and photographs, and spent some weeks making in-
quiries at police departments in various European cities. When he got to Ma-
drid he discovered a perfect fingerprint match: the imprints belonged to Jaime
Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández, a Catalan radical who had been briefly
detained and charged with subversive activities in the mid-1930s.
Quiroz Cuarón returned to Mexico carrying a set of documents from
the Spanish police archives—including Ramón Mercader’s photos, finger-
prints, and handwriting samples—that left no doubt about the true identity
of Trotsky’s assassin. He published his findings, illustrated with the newly sur-
faced evidence, in a criminological journal and took credit for being the first to
solve the mystery of Jacques Mornard’s identity. Mercader, alas, dismissed the
findings and insisted, once more, that he was simply Mornard, a Belgian citizen
and a disgruntled Trotskyite.47
In his articles, Quiroz Cuarón offered a Freudian interpretation of his
findings, and invoked the theory of free association to explain the unconscious

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 221
motives behind Mercader’s choice of Mornard as a pseudonym. “The name
Mornard,” he wrote, “contains all the letters found in Ramón. Because of psy-
chological determinism, he who devises a false name betrays himself.”48
Quiroz Cuarón’s article concluded that Mercader’s attitude toward his
name evoked the primitive beliefs analyzed in Totem and Taboo: “Ramón Mer-
cader considers his name ‘sacred’ and ‘dangerous,’ and thus he will not utter it,
disguising it under a different and false name.”49 In a Freudian move, Quiroz
Cuarón compared the behavior of a neurotic criminal to primitive religious
practices.
Quiroz Cuarón brought to fruition the ambitious project for integrat-
ing psychoanalysis and criminology that Carrancá had proposed in his articles
for Criminalia, including the use of free association, the focus on pathologi-
cal complexes, and the attention to unconscious motivations. The procedures
for psycho-legal analysis that Carrancá had tested on a small scale in the 1930s
were now applied, with the blessings of the legal and medical establishment, to
one of the most famous criminal cases anywhere in the world. The judicial use
of psychoanalysis had become a mainstream practice, fulfilling what had once
seemed an idealistic young judge’s utopian vision.

c a s t r at i n g c a r i d a d

Freud, as we saw earlier, would have objected to the conclusion that “an ac-
tive Oedipus complex” led Mercader to kill Trotsky—a reservation that many
modern readers might be inclined to share. But as outlandish at it might sound
today, the diagnosis did point to a crucial factor in the case: Mercader’s perplex-
ing relationship to his mother.
Caridad del Río was born in Cuba but soon moved to Barcelona, where
she married, gave birth to five children, and became a powerful political activ-
ist working first for the Spanish Republic and then, after 1939, for the Soviet
Union. During the Spanish Civil War she traveled to Mexico, where Diego
Rivera painted her portrait (figure 6.5). In those years, Caridad became the mis-
tress of one of the most powerful Soviet agents working for the GPU (the espio-
nage agency that would later be known as the KGB): Leonid Eitingon.
Leonid Eitingon—who also went by the aliases Naum Eitingon
and General Kotov—was one of Stalin’s most trusted agents, charged with

222
f i g u r e 6.5
Diego Rivera, Portrait of Caridad Mercader. From Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, Psicoanálisis del
magnicidio (Mexico City: Editorial Jurídica Mexicana, 1965), 142. © Banco de México Diego
Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 223
overseeing the most delicate international operations, like the kidnapping of
General Kutepov in 1930 and the assassination in 1937, in Paris, of General
Evgeny Karlovich Miller, the most senior White Russian officer in Europe and
leader of an association of ex-tsarist officials.50 In 1940 Eitingon convinced
his mistress, Caridad, to recruit her son for the single most important assign-
ment of his life: the execution of Leon Trotsky. Eitingon and Caridad trained
the young Ramón, sent him to Mexico, and, on the day of the assassination,
waited for him in the getaway car outside Trotsky’s house. When Ramón was
arrested, the pair returned to Moscow, where Caridad was awarded the Or-
der of Lenin for her services—and for the sacrifice of her son—to the Soviet
Union.51
Quiroz Cuarón’s diagnosis of Mercader was not entirely far-fetched:
there was something uncannily Oedipal about a son committing a murder at
the behest of his mother and her lover, and a mother willing to sacrifice her son
for the sake of her lover. Trotsky’s assassination played out as a family romance,
as a neurotic triangle featuring a Stalinist agent, his attractive mistress, and her
compliant son—a plot that seems to be taken out of a Greek drama, a Shake-
speare play, or one of Freud’s case studies.
And the plot thickens: as it turns out, there were two degrees of sepa-
ration between Trotsky’s assassin and Freud. While Leonid Eitingon was fine-
tuning the details of the assassination in Mexico, another Eitingon had become
Freud’s closest confidant and a pillar of the psychoanalytic movement in Eu-
rope. Max Eitingon, a wealthy Russian-born analyst, had been president of the
International Psycho-Analytical Association from 1927 to 1932, emigrated to
Palestine in 1934, and maintained a regular correspondence with Freud until
his death.
Sándor Radó was one of the first to make the claim that Max and Leo-
nid were brothers, and that Max was well informed of his sibling’s involvement
with Stalin and the GPU. His claim was intensely debated by historians of So-
viet espionage: John Dziak and Stephen Schwartz argued that the Eitingon
fortune came not from the family fur business, as it was generally believed, but
from Stalin’s intelligence services, and that Max might have been implicated in
some of the operations carried out by Leonid. Some historians have suggested
that Freud, who received loans from Max during World War I, might have been
an indirect recipient of the Soviet money channeled to Leonid. It has since
been disproved that the two Eitingons were brothers, but some scholars still
believe that they were close relatives: Robert Conquest believes they were first
cousins and Alexander Etkind claims that they were brothers-in-law.52

224
 Whatever the exact relationship between the two Eitingons, a prom-
inent historian argued that Max was implicated in at least one of Leonid’s
schemes: the assassination of General Miller. One of the agents enlisted for
this operation was the Russian émigrée singer Nadezhda Vasilievna Plevi-
tskaya, an extravagant diva who was a frequent guest at Max Eitingon’s Berlin
home. After the murder, Plevitskaya was convicted in a French court, and her
deposition mentioned Max several times, though the analyst was never ques-
tioned. Alexander Etkind believes that “Plevitskaya’s testimony and Rado’s rec-
ollections indicate that Max Eitingon could well have been an accomplice in a
subtle political game that was being played on a pan-European scale, in which
the leader of international psychoanalysis carried out the commands of Stalin’s
secret service.” Though Etkind concedes that “most of the evidence to that ef-
fect is circumstantial,” he believes that “today there are sufficient data to link
Max Eitingon in one degree or another with his brother-in-law’s schemes.”53
In 2009 Mary-Kay Wilmers revisited the debate about the relationship
between Max and Leonid in The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story. After
interviewing the descendants of both men and visiting the Ukrainian town of
Mogilev, where they were both born, she concludes: “it is inconceivable that
Leonid’s family and Motty’s and Max’s didn’t know each other: indeed, that
the three of them weren’t cousins, however many removes separated.” On the
more serious allegations that Max was involved in Leonid’s schemes, Wilmers
writes: “No. Probably not. But the mystery remains and I don’t see how it can
go away.” 54
In my view, the evidence available does not support the claim that
Freud actually benefited from Leonid Eitingon’s schemes, neither does it lend
credence to the suggestion that Max might have actively collaborated in Leo-
nid’s operations. I do believe, however, that the two Eitingons were relatives,
and only one degree separated Max—and Freud—from Leonid’s plots.
The tale of the two Eitingons—one a Freudian, the other a Stalinist—
included a Mexican chapter in which followers of the two relatives crossed
paths during the Trotsky case. As president of the IPA, Max Eitingon pushed
for the worldwide dissemination of Freud’s ideas, and it was in part thanks to
his efforts that a young Carrancá, living thousands of miles away from Vienna,
could study Freud’s writings. And it was thanks to the other Eitingon, obsessed
with internationalizing the revolution, that Mercader became a hardline Stalin-
ist, traveled to Mexico, assumed a false identity, and murdered Leon Trotsky.
The Trotsky trial pitted a partisan of Max Eitingon against an agent of Leonid
Eitingon, a follower of international psychoanalysis against an agent of Soviet

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 225
espionage. This episode was a historical clash between two institutions, psycho-
analysis and Stalinism, each represented by one of the Eitingons. Leonid’s agent
was subjected to Max’s analytic methods, and in the end, Max’s follower put
Leonid’s lieutenant behind bars, handing Freud a symbolic victory over Stalin.
One wonders how Max Eitingon received the news of Trotsky’s assassi-
nation in his Palestinian home. Had he been in touch with his relative? Did he
know that Leonid had masterminded the murder? Did he realize the assassin
would be tried by a psychoanalytic judge? Max died in 1943; Leonid lived until
the 1970s. Did Max see Leonid again before his death? Did the two relatives
ever discuss Trotsky’s death? Was Leonid ever analyzed? Historians have de-
bated whether Leonid co-opted Max, but they have never considered whether
Max might have co-opted Leonid, convincing him to undergo an analytic treat-
ment. Readers might be amused by the image of a Soviet agent confessing his
secrets to an analyst, but this is exactly what happened in Mexico: when Mer-
cader was ordered to undergo an analysis, Freudians put Stalinism on the couch.
In the epic battle between these two Weltanschauungen, psychoanalysis had the
upper hand.
Mercader’s family romance was more complex than Carrancá or Quiroz
Cuarón imagined: it involved a triangle between a Soviet agent, a domineering
mother, and a complacent son, but it also extended to a sinister father figure:
Josef Stalin.

mexicans gone wild

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned Freud’s essay on “Wild Psychoanalysis”

and asked if Carrancá might fit the profile of a “wild” analyst: he did not un-
dergo a training analysis, reduced sexuality to genital activity, and did not fol-
low Freud’s recommended techniques. But despite these symptoms of analytic
wildness, Freud endorsed his practice of psycho-legal analysis and commended
him as an ally to the psychoanalytic movement. Carrancá was wild . . . but not
enough to qualify as a wild psychoanalyst.
During the Trotsky case, Carrancá came in contact with a type of wild-
ness that would plague Mexico for several decades: wild Marxism. If wild psy-
choanalysis refers to a superficial and imprecise knowledge of Freudian theories
combined with a sloppy clinical practice, wild Marxism entails a vulgar un-
derstanding of Marx’s writings coupled with dangerous ploys to construct a

226
communist utopia. Stalin—Isaac Deutscher called his doctrines “a grotesque
form of Leninism”—was the most notorious advocate of wild Marxism; others
were were Leonid Eitingon and Ramón Mercader.55
The Trotsky case pitted Carrancá, a wild analyst, against Mercader, a
wild Marxist. As we learn from this episode, wild psychoanalysis might raise
some eyebrows, but is ultimately harmless. In the worst of cases, it could ag-
gravate a neurosis or chip away at the prestige of psychoanalysis. Wild Marx-
ism, on the other hand, left behind a bloody trail of purges, kidnappings, and
political assassinations. Both Freudians and Marxists could go wild, but wild
analysis, even in its most extreme forms, was merely a form of listening, while
wild Marxism was almost always an instrument of murder. Analysis could also
be deployed as a weapon—Mercader experienced the battery of psychological
tests as a form of torture56 —but those who found themselves on the couch of
a wild analyst fared much better than those—like Trotsky—who found them-
selves in the bull’s eye of wild Marxism.
What were the repercussions of this epic struggle between the dis-
ciples of Freud and Stalin in Mexico? Could we conclude that psychoanalysis
triumphed over Stalinism? The efforts of Carrancá and Quiroz Cuarón led
to Mercader’s sentence and imprisonment, while at the same time raising the
prestige of psychoanalysis and exposing the dangers of Stalinism. Freud’s doc-
trines have endured, while Stalin’s methods have been repudiated by all but the
most recalcitrant of wild Marxists. Some Russian historians have even chosen
psychoanalysis as a model to examine the Stalinist past: the recent publication
of Alexander Etkind’s Eros of the Impossible, with its inventive interpretations
of Stalinist atrocities, can be read as the most recent in a series of efforts to ana-
lyze—in the Freudian sense of the term—the darkest moments of Soviet his-
tory. More than seven decades after Carrancá’s efforts, analysts are still putting
Stalinists on the couch!

t r o t s k y o n p s y c h o a n a l ys i s

So far, our account of how the followers of Freud and Marx waged a battle of
epic proportions in Mexico has left out an important actor: Leon Trotsky.
Isaac Don Levine wrote that “as a communist, Ramón [Mercader] had
no use for Freud and, as a matter of fact, knew nothing about his theories.”57
The same could not be said for Trotsky, who was an avid reader of Freud, and

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 227
devoted several essays to the relationship between Marxism and psychoanaly-
sis: perhaps it was not entirely coincidental that Trotsky chose to spend his
Mexican exile living on a street called Calle Viena.
Trotsky first wrote about Freud in his 1923 Literature and Revolution.
In the chapter on “Communist Policy Towards Art,” he asks whether “the psy-
choanalytic theory of Freud . . . can be reconciled with materialism,” and then
goes on to assert that he—along with other fellow travelers like Karl Radek—
believed it could.58 Some years later, he spoke positively about Freud’s findings
in a lecture on the Russian Revolution: “Psychoanalysis,” he told a Danish audi-
ence, “with the inspired hand of Sigmund Freud, has lifted the cover of the well
which is poetically called the ‘soul.’ And what has been revealed? Our conscious
thought is only a small part of the work of the dark, psychic forces.”59
Extending the well metaphor, Trotsky called psychoanalysts “learned
divers [who] descend to the bottom of the ocean and there take photographs
of mysterious fishes.” The purpose of their endeavors was to “shed light on the
most mysterious driving forces of the soul and subject them to reason and to
will.”60 Trotsky believed in the existence of an unconscious realm—the “mys-
terious fishes” at the bottom of the ocean—but unlike Freud, he insisted that
the unconscious had to be tamed and subjected to rational forces; as Etkind
has shown, Trotsky viewed the unconscious as an unruly and chaotic realm that
had to be dominated by Cartesian reason.61 The Revolution would ultimately
do away with the unconscious, building a new man fully in control of his ac-
tions, eliminating both class struggle and psychic struggle. In Trotsky’s view,
psychoanalysis was compatible with the Revolution as long as it was used as a
tool for “perfecting and developing” the human spirit by bringing the contents
of the unconscious into consciousness.62
In a 1926 lecture on “Culture and Socialism,” Trotsky contrasted two
different approaches to psychology: Freud’s psychoanalysis and I. P. Pavlov’s
psychology. Pavlov’s method, he told his audience, was closer to Marxism be-
cause it was based on scientific experiments and worked “step by step” from
physiology to psychology. In contrast to Pavlov, Freud “proceeds in a different
way. [He] assumes in advance that the driving force of the most complex and
delicate of psychic processes is a physiological need.”63 While the Pavlovian
scientist proceeded through a series of careful and graduated steps, the psycho-
analyst “attempts to take all these intermediate stages in one jump, from above
downwards, from the religious myth, the lyrical poem or the dream straight to
the physiological basis of the psyche.”64

228
 To explain the difference between Freud and Pavlov, Trotsky resorted
once more to the well analogy:

The idealists tell us that the psyche is an independent entity, that the “soul” is
a bottomless well. Both Pavlov and Freud think that the bottom of the “soul”
is physiology. But Pavlov, like a diver, descends to the bottom and laboriously
investigates the well from there upwards; while Freud stands over the well and
with penetrating gaze tries to pierce its ever-shifting and troubled waters to
make out or guess the shape of things down below. Pavlov’s method is experi-
ment, Freud’s is conjecture, sometimes fantastic conjecture.65

Trotsky preferred Pavlov, who ran a large, state-financed laboratory and exper-
imented on animals, to Freud, who simply listened patiently by the analytic
couch. But even then, Trotsky insisted that Freud’s theories were not necessarily
incompatible with Marxism.
In the same lecture, Trotsky, in an aside, lashed out against those who—
like Carrancá—used psychoanalysis to investigate human sexuality. These ef-
forts, he told his audience, were based on “a sham Freudism” and resulted in no
more than “an erotic indulgence” or “[a] piece of ‘naughtiness.’” Such claptrap,
he warned his audience “has nothing to do with science and merely expresses
decadent moods.”66
Trotsky viewed Freudian psychoanalysis as a method that was compat-
ible with Marxism, as long as it did away with the unconscious and sexuality—
dark, unruly forces that had no place in a communist utopia. But what is left of
Freudian theory if it is stripped of the unconscious and sexuality—two pillars
of Freudian thought? An empty carcass or, to continue with Trotsky’s analogy,
a dried-up well.
Trotsky was neither a wild Marxist nor a wild analyst, but a sophisti-
cated reader who believed that the ideas of Marx and Freud were compatible.
As Isaac Deutscher showed in his biography, “Trotsky studied psychoanalytic
issues deeply and systematically,”67 and before his murder he had been exploring
way to reconcile Marxism—and Soviet politics—with psychoanalysis.
Despite his inability to conceive of sexuality as anything but “a piece
of naughtiness,” Trotsky had much in common with Carrancá. Out of all the
characters considered in this chapter, Carrancá and Trotsky were the closest
in spirit. Both men admired Freud, enthused about his writings, and searched

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 229
for ways to incorporate psychoanalysis into their respective disciplines. They
both lived in Mexico City in the late 1930s, and while Carrancá was explor-
ing ways of linking psychoanalysis and criminology, Trotsky was attempting a
synthesis between psychoanalysis and Marxism. The two encountered similar
obstacles, which they surmounted by simplifying Freud’s theory of sexuality. In
the end, both thinkers fell into the same pitfall as wild psychoanalysts—a re-
ductive reading of the psychoanalytic concept of the libido. In this sense, both
Carrancá and Trotsky went wild, though in radically different ways.

conclusion

Derecho penal mexicano: Parte general, the single Mexican book in Freud’s li-
brary, had quite a story to tell: the tale of a Mexican judge who brandished psy-
choanalysis as a weapon against crime, invented the technique of psycho-legal
analysis, and counted Trotsky’s assassin as his most famous subject. The plot, as
complex as a detective novel, implicated Mercader, Leonid Eitingon, and even
Stalin—an unlikely cast of characters in a psychoanalytic murder mystery.
One of the joys of archival research is to make documents speak, to
listen to the story they have to tell. The story told by Derecho penal, which sat
unopened and unread for almost seventy years at Columbia University’s medi-
cal library, illustrates the degree of eccentricity that characterized the reception
of Freud’s ideas in Mexico. In Argentina and Brazil, Freud was read by psychia-
trists and doctors, professionals who saw a direct application of psychoanalytic
techniques to their professions. In Mexico, however, judges, criminologists,
and revolutionaries read Freud, and they used his ideas to theorize a radically
utopian society—a world in which prophylactic psychoanalysis would eradi-
cate crime, a world in which men would no longer be tortured by neuroses or
unconscious traumas. Of all utopias conceived in the twentieth century, the
one imagined by Trotsky and Carrancá was one of the most radical: a society
ruled by enlightened, psychoanalytically inclined Marxists protected by Freud-
ian judges. If rumors of this radical utopia had ever reached Freud, he would
have certainly concluded, with mild amusement, and perhaps not without
some pride, that psychoanalysis had gone completely wild.

230
MARX

Though Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived together for many years, their aes-
thetic projects could not be more different: Rivera produced epic mural cycles
in public buildings depicting Manichean struggles between rich and poor, op-
pressors and oppressed, ideological battles that stretched out for hundreds of
years; Kahlo, on the other hand, painted small canvases about herself, her expe-
riences, and her feelings. When the couple spent some months living in Detroit
in the early 1930s, Rivera produced Detroit Industry, a vast mural cycle about
the automobile industry and its role in society, while Kahlo devoted herself
to a small canvas about the miscarriage she suffered in a Detroit hospital. For
most of their lives, Rivera turned his eye to history while Kahlo focused on her
inner life.
Rivera’s murals include portraits of the most influential figures in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century history: Detroit Industry celebrates Henry
Ford, while Man at the Crossroads includes portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Stalin, and Trotsky. Elsewhere, he painted Woodrow Wilson, Hitler and Musso-
lini, as well as the Mexican revolutionaries Madero, Zapata, and Villa; other mu-
rals portray Frank Lloyd Wright, Tina Modotti, and, of course, Frida Kahlo.
Charlie Chaplin makes a cameo, and so does the Mexican philosopher José Vas-
concelos. Bolívar, Hidalgo, and Morelos are represented, as well as Washington,
Jefferson, and Lincoln. There are doctors and researchers, grouped according
to their area of specialization, and a San Francisco mural features Thomas Alva

231
Edison and Samuel Morse. The artist even created a mural homage to the fa-
mously beautiful tennis player Helen Wills Moody.
Rivera’s murals read like a Who’s Who of the first half of the twentieth
century, a directory of the most influential figures in politics, art, and culture: a
diverse group including communists and capitalists, Mexicans and Europeans,
liberators and tyrants. Every important thinker seems to be represented, except
for one conspicuous omission.
Sigmund Freud does not appear in any of Diego Rivera’s murals. He is
not to be found near the portraits of Marx or Darwin, two revolutionary intel-
lectuals with whom he is often linked; he is not included in any of the murals
depicting famous doctors and scientists; and he is also missing from the pan-
orama of twentieth-century culture painted on the walls of the National Palace
in Mexico City.
Why would Rivera choose to exclude Freud from a body of work featur-
ing portraits of just about every famous writer and intellectual of his time, in-
cluding obscure physicians like Josef Auenbrugger or Jean-Nicholas Covisart?
We might find a clue to this mystery in a remark the muralist once made to his
biographer. In 1939, while Freud, now living in exile in London, was spending
the final days of his life correcting the proofs of Moses and Monotheism, Rivera
received the typescript of Diego Rivera: His Life and Times, a biography written
by fellow traveler Bertram Wolfe. The muralist read the book, became incensed
at his portrayal, and sent an angry letter to Wolfe that included the following
recriminatory passage:

Dear Bert, the list of illustrations gives the clear impression that you either have
finally been influenced far more by Freud than by Marx, or that you have tried
to help the sales of your book among members of the women’s clubs of the
States by showing more of my sex life . . . than of anything else concerning me.
Bert, judging by the index of illustrations, your book should be called “Diego
Rivera and his Wives,” rather than “Diego Rivera and His Times.” And that,
dear Bert, is not very Marxist at all. . . . Very bad for a revolutionist, dear boy,
and even worse for a biographer.68

Rivera had hoped for “the first Marxian biography of a painter,” but was disap-
pointed to receive a work he read as a Freudian account of his private life.69
Rivera went on to chastise Wolfe for dwelling on his personality and
eccentricities, and devoting too much space to his legendary womanizing. The

232
biographer was so interested in the painter’s larger-than-life character that
when it came time to publish the second edition he changed the title to The
Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera. But Rivera expected something very different
from his biographer: he wanted to be immortalized as Mexico’s first revolution-
ary painter, as an activist who had elevated art to a form of political struggle. He
saw Wolfe’s book as a missed opportunity: instead of explaining how muralism
had transformed the social function of art, he focused on personal quirks and
character traits. His biographer approached the task at hand not like Marx—
keeping an eye on the long march of history—but like Freud, peeking into his
affects and obsessions.
Rivera saw psychoanalysis and history as mutually exclusive practices:
one could either focus on historical developments and ignore the peculiarities
of individual character, or choose to explore the psyche and turn a blind eye to
the larger world picture. One had to choose between Freud and Marx, and in
his work, Rivera chose the latter: his mural œuvre was monumental, but it was
not large enough to accommodate both the German philosopher and the Aus-
trian analyst.
As we saw in chapter 3, Frida Kahlo did not share her husband’s preju-
dices: she painted Marx and also Freud. The two men appear in Moses, sepa-
rated by Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century doctor (figure 6.6). There appears
to be a simple reason why Kahlo painted Freud while Rivera refused to do so.
Unlike her husband, Kahlo used her work to explore her inner life: her traumas
and desires, her experiences and dreams. Rivera, on the other hand, focused on

f i g u r e 6.6
Detail from Frida Kahlo, Moses, 1945. Oil on canvas, 60 x 75.6 cm. Private collection,
Houston. © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. /
Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Chapter 6 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n b o o k s 233
historical events: conquests, wars, revolutions, and other social movements. It
makes perfect sense that out of the two, it was Kahlo who gravitated to Freud.
But Moses, Kahlo’s most Freudian painting, is an unusual work for a
painter who favored self-portraits and autobiographical sketches. This work
focuses not on personal experience but on the history of religions, a vast period
spanning the pre- Columbian past to the postwar era and encompassing fig-
ures as diverse as Akhenaton and Huitzilopochtli. It is also the work of Kahlo’s
that most resembles her husband’s style: Moses is painted like a mural, featuring
thematic sections grouping clusters of figures and structured by oppositions
between left and right, east and west, good and evil, masculine and feminine—
all devices often used by Rivera. Kahlo for once seems to have been more influ-
enced by Marx than by Freud. But she painted Moses after reading Freud and
portrays the analyst in her canvas, so perhaps she was more influenced by Freud
than by Marx . . . unless of course she was equally influenced by the two. Like
Trotsky, Kahlo believed that psychoanalysis could be reconciled with Marxism,
and that the life of the psyche was compatible with historical analysis.
Perhaps Rivera was right when he accused Wolfe of being “more in-
fluenced by Freud than by Marx.” Wolfe had become so intrigued by his sub-
ject that he took his biographical inquiries a step further and sought to delve
into the painter’s most guarded secrets. During the years it took to prepare
the book, Wolfe asked many questions and listened while Rivera talked
away. Rivera assumed he had the upper hand in the exchange until he saw the
book . . . and discovered that Wolfe had assumed the role of the analyst: he had
listened, but also interpreted and offered his own kind of “constructions in
analysis.” And many of Wolfe’s interpretations must have hit home, for Rivera,
by writing an angry letter and accusing his biographer of being more influenced
by Freud than by Marx, displayed a textbook example of what the Viennese an-
alyst called resistance. Rivera thus became an unwilling analysand: he dreamed
of being immortalized as a revolutionary, but found himself portrayed as a neu-
rotic . . . though one with a fabulous life.

234
 | 7 |

FREUD’S
MEXICAN
ANTIQUITIES

Every collector is a substitute for a Don

Juan Tenorio, and so is the
mountaineer, the sportsman, and such
people. These are erotic equivalents.
sigmund freud1

Freud was an avid collector of antiquities, and during his life he acquired over
two thousand archaeological pieces: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and other ob-
jects purchased from Viennese dealers or acquired during his trips to Italy
and Greece. Like smoking cigars, collecting was a guilty pleasure, one that
Freud playfully described as an addiction in light of the considerable financial
and psychological resources it demanded.2 Buying antiquities was expensive
and time-consuming, and Freud devoted countless hours to the purchase, authen-
tication, and arrangement of his objects.
Unlike most collectors, Freud invested his objects not only with exhi-
bition value, but also with use value: his antiquities became instruments for
writing, thinking, and even analyzing patients. He placed his most treasured
purchases on his desk so he could face them as he wrote, turning them into a
captive audience of sorts.3 Freud spoke to his antiquities, used them as paper-
weights, and would occasionally rub the head of a statuette; in a letter to Fliess,

237
he referred to these objects as his gods—albeit “old and grubby gods.”4 During
analytic sessions, he would sometimes point to one of his ancient artifacts to il-
lustrate the workings of the unconscious.5 Freud even traveled with his antiqui-
ties: every summer the family rented a country house, and the figurines had to
be carefully packed, unpacked, and reinstalled in the new domicile. And when
Freud left Vienna for good in 1938, he made the necessary arrangements—
including securing the required permits from the Nazi authorities—so that
his collection could accompany him to London. Princess Marie Bonaparte, his
patroness and one-time analysand, smuggled one of the most prized pieces—
a statuette of Athena—out of Austria. And when the end came, Freud’s ashes
were deposited in a Greek urn at London’s Golders Green Cemetery.
Much has been written about Freud’s collection, but scholars have
tended to focus on the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian pieces—objects belong-
ing to three cultures the analyst admired and about which he wrote extensively
in his essays. The cover of Sigmund Freud and Art—the first major catalog of
Freud’s holdings—for instance, features a winged sphinx, a piece directly related
to one of the central theories of psychoanalysis: the Oedipus complex. Crit-
ics have tended to read Freud’s antiquities as companion pieces to his writings,
assuming that he acquired pieces that illustrated elements of his arguments.
This line of inquiry works well for Oedipus, the Sphinx, Athena, and
Eros—characters who appear in The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality, and other works. But how are we to make sense
of the antiquities from other cultures without direct links to Freud’s theories?
How are we to read the African, Indian, and Chinese artifacts in his collection?
These objects came from places Freud never visited or discussed in his work,
and their presence in the collection raises an important question: what role did
cultural alterity play in Freud’s practice of collecting? And how did he perceive
the difference between the various cultures—Greek and Egyptian, Chinese
and Roman figures—represented in his holdings?
The question becomes even more complex when it comes to Freud’s
pre- Columbian holdings. Freud owned three pieces from American civiliza-
tions that do not fit into any of the schemas used to interpret the collection:
they are—at least at first sight—not related to psychoanalytic texts or concepts,
nor do they seem to have a connection to places, like Greece or Rome, which
Freud had invested with special significance. One might be tempted to dismiss
these pieces as anomalies in a collection that is otherwise coherent and unified.

238
But Freud himself taught us that every detail, regardless of how small or insig-
nificant it appears, can be placed under the lens of psychoanalysis to uncover a
web of unsuspected associations.
Freud’s pre-Columbian holdings consist of a Moche figure from Peru
that has been described as “vase depicting a dignitary” (figure 7.1) and the two
Mexican objects mentioned in the Introduction: a kneeling figure from West
Mexico (figure 7.2) and an anthropomorphic stone object from Mezcala (figure
7.3; plate 6).6 These objects have drawn little attention from scholars working
on Freud’s collection, and they have not been included in most exhibitions of
Freud’s antiquities—including one in Mexico City! The three pre-Columbian
objects have never been published together or analyzed as a group.7 In the pages
that follow, I propose to interpret these pieces with the following questions in
mind: Where did these objects come from? What role did pre-Columbian art
play in Freud’s collection? How did these objects influence Freud’s perception
of the Americas in general and of Mexico in particular? What do they tell us
about Freud’s relation to the non-European?

the objects

Freud’s American pieces come from two countries that gave birth to the great
pre-Columbian civilizations: Peru, home of the Inca Empire, and Mexico, land
of the Maya and the Aztecs. Interestingly, Freud’s objects were not created by
any of these cultures but by the relatively marginal peoples of the Moche and
West Mexico, which vanished long before the arrival of the Spaniards.
In contrast to the Inca, who built their capital on the mountains,
the Moche were coastal people who settled dozens of cities—complete with
temples and pyramids—along the Pacific Ocean. Their civilization disinte-
grated by about 800 CE, and most of what is known about them is based on
their artistic production—metalwork and ceramics of the type Freud owned.8
In the late nineteenth century, Max Uhle, a German scholar, visited Peru to study
the Moche, but faced many challenges: the region was looted long before archae-
ologists could excavate the sites, and there was scant information about the
provenance or original placement of the thousands of objects that eventually
found their way to museums and private collections around the world.

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 239
f i g u r e 7.1
Vase depicting a dignitary. Mochica, Peru, ca. 350 CE. 18 cm. Freud Museum, London.

240
f i g u r e 7.2
Kneeling figure. West Mexico, 100 BCE–250 CE. 30.3 × 10 cm. Freud Museum, London.

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 241
f i g u r e 7.3
Anthropomorphic idol. Mezcala, West Mexico, 12th–15th centuries CE. Green slate,
21.4 × 5.6 cm. Freud Museum, Vienna.
 Like the Moche, West Mexican cultures flourished in a remote region
close to the Pacific Ocean that occupies the modern-day states of Colima,
Jalisco, and Nayarit, far away from the center of power and from Teotihuacan,
the great city-state that was the precursor to the Aztec Empire. Until recently
this was one of the most obscure archaeological regions of Mexico: very little
was known about the West Mexicans, a people who lacked writing and thus,
unlike the Aztecs or Maya, left no written records. They were long considered
more “primitive” than the Aztecs, and, like the Moche, their civilization dis-
integrated many centuries before the arrival of the Europeans. They did not
leave behind temples or pyramids; only thousands of shaft tombs filled with
figurines like the one owned by Freud: terracotta sculptures representing men,
women, and animals engaged in simple, domestic, or village scenes—funerary
objects that constitute the main source of information on this lost civilization.9
As happened with the Moche, the vast majority of West Mexican sites
were pillaged, especially after the Revolution, when the region was mined for
what were now valuable archaeological pieces. Most West Mexican objects in
museums around the world—including Freud’s—were dug up by looters and
sold to collectors without any information on their provenance.10
The kneeling figure owned by Freud was originally designed to be bur-
ied in a shaft tomb—a type of figurine Richard Townsend believes was meant
to accompany the spirit of the deceased on the journey to the underworld, and
functioned as “certificates offering testimony of initiations and changes that
marked critical stages of life.”11
Coincidentally, around the time Freud acquired this piece, prob-
ably in the 1920s or 1930s, halfway around the world a very different art lover
was amassing what would become one of the most important collections of
West Mexican art. The muralist Diego Rivera was at work painting epic mu-
rals celebrating pre-Columbian Mexico as a utopian civilization that had been
destroyed by Europe. Rivera was especially interested in West Mexico: he ideal-
ized the inhabitants of this region and depicted them as a peace-loving people
who did not engage in any of the bloody excesses attributed to the Aztecs. Fol-
lowing a common misconception, he believed the West Mexicans did not prac-
tice human sacrifice, but instead devoted their energies to healthy, communal
activities. In the first published catalog of Rivera’s West Mexican collection,
Gilbert Médioni and Marie-Thérèse Pinto wrote: “There is no cruelty among
[the West Mexicans]. They apparently wished to ignore war, bloody sacrifices,
and even death; in any case nothing of this sort appears in their art. They are

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 243
 the Greeks of America. All their love goes to children, dogs, the young of animals,
familiar scenes.”12 Many other intellectuals in the 1930s shared this idealized vi-
sion of West Mexico: as Richard Townsend has written, West Mexican objects
“seemed to speak of an ideal, communal way of life, far from the regimented
coercion and economic exploitation of warlike fascist or imperialist states.”13
The third pre-Columbian piece Freud owned, the “Anthropomorphic
Idol,” comes from Mezcala, a region bounded by the Mezcala River (also known
as the Río Balsas) in the state of Guerrero, which also borders the Pacific. In the
past, this region was considered part of West Mexico, but scholars now define
it a separate archaeological zone. Like West Mexico, this is a peripheral region
about which very little is known, and which was looted for many centuries—
even as far back as Olmec times—before the arrival of archaeologists.14
We know even less about the Mezcala region than we do about West
Mexico; its inhabitants did not leave behind written records, and there is no
other evidence about their mode of life. All that remains from their culture is
their artistic production: simple figurines of the kind Freud owned, depicting
men, women, and sometimes animals, and originally placed in tombs. They
are carved out of the local hard stones—green, gray, and black, as well as “a
pale-green stone mottled with darker green typical of the area.”15 Miguel Co-
varrubias, an artist who wrote at length about this region, has described these
objects as “highly stylized and schematic,” and noted that many of them seem
to be executed in a style using a “mechanized technique, with a coarse, vigor-
ous character.”16 They are made “from a basic form like a petaloid ax with sym-
metrically arranged cuts and planes that barely indicate the traits of the face
and extremities. They are shown standing or seated, with arms folded across the
chest, stretched alongside the body, with hands over the stomach, or in front, in
an offering position.”17 The Mezcala style, notes Covarrubias, “resembles . . . no
other in Middle America.”18 André Emmerich, the New York dealer who orga-
nized one of the first exhibitions of these objects, compared these figurines to
the work of modern artists from Brancusi to Henry Moore.19
Freud’s pre-Columbian objects share a number of attributes: all three
pieces originated in remote areas far from the powerful urban centers of the
Inca or the Aztecs; they were made by peoples who had no writing, and thus
left no record of their history or beliefs, and vanished long before the arrival
of the Spaniards. And, perhaps more importantly, all three were funerary ob-
jects, designed to be buried alongside the dead in tombs that were looted long
before archaeologists had the opportunity to explore them. In this respect, the

244
three pre- Columbian pieces fit perfectly in a collection that included many
other examples of tomb art: from fragments of Egyptian mummies to Roman
sarcophagi.

provenance

But how did these pre-Columbian artifacts make their way from the Americas
to Vienna? Freud purchased most of his antiquities from local dealers, but he
also received some as presents from patients or friends. In some cases, the story
of how the object arrived at Freud’s office was at least as interesting the object
itself: Sergei Pankejeff, the Wolf Man, presented his analyst with a statue of the
Egyptian warrior goddess Neith, and later sent a drawing illustrating his night-
marish vision of a pack of wolves perched on a tree, a work that still hangs on
a wall of the Freud Museum in London; Salvador Dalí sketched Freud’s por-
trait using his signature “paranoiac-critical method” after visiting the analyst;
and Princess Marie Bonaparte offered him several valuable pieces, including
the Greek vase in which his ashes were deposited after his death.
Freud did not keep any records on the pre-Columbian pieces, and no
documents have survived that could explain how these objects arrived at Berg-
gasse. Out of the three, the Moche piece has the clearest connection to psy-
choanalysis. In 1919, Freud received an enthusiastic letter of admiration from a
young Peruvian doctor named Honorio Delgado, who had been disseminating
psychoanalytic ideas in Latin America.
Delgado published one of the first studies of psychoanalysis in Spanish:
La psicoanálisis (1919), authored many articles on analytic themes, and wrote a
biography of Freud in Spanish: Sigmund Freud (1926). He maintained a regu-
lar correspondence with Freud and made several trips to Europe to visit the re-
vered professor. The admiration was, to some degree, mutual: Delgado was the
only Latin American mentioned by Freud in “On the History of the Psycho-
Analytic Movement.”20
From their correspondence we know that Delgado, an old-fashioned
Peruvian gentleman with impeccable manners, often sent presents to the en-
tire Freud family, including the children and grandchildren. In several letters
written between 1927 and 1928, Freud thanks his Peruvian colleague for gifts
received.21 Álvaro Rey de Castro has suggested that the Moche vessel in Freud’s

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 245
collection was one of the many presents Delgado sent the Professor as a token
of his admiration.22
The Moche figure also relates—at least tangentially—to Freud’s pre-
psychoanalytic writings. In Über Coca, his 1884 study of cocaine, Freud de-
scribed the use of coca leaves in ancient Peru and quoted the Inca legend of
Manco Capac, the divine son of the Sun, who gave humans coca, that “divine
plant which satiates the hungry, strengthens the weak, and causes them to for-
get their misfortune.”23 Freud was especially interested in how ancient Peruvi-
ans “offered [coca] in sacrifice to gods and placed in the mouths of the dead.”24
Interestingly, there are at least two important connections between coca leaves
and Moche pottery: both were connected to the practice of sacrifice, and both
were used in funeral rituals.
If the Spanish language had been a boyhood obsession, Peru was linked
to one of Freud’s first professional interests. In this respect the Moche vessel’s
place in the collection is not unlike that of the Sphinx: it was a memento of
an earlier theoretical development in Freud’s thought, with the difference, of
course, that Freud quickly abandoned his interest in cocaine but retained a life-
long fascination with Oedipus.
The two Mexican objects pose a much greater challenge for the scholar.
With the exception of a footnote on the Aztecs, Freud never wrote about pre-
Columbian Mexico;25 and he never had a close Mexican disciple who, like Del-
gado, could have sent the pieces as presents. Freud could have acquired them on
his own, but there was virtually no market for American antiquities in Vienna
before the Second World War (but there were, in contrast, several dealers who
specialized in Asian objects).26
The Mexican pieces thus occupy a place in the collection of antiquities
that is as eccentric—and as puzzling—as that of the single Mexican book in
Freud’s library. How are we to interpret them? How do they relate to the other
objects in Freud’s collection? Could there be any links between these objects
and Freud’s theories? Could they provide some clues about the analyst’s percep-
tion of Mexico?

f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n l i b r a r y

We can try to reconstruct the ideas the analyst might have had about his Mex-
ican antiquities by turning to an extremely useful resource: Freud’s books.

246
When Freud moved to London in 1938 he took most of his library with him,
and it can still be consulted at 20 Maresfield Gardens. Scholars who have writ-
ten on Freud’s passion for archaeology have turned to the library in search of
the authors, from Heinrich Schliemann to James H. Breasted, who influenced
his thinking. We can certainly follow a similar strategy and mine the library for
information on these non-European antiquities: if Freud owned any studies of
Mexican archaeology, a topic that became popular among German and Aus-
trian scholars in the early years of the twentieth century, these volumes would
shed light on his ideas about the West Mexican and Mezcala antiquities.
Freud’s life coincided with an explosion of interest in Aztec Mexico
among Austrian, German, and French intellectuals. In 1916, Walter Benjamin
moved to Munich to attend a series of seminars, including one given by the
Americanist Walter Lehmann, on the language and culture of ancient Mex-
ico. Benjamin was fascinated by the Aztecs and recorded two dreams about
them in “One-Way Street”: in one, he sees “Mexican shrine from the time of
pre-animism, from the Anaquivitlzi”;27 in the second he encounters “a priest
rais[ing] a Mexican fetish.”28 In 1918, Eduard Stucken—an author Freud had
in his library—published Die weißen Götter, a novel about the conquest of
Mexico by the “white gods,” as the Spanish conquistadors were called by the
Aztecs.29 Two years later, in 1920, Gerhart Hauptmann wrote a play based on
Stucken’s novel: Der weiße Heiland (The white savior) was staged, with much
fanfare, throughout Germany and Austria. One of the Viennese productions
featured an actor wearing a replica of “Moctezuma’s headdresss” held in the col-
lections of the Museum of Natural History. Even Oswald Spengler succumbed
to the lure of the Aztecs: his archive at the Munich State Library includes an
unpublished play titled Montezuma: Ein Trauerspiel.30
This kind of Aztecmania caught on in other European countries. In
France, Georges Bataille devoted his 1928 essay “L’Amérique disparue” to ana-
lyzing the Aztecs’ “violence démente” and their pantheon of anthropophagic
gods, “les plus sanglants de tous ceux qui ont peuplé les nuages terrestres” [the
bloodiest of all who have lived under terrestrial clouds]. The opening para-
graph of this essay is representative of the generalized fascination with Aztec
cruelty found among so many European intellectuals in the first two decades of
the twentieth century:

La vie des peuples civilisés de l’Amérique avant Christophe Colomb n’est

pas seulement prodigieuse pour nous du fait de leur découverte et de leur

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disparition instantanées, mais aussi parce que jamais sans doute plus sanglante
excentricité n’a été conçue par la démence humaine: crimes continuels commis
en plein soleil pour la seule satisfaction de cauchemars déifiés, phantasmes terri-
fiants ! Des repas cannibales des prêtres, des cérémonies à cadavres et à ruisseaux
de sang, plus qu’une aventure historique évoquent les aveuglantes débauches
décrites par l’illustre marquis de Sade. Il est vrai que cette observation concerne
surtout le Mexique.31

[The life of American civilizations before Columbus was astonishing: not only
because the discovery was followed by an instantaneous disappearance, but also
because never before had such a bloody eccentricity been conceived by human
madness: nonstop crimes, perpetrated in plain sight for the sole purpose of sat-
isfying deified nightmares and terrifying specters! The priest’s cannibal meals,
the rituals revolving around dead bodies and rivers of blood evoke the dazzling
debauchery described by the illustrious Marquis de Sade. It is true that these
observations concern mostly Mexico.]

Bataille—who would revisit the theme of Aztec sacrifice in his novels

and essays of the 1920s and 1930s—provided one of the most original expla-
nations to the mystery of how the Spaniards conquered Mexico with only a
few hundred men: the Aztecs, he argued, chose to kill themselves in a mas-
sive human sacrifice.32 In 1935, Elias Canetti published Auto-da-fé, which in-
cluded a nightmare sequence of Aztec human sacrifice: instead of blood, books
flow from the victim’s open chest: “Human sacrifices he had heard of,” remarks
the character, “but books, books!”33 Even French cinema participated in this
veritable Aztec mania: Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu (1939) features a young
woman named Jackie who announces to her aristocratic friends that she has
taken up the study of pre-Columbian art, only to be derided as an intellectual
fashion victim by the other guests:

Madame La Bruyère: Bonsoir, ma petite Jackie . . . je voulais te de-

mander qu’est ce que c’est que l’art que tu étudies, ton art précolombien?
Jackie: C’est l’étude de la civilisation américaine avant l’arrivée de Chris-
tophe Colomb.
MLB: Ah, oui, des histoires de nègres!
J: Mais non, Madame, il n’y avait pas encore de nègres en Amérique.
MLB: Tiens, mais qu’est-ce qu’il y avait alors?

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J: Mais les Indiens.
MLB: Ah! oui, évidemment, que je suis bête! . . . Buffalo Bill!”34

[Madame La Bruyère: Good evening, my dear Jackie. Say, I wanted to

ask . . . what is that art you’re studying, that pre-Columbian art?
Jackie: It’s the study of American civilizations before the arrival of Chris-
topher Columbus.
MLB: Oh, I see: Negro stuff.
J: But no, Madame: There were no Negroes in America at that time.
MLB: Really? So what was there?
J: Indians.
MLB: But of course! How silly of me: Buffalo Bill!]

As these examples reveal, the Aztecs were very much à la mode among
European intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps the horrors experienced
by Europe during the Great War had made the theme of human sacrifice partic-
ularly relevant to intellectuals. While these fantasies about Aztec cruelty were
not always historically accurate, they would have colored Freud’s vision of An-
cient Mexico as a land of unusual aggression.
But, alas, none of these Aztec-philic authors is represented in Freud’s li-
brary: neither Benjamin, nor Bataille, not even Stucken’s novel of Hauptmann’s
play. But the library does include three books featuring lengthy discussions of
Ancient Mexico: Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Heinrich Heine’s Romanzero, and,
to a lesser extent, Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religions of the Semites.35
These are authors Freud knew well—Frazer and Smith are the main sources for
Totem and Taboo, while Heine is cited frequently in Jokes and Their Relation
to the Unconscious—and their views on Aztec culture would have influenced
Freud’s ideas about Mexico . . . and about the two pre- Columbian objects in
his collection.36

f r a z e r’s m e x i c o

The eleven volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough constitute the most ambi-
tious, encyclopedic, and controversial collection of worldwide myths ever pub-
lished. Frazer discusses the beliefs and customs of peoples from North America

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to Australia, organizing them under a series of categories, like “The Scapegoat”
and “ Spirits of the Corn and the Wild,” that allow for a comparative study.
Pre-Columbian Mexico is an important reference throughout this monumen-
tal work: Frazer writes at length about the Aztecs and, to a lesser degree, about
other Indian groups that include Huicholes, Tepehuanes, Tzentzales, and even
the Cora of West Mexico.
Frazer was especially interested in the Aztec practice of ritual sacri-
fice—a topic he explores in depth in two chapters of The Golden Bough: “Eat-
ing the God among the Aztecs” (in the volume Spirits of the Corn and the Wild )
and “Killing the God in Mexico” (a section of The Scapegoat). Frazer was both
fascinated and horrified by this Aztec ritual, which he called “the most mon-
strous on record.”37 He noted that in pre- Columbian Mexico “more people
used to be sacrificed on the altar than died a natural death.”38 His main sources
are the Spanish chroniclers Bernardino de Sahagún—whose works he read
in French translation—Diego Durán, Francisco Clavijero, Juan de Torque-
mada, José de Acosta, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Gonzalo Fernández de
Oviedo, as well as nineteenth-century scholars and travelers like Eduard Seeler,
Carl Lumholtz, and Désiré Charnay.39
The first of these chapters, “Eating the God in Mexico,” analyzes “the
custom of eating bread sacramentally as the body of a god” as part of a wider
discussion about “spirits of the corn and the wild.” Quoting Sahagún and other
early chroniclers, Frazer describes the ritual of solemnly ingesting an edible im-
age of “Huitzilopochtli or Vitzilipuztli” (baffled by the Nahuatl pronuncia-
tion, Spanish chroniclers referred to this god as “Huichilobos”; English and
German translations often called him “Vitzlipuztli” or “Vitzliputzli”; scholars
now use the standard “Huitzilopochtli”). Priests made a likeness of the god
out of maize and honey paste, carried it to the top of a pyramid, and then fed
it to the worshippers “in [the] manner of a communion, beginning with the
greater and continuing unto the rest, both men, women, and little children,
who received it with such tears, fear, and reverence as it was an admirable thing,
saying that they did eat the flesh and bones of God wherewith they grieved.”40
Frazer comments: “from this interesting passage we learn that the ancient Mex-
icans, even before the arrival of Christian missionaries, were fully acquainted
with the theological doctrine of transubstantiation and acted upon it in the
solemn rites of their religion.” In his view, the Aztecs did not have “much to
learn from the most refined mysteries of Catholic theology.”41 Freud seemed
especially interested in this idea: he marked the passage on “The doctrine of

250
 transubstantiation or the magical conversion of bread into flesh recognized by
the ancient Aztecs and Brahmans”—one of only two pages he annotated in his
copy of The Golden Bough.42
Frazer theorized that the practice of ingesting a divine likeness was
closely related to human sacrifice. “The Mexicans,” he wrote, “did not always
content themselves with eating their gods in the outward and visible shape of
bread or grain,” even in cases when the dough was “kneaded and fortified with
human blood.” But this was not enough and the people aspired to “a closer
union with the living god, and attained it by devouring the flesh of a real man,
who, after he had paraded for a time in the trappings and received the honors of
a god, was slaughtered and eaten by his cannibal worshippers.” Once dead, “in-
stead of being kicked down the staircase and sent rolling from step to step like
the corpses of common victims, the body of the dead god was carried respect-
fully down, and his flesh, chopped up small, was distributed among the priests
and nobles as a blessed food.”43 Frazer saw these ceremonies as exemplifying
“the custom of entering into communion with a god by eating his effigy.”44 He
believed that the intention of these rituals was twofold: to keep the corn spirits
alive and to allow the worshippers to partake—by eating a likeness—in a por-
tion of the god’s divinity.45
Frazer merely touched on sacrificial rituals in Spirits of the Corn and the
Wild, but he presents a more elaborate discussion in The Scapegoat, a volume
that devotes an entire chapter to the practice of “killing the god in Mexico.”
“Among no other people,” he writes, “does the custom of sacrificing the human
representative of a god appear to have been observed so commonly and with so
much solemnity as by the Aztecs of Mexico.”46
Frazer points to the example of a yearly ceremony that consisted in se-
lecting young men to live as the incarnations of a major god for several months.
During this brief period they were treated like divinities, but at the end of the
ceremony they were sacrificed at the altar. The incarnation of the deity “was
seized and held down by the priests on his back upon a block of stone, while
one of them cut open his breast, thrust his hand into the wound, and wrench-
ing out his heart held it up in sacrifice to the sun.”47
Frazer found these sacrificial rituals shocking, but he was even more
disturbed by another Aztec practice: cannibalism. He describes, in gruesome
detail, the anthropophagic rituals involving prisoners captured in warfare. Af-
ter the victims had been sacrificed atop the pyramid, he writes, “the bodies were
sent rolling down the staircase, clattering and turning over like gourds as they

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 bumped from step to step till they reached the bottom.” Once they had come to
rest on the ground, “they were received by other priests, or rather human butch-
ers” who flayed them. The skinless body was then carried away by the warrior
who had captured him. “He took it home with him, carved it, sent one of the
thighs to the king, and other joints to friends, or invited them to come and feast
on the carcass in his house.”48 In some cases, “the body was drest with diverse
sauces, to celebrate (at the break of day) the banquet and dinner of the feast.”49
Frazer concludes that the sacrifice of these human deities constituted “a
means of perpetuating the divine energies in the fullness of youthful vigour, un-
tainted by the weakness and frailty of age, from which they must have suffered
if the deity had been allowed to die a natural death.”50 Through these rituals,
“the priests attempted not merely to revive the gods whom they had just slain in
the persons of their human representatives, but also to restore to their wasting
and decaying frames all the vigour and energy of youth.”51
Frazer’s analysis of Aztec religion touched on two themes that were of
fundamental importance in Freud’s work: human sacrifice and cannibalism. To-
tem and Taboo, the only work in which Freud refers to Ancient Mexico, notes
that “the human sacrifices of the Aztecs [which] have been reported in detail by
Frazer in the fifth part of his great work,” constitute a good example of the sac-
ramental nature of sacrificial rituals.52 Like the English anthropologist, Freud
associated pre-Columbian Mexico with the bloody rituals of killing and eating
sacrificial victims. But as we will see further on, his reaction to these practices
was quite different than Frazer’s.

h e i n e ’s m e x i c o

In addition to The Golden Bough, Freud owned another book that dwelt at
length on Aztec rituals: Heinrich Heine’s Romanzero (1851), a collection of po-
etry that included “Vitzliputzli,” a mock epic about the conquest of Mexico.
This mischievous poem, written in the 1840s while Heine was exiled in Paris,
could not be more different in tone and spirit from Frazer’s anthropological
texts.53
“Vitzliputzli” recasts the story of the conquest of Mexico as a German
Romantic tale. The poem opens with a prelude hailing America as a bright
new land that “shines with sea-fresh colors” and “drips with pearls or water,” in

252
contrast to an old Europe that has degenerated into “a romantic’s graveyard”
and an “ancient junkyard.”54 The action begins with the arrival of the Span-
ish conquistadors in Mexico and their first encounter with the Aztecs. Heine
does not show much sympathy for the Spanish leader, Hernán Cortés, whom
he calls “a bandit” and “a robber captain.”55 In contrast, Moctezuma, the Aztec
emperor, appears as a gracious host, showering the foreigners with gifts, only to
be kidnapped and murdered by them. His death ignites a violent war, and the
Mexicans turn all their rage against the conquistadors: “a stormy tide of terror /
mounted like a savage ocean.”56
The first section of the poem closes with the Spaniards, beaten and de-
moralized, retreating from the Aztec city on that sad night that went down in
history as the noche triste. Heine paints this scene with all the pathos character-
istic of Romantic poetry: “Blood flowed red in streaming torrents / And the
bold carousers struggled”;57 even the mighty Cortés breaks down at the sight of
the carnage, and we find him “weepy, under weeping willows.”58
While the Spaniards mourn, the Aztecs prepare to celebrate their vic-
tory by offering a sacrifice to the god Vitzliputzli. The ceremony, like those
described by Frazer in The Golden Bough, takes place on a pyramid, which
Heine, following a long tradition that began in the seventeenth century, likens
to an Egyptian temple. At the summit of this “Red-brick stronghold of the
idol—/ Strange reminder of Egyptian / Babylonic and Assyrian / Buildings,
monstrous and colossal,”59 we catch the first glimpse of the “bloodthirsty god”
Vitzliputztli:

Dort auf seinem Thronaltar [There, upon his altar-throne

Sitzt der große Vitzliputzli, Sits the mighty Vitzliputlzi,
Mexikos blutdürst’ger Kriegsgott. Mexico’s bloodthirsty war god,
Ist ein böses Ungetüm, He’s an evil-looking monster,
Doch sein Äußres ist so putzig, But so droll is his exterior,
So verschnörkelt und so kindisch, So bedizened and so childish,
Daß er trotz des innern Grausens That in spite of inward shudders
Dennoch unsre Lachlust kitzelt— Yet he tickles us to laughter,
Und bei seinem Anblick denken And on seeing him, one also
Wir zu gleicher Zeit etwa Is reminded of the picture
An der blassen Tod von Basel Of the Dance of Death in Basel
Und an Brüssels Mankenpiß.60 And of Brussels’s Manneken-Pis.]61

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 Vitzliputzli turns out to be much less threatening than the reader had antic-
ipated: even though he looks like a “bloodthirsty god,” he turns out to be a
“droll” and “childlike” figure that “tickles us to laughter,” and is no more fear-
some than the Belgian statue of the pissing boy.
Enter an Aztec priest, “a little hundred-year-old / Man with hairless
chin and baldpate,” who will sacrifice eighty Spaniards to his god:62 the vic-
tims will be killed and devoured by Vitzliputzli and his worshippers. But
the poet introduces a peculiar distinction: while the priests eat human flesh
(“For the priests are men and mortals, / And we men must fill our stomachs”),
Vitzliputzli, a spiritual entity, can only take in the smell of blood. The priest
tells his god: “today it’s Spanish blood that / will regale your greedy nostrils /
with its warm and fragrant vapors.”63 (Coincidentally, Robertson Smith de-
voted a short passage in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites to the associa-
tion of gods with immaterial sustenance: “Thus the idea that the gods drink,
but do not eat, seems to mark the feeling that they must be thought of as having
a less solid material nature than men.”)64
Once satiated, the priest offers a recriminating oration to his god in the
poem’s most playful verses:

“Vitzliputzli, Putzlivitzli, [“Vitzliputzli, Putzlivitzli,

Liebstes Göttchen Vitzliputzli! Dearest godling Vitzliputzli!
Hast dich heute amüsieret, What a good time you’ve been
Hast gerochen Wohlgerüche! having,
Heute gab es Spanierblut— What sweet odors you’ve been
Oh, das dampfte so app’titlich, smelling!
Und den feines Leckernäschen Spanish blood was served today—
Sog den Duft ein, wollustglänzend.”65 Oh, it steamed with savory fragrance,
And your fine fastidious nostrils
Sniffed it with voluptuous pleasure.”]66

The Aztec god responds to the priest’s prayers with a cruel request: he is still
hungry, so he asks the priest to sacrifice himself !
After the bloody banquet, Viztliputzli’s mood turns somber: he predicts
an imminent Spanish victory followed by the destruction of his city, the col-
lapse of Aztec civilization, and the twilight of its gods: “Smashed to bits will be
my temple,” he laments, “I myself will fall and founder / In the ruins—dust and
ashes—.” But Vitzliputzli is a god, and since gods are immortal, he will survive

254
the mayhem: after the Conquest, Vitzliputzli will flee his homeland and seek ref-
uge in Europe, the land of his enemies, where he will devote his endless life to ter-
rorizing his foes and “with torments / Frighten them with ghostly phantoms.”67
In the last stanza, a melancholic Vitzliputzli relishes the prospect of ex-
acting revenge upon the Spaniards:

“Mein geliebtes Mexiko, [“My beloved Mexico—

Nimmermehr kann ich es retten, I can save her now no longer,
Aber rächen will ich furchtbar But I’ll wreak a dire revenge for
Mein geliebtes Mexiko.”68 My beloved Mexico.”]69

Heine’s portrayal of Ancient Mexico foregrounds the same two themes

Frazer presented in The Golden Bough: cannibalism and human sacrifice. In-
deed, “Vitzliputzli” focuses on the same rituals discussed in Frazer’s study, and
the two authors consulted the same sources on Aztec religious ceremonies.70
Heine’s descriptions of Aztec priests offering the aroma of human blood to
their deities while feasting on the flesh of eighty Spaniards would be entirely at
home in the catalog of pre-Columbian atrocities compiled by Frazer.
But Heine’s attitude toward Ancient Mexico could not be more differ-
ent from Frazer’s. From the very first lines of the poem, Heine makes it clear
that his sympathies lie with the Aztecs, not with the Europeans: and if Frazer
deplored the Aztec sacrificial rituals as “the most monstrous on record,” Heine
likens them to Spanish customs:

“Menschenopfer” heißt das Stück. [“Human sacrifice” is its title.

Uralt ist der Stoff, die Fabel; Ancient plot, an ancient fable;
In der christlichen Behandlung In its Christian form the drama
Ist das Schauspiel nicht so gräßlich. Is not such a gruesome version—
Denn dem Blute wurde Rotwein, For the blood is changed to red wine,
Und dem Leichnam, welcher vorkam, And the body that’s presented
Wurde eine harmlos dünne Is by transubstantiation
Mehlbreispeis’ transsubstituieret— Just a harmless little wafer.
Diermal aber, bei den Wilden, Now, however, savage Indians
War der Spaß sehr roh undernsthaft Played this jest out in raw earnest:
Aufgefaßt: man speiste Fleisch, It was real flesh that they fed on
Und das Blut was Menschenblut.71 And the blood was human blood.72]

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 Heine describes human sacrifice as a ritual practiced by both Aztecs and Span-
iards, albeit in slightly different ways. The Spaniards eat Christ, while the
Aztecs eat their enemies. Claude Rawson has argued that “the cannibal imputa-
tion has been a staple of ethnic defamation since as far back as Homer,”73 and
following a similar logic, Heine directs this accusation against the Europeans
to make them more savage than their Mexican counterparts.
The Spaniards practice a form of sacrifice that is mere “jest,” involving
red wine and “harmless little wafers,” while the Aztec version is more real: “It
was real flesh that they fed on / And the blood was human blood.” Heine thus
gives the Aztecs the upper hand when it comes to authenticity: Christians seem
unable to accept the implications of their ritual and must substitute real flesh
for watered-down equivalents, while the Aztecs are more “earnest.”
Heine’s Aztec priest offers an even more heretical comparison of Chris-
tian and Mexican sacrificial rituals. He calls the Spaniards “morally ugly” and
views their religion with contempt. “They’re even wont to / munch upon their
own gods’ bodies,” he exclaims in disgust, dismissing the foreigners as “god-
devourers [Götterfresser].”74 This remark adds another twist to the comparison
between the two religions: among the Aztecs, priests eat commoners; among
the Christians, it is the commoners who eat their gods. Both meals are equally
cannibalistic, but at least the Aztecs reserve human flesh for the priestly class
and keep their gods at bay from hungry mouths!
Heine’s identification with the Aztecs colors his poetic form: his
language performs on itself the very act of sacrifice it represents. When the
priest slays the Spaniards while praying to “Vitzliputzli, Putzlivitzli, / Dear-
est godling Vitzliputzli,” Heine uses a linguistic blade to slice the word
“Vitzliputzli” in half before recombining the fragments into the neologism
“Putzlivitzli.” This technique of syntactic cutting and rearranging, a linguis-
tic sacrifice of sorts, parallels the Aztec practice of reassembling severed body
parts during the ceremonies described by Frazer.75 And if Aztec sacrifices al-
tered the function of human organs—a beating heart was turned into an in-
animate snack—Heine transforms the linguistic function of “Vitzliputzli,”
playfully changing it from a proper noun into the verb Vitzliputzeln—to
Vitzliputz (one of his characters asks, rhetorically, if the deity has been “blithely
vitzliputzling”).76 If the Aztecs sacrifice Spaniards, Heine sacrifices words (and
also Spaniards . . . for it is he who orchestrates their ritual ingestion in the
poem). And if the Aztecs offer their sacrifice to Vitzliputzli, Heine directs his
linguistic sacrifice to the reader, serving the butchered words of the German

256
language, and inviting the reader to partake, like a cannibal, in this feast of
putzlis and vitzlis, of severed names and sliced up words.
In the end, Heine’s “Vitzliputzli” subverts the opposition between sav-
age and civilized—an opposition that structures most European accounts of
Aztec civilization, including Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Though Heine intro-
duces the Aztecs as “savage,” he ultimately presents them as more civilized than
the Spaniards: it is the Spanish Christians who backstab, rob, steal, and ulti-
mately adopt a watered-down version of human sacrifice because they cannot
stomach the real thing, while the Aztecs are noble, courageous, and in touch
with the true nature of sacrificial rituals.77
Heine’s Aztecs are nothing like Frazer’s Mexicans. Frazer, like a good
Victorian, experienced a mixture of horror and contempt toward the “savage”
rituals of the Aztecs. In contrast, Heine turns the Aztec priest into a Romantic
hero and human sacrifice into a poetic model. His Aztecs are not only civilized,
but their rituals surpass those of the Spaniards in theological complexity. Frazer
imagined himself as a potential victim of Aztec sacrifice, while Heine identified
with Vitzliputzli: like the Mexican god, he was an exile condemned to live far
away from his native land and lament its fate.78
When Freud read Heine’s Romanzero, he would have been particularly
attentive to the ending: Vitzliputzli, like libidinal flows, cannot be destroyed;
he disappears from one location to reappear in another—the same procedure
Freud attributed to psychic forces. In “The Uncanny,” Freud invoked another
of Heine’s poems to explain the workings of unconscious repression: in un-
canny experiences, he wrote, “the ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as,
after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.”79 The ana-
lyst was referring to Heine’s Die Götter im Exil, a poem devoted to the same
topic as “Vitzliputzli”: the exile of deities after the collapse of their cultures.
Among so many other things, “Vitzliputzli” is a parable about the return of the
repressed.

m e x i c a n ta b o o s

The Golden Bough and Romanzero present two very different models for
thinking about the pre- Columbian objects in Freud’s collection of antiqui-
ties. Frazer’s account would have led Freud to perceive the Ancient Mexicans

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 257
as a barbarous and bloodthirsty bunch, given to the most extravagant acts of
cruelty—rituals that would send shivers up the spine of even the most sadistic
of his patients. Heine’s poetry, on the other hand, would have inspired him to
imagine the Aztecs as Romantic heroes, as passionate warriors whose practice
of human sacrifice was merely a more honest version of the Christian sacra-
ment of communion.
Unlike Frazer, Freud was not easily shocked by either human sacrifice
or cannibalism. He spent many years thinking about the role of these two prac-
tices in the evolution of civilization, and he wrote at length about them in To-
tem and Taboo—a work that is both an elaboration of and a response to The
Golden Bough.
Totem and Taboo is an essay about the origins of religion and society.
Freud begins by considering the most archaic of tribes, a group of savages who
had not yet developed religion, government, or even agriculture. Citing Dar-
win, Freud argues that this primal horde was led by a despotic father who ex-
erted his authority by brute force and kept all the women for himself. His sons
felt oppressed by this arrangement; their resentment grew, until one day they
rose against the father, killed him, and ate his body.80 Following the crime, the
brothers experienced a deep ambivalence about their deed: they felt guilty and
remembered their affectionate feelings toward their father; at the same time,
they celebrated the disappearance of the hated tyrant. Aware of the dangerous
implications of their crime—which their own descendants could one day re-
peat against them—the brothers devised a series of rules to maintain order and
prevent all further acts of patricide: a prohibition against killing the totem, the
paternal symbol par excellence, and various interdictions designed to enforce
exogamy. These primitive constraints, Freud argues, are the negative correla-
tives of the two impulses found in the Oedipus complex, and they constitute
the first step toward the development of the social and religious institutions
that are the core of civilization.
Human sacrifice and cannibalism, the same themes that dominate the
discussions of Aztec culture in The Golden Bough and Romanzero, play a cru-
cial role in Freud’s tale of patricide. But for him, human sacrifice—the killing of
the father by the primal horde—represents the cornerstone of civilization. All
religious and social innovations since then, Freud argues, have been attempts to
atone for the brothers’ deed by idealizing the paternal figure: first came totemic
religion (with its two taboos designed to prevent further killings), followed by
the invention of the concept of God (“at bottom God is nothing other than an

258
 exalted father”),81 which eventually led to the generalized practice of sacrifice
(“The object of an act of sacrifice has always been the same—namely, what
is now worshipped as God, that is to say, the father”),82 before culminating
with the appearance of kings (“father surrogates”).83 Even the rise of Christian-
ity was merely a sophisticated variation on the primitive crime: “In the Chris-
tian doctrine . . . men were acknowledging in the most undisguised manner the
guilty primeval deed, since they found the fullest atonement for it [the murder
of the father] in the sacrifice of his son.”84
Freud is especially interested in the emergence of sacrifice as an integral
element of religious practice. At its origin, he writes, it was offered directly to
God—a paternal substitute—as a way of atoning for the killing: “The impor-
tance which is everywhere, without exception, ascribed to sacrifice lies in the
fact that it offers satisfaction to the father for the outrage inflicted on him.”85
But sacrifice, which always involves the slaying of animals or humans, is also
a symbolic repetition of the primitive murder—the worshippers direct their
murderous impulses against a paternal substitute taking the form of an animal
or a human. Sacrifice is a symbolically ambivalent deed: it is meant to atone for
the patricide through an act that is also its symbolic repetition, or, as Freud puts
it, sacrifice “offers satisfaction to the father for the outrage inflicted on him in
the same act in which that deed is commemorated.”86
The symbolic structure of sacrifice becomes even more complex when
it involves human victims. “The ceremonials of human sacrifice,” writes Freud,
“leave very little doubt that the victims met their end as representatives of the
deity.”87 Freud then points to the Aztec “theanthropic sacrifice of the god”—
the ritual slaying of a person incarnating a divinity—as the most dramatic ex-
ample of this practice.88 Theanthropic rituals have the distinction of featuring
the killing of a father substitute as both a reenactment of the original murder
and an atonement for the deed.
Totem and Taboo links human sacrifice to cannibalism, one of the prac-
tices both Frazer and Heine associated with Mexico. The horde of brothers,
Freud explains, went from crime to anthropophagic feast: “Cannibal savages as
they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as kill-
ing him.”89 But if the murder was sparked by an irruption of hostile impulses,
the act of cannibalism stemmed from more complex feelings: “The violent pri-
mal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the
company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their
identification with him, and each of them acquired a portion of his strength.”90

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 259
 Cannibalism is the foundation of identification, a fundamental psycho-
analytic concept. The father might have been a ruthless tyrant, but there were
many aspects of him that the brothers admired: his strength, his power, his
sexual appetite. After his death, the brothers yearned to become like him—or
at least like the portion of his personality they respected and admired. And
since they had no more complex mechanisms at their disposal, they decided to
eat him: by incorporating a portion of the dead body, each of them would be
able to carry with him a piece—a good piece—of him. If the brothers killed
their father out of hatred, they ate him out of love. To put it in slightly differ-
ent terms, Freud considered cannibalism a primitive—perhaps the most primi-
tive—expression of love.91
Like sacrifice, this primitive act of cannibalism underwent a series of
transformations through the ages: it was first commemorated by the totem
meal, in which a father substitute, the totem animal, was eaten by the group;
with time the ritual became more abstract, until the advent of Christianity, a
religion in which “the ancient totem meal was revived in the form of commu-
nion, in which the company of brothers consumed the flesh and blood of the
son—no longer the father—, obtained sanctity thereby and identified them-
selves with him.”92 Freud stresses that Christianity, the religion of civilized Eu-
rope, features as its most important sacrament a symbolic repetition of the
cannibalistic feast celebrated by the primal horde. “We can trace through the
ages,” he argues, “the identity of the totem meal with animal sacrifice, with
theanthropic human sacrifice and with the Christian Eucharist, and we can rec-
ognize in all these rituals the effect of the crime by which men were so deeply
weighed down but of which they must nonetheless feel so proud.”93 Freud’s
argument turned his readers—at least the Christians among them—into can-
nibals of sorts who continued to symbolically eat the flesh of a paternal figure
even while condemning, like Frazer, the anthropophagic rituals practiced by
“primitive” peoples.
We can thus see how greatly Freud’s views on human sacrifice and canni-
balism differed from those expressed by Frazer and Heine. Unlike Frazer, Freud
did not believe that these practices were the exclusive domain of savages living
in faraway lands. If Frazer established a rigid distinction between civilization
and barbarism, between rational Europeans and cannibal Indians, Freud in-
sisted on the continuity of these violent impulses from the primal horde to the
present, emphasizing how the most refined accomplishments of civilization—

260
including the institutions of religion and the law—are built on a foundation of
anthropophagic sacrifice.
Freud is closer in spirit to Heine. Heine wrote a poem in which Span-
iards, “god devourers,” surpass the Aztecs in savagery: they “munch upon their
own gods’ bodies.”94 The poet’s comparison of Christian communion and
Mexican theanthropic sacrifice fits within the elegant schema presented in To-
tem and Taboo. But there is an important difference between the analyst and
the poet: while Heine falls into the Romantic myth of the noble savage, and
renders his Aztecs more authentic and more passionate than their Spanish
counterparts, Freud refuses to idealize Ancient Mexicans or other practitioners
of human sacrifice. Our civilization might have developed institutions to keep
violent impulses at bay, but in essence modern man differs very little from the
murderous horde of brothers. Freud believes that the impulse to kill and eat the
father has not been extinguished: it has merely undergone a series of transfor-
mations and developments through the ages. And, as he would later argue in
Civilization and Its Discontents, our supposedly civilized world is ever on the
brink of sliding back into barbarism, as the world discovered a few months after
the publication of Totem and Taboo, when the Great War plunged Europe into
the worst kind of savagery.
While most European intellectuals in the early twentieth century saw
the Aztecs as cruel practitioners of human sacrifice and cannibalism, Freud
would have considered them simply as a people that display more openly the
hostile impulses that are part and parcel of human nature. He actually places
the Aztecs within the historical overview presented in Totem and Taboo: more
advanced than the primal horde—they had developed a sophisticated religion
and solid social institutions, and had moved beyond the totem meal and ani-
mal sacrifices—the Aztecs were still practicing theanthropic sacrifices. Unlike
the Spaniards, they had not yet elevated sacrificial cannibalism into a symbolic
ritual, thus they remained bound to a recurring, literal repetition of the prime-
val killing of the father.95
Freud does not comment on the horror experienced by the Spaniards
at the discovery of Aztec religion, but he would have perhaps interpreted it as a
classic example of the uncanny: an overwhelming sense of anxiety experienced
at the sight of an act eradicated from conscious memory. What had been re-
pressed from civilized Europe—the killing that was the founding act of civiliza-
tion—returned with shocking literalism in Aztec sacrifice: what the Spaniard

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 261
repeated metaphorically in the ritual of the Eucharist, the Aztecs commemo-
rated literally, by selecting a father figure to sacrifice and devour. The anxiety
produced by this déjà vu would explain the violence with which Europeans re-
acted to Aztec sacrificial ceremonies.

t o t e m , ta b o o, a n d m u lt i c u lt u r a l i s m

One remarkable feature of the historical account presented in Totem and Ta-
boo is its capacity to accommodate every culture and religious system, from
animism to Judaism and from Aboriginal totemism to the Christian Eucha-
rist. Freud’s theory can account for Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or even pre-
Columbian belief systems: all of these religions worship a god that functions
as a father substitute and stage rituals that are symbolic repetitions of the
primal killing.
Like The Golden Bough, Totem and Taboo aspires to universality. But if
Frazer proceeds like an encyclopedist, cataloging the world’s myriad myths and
rituals, Freud works like a theorist, devising a single schema to account for the
totality of religious beliefs. Frazer assumes a complete discontinuity between
European civilization and savage peoples; Freud, on the other hand, focuses
on the shared psychic traits linking civilization and barbarism, Europeans and
non-Europeans.
The approaches taken by Freud and Frazer correspond to the differ-
ences between their disciplines: anthropology highlights cultural differences,
while psychoanalysis treats national and ethnic differences, like religion, as
mere illusions. Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the universality of uncon-
scious structures—complexes, anxieties, fears, desires—and the shared psychic
traits among people of different origins. Totem and Taboo, for instance, in-
sists on the Oedipus complex as a fundamental structure of the human psyche,
found alike in Aborigines, pre- Columbians, and Europeans. Cultures and re-
ligions might undergo the most radical transformations across time and space,
but the essential component of the Oedipus complex remains constant.
The schema presented in Totem and Taboo can account for the belief
systems of ancient Peru, contemporary Africa, or medieval Spain. In this sense
Freud was a multiculturalist avant la lettre. His theories emphasize the common
traits linking peoples and cultures across geographical, linguistic, religious, and

262
political borders. Freud’s multicultural view is best illustrated by the arrange-
ment of antiquities on his desk. Out of the hundreds of pieces he owned, Freud
selected a handful of prized objects for this privileged spot: these were his most
treasured pieces, the “gods” who kept him company as he wrote in his study,
doubling as his silent audience. As Freud worked on Totem and Taboo between
1912 and 1913, his eyes would have wandered from the paper to the figurines as
he meditated on primal hordes, human sacrifices, and cannibalistic feasts.
Examining the antiquities on Freud’s desk, as captured in an etching by
Max Pollak from 1914 (figure 7.4), the viewer is struck by their diversity: there
are Egyptian, Umbrian, Greek and Roman figures. By 1938, when Edmund En-
gelman photographed the interior of Berggasse 19, just before Freud left Vienna,
the selection on the desk had grown to encompass Chinese and Mesopotamian,
as well as more Roman and Egyptian pieces (figure 7.5).96 In addition, the vitrines
in his study and consulting room held other objects from Africa, the Americas,
and the Far East. Freud’s private pantheon was truly multicultural: a veritable
sampling of civilizations ranging from Classical Greece to Ancient China.
Freud’s collecting was characterized by a “Franciscanism of cultures”—
to paraphrase Roland Barthes’s assessment of Severo Sarduy’s love of words
from different traditions.97 He opened the door of Berggasse 19 to representa-
tives from every imaginable ancient civilization: Eastern and Western, South-
ern and Northern. And all pieces shared the same space: Freud refused to
segregate them according to national or geographic origin, or even to submit
them to the apparent logic of chronological ordering. His desk and vitrines
became egalitarian territories in which Greek and Roman antiquities—long-
standing symbols of European high culture—rubbed shoulders with North
African and Asian figures.
This egalitarian museography is all the more striking if we consider that
in Freud’s time most museums moved in the opposite direction, carving out
separate spaces for European and non-European antiquities. In Freud’s Vienna,
Franz Josef inaugurated two grand institutions structured by this cultural di-
vide: the Art History (figure 7.6) and the Natural History museums, built on
opposite sides of a plaza on the Ringstrasse and opened with great fanfare in
1891 and 1889, respectively. The city’s cultural officials exhibited Greek, Roman,
and Egyptian antiquities at the Art History Museum, presenting these ancient
cultures as precursors of the Italian Renaissance and Austrian baroque paint-
ings housed under the same roof; Mexican, Peruvian, and Asian objects, on the
other hand, were sent across the street, where they shared gallery space with

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 263
f i g u r e 7.4
Max Pollak, Freud at His Desk, 1913. Etching. Freud Museum, London.

264
f i g u r e 7.5
Edmund Engelman, Photograph of Sigmund Freud’s Desk, 1938. From Berggasse 19: Sigmund
Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (New York: Basic Books, 1972), plate 25. Photo
courtesy Thomas Engelman.

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 265
f i g u r e 7.6
Museum of Natural History, Vienna, ca. 1891. Austrian National Library, photography
collection, 233.169-C.

mineral collections, prehistoric fossils, the emperor’s meteorite samples, and

other products of “natural” history. The cultural divide separating European
and non-European antiquities became even more pronounced in 1928, when
the city inaugurated the Museum für Völkerkunde (Museum of Ethnogra-
phy) in the Hofburg, the Palace on the Ringstrasse that lost its imperial ten-
ants after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. This new
museum became—and continues to be—the repository of the nation’s Asian,
pre-Columbian, and African collections.
The official names of Viennese museums reveal a rigid set of assump-
tions about culture: non-European antiquities were not considered art; thus
Mexican, Peruvian, and Chinese objects were not housed in the Museum of
Art History but relegated to the Museum of Natural History (figure 7.7). Even-
tually American and Asian antiquities came to be recognized as products of
culture, but even then they were viewed as creations of primitive peoples be-
longing in the Ethnographic Museum. If Greek vases and Roman marbles
belonged to art history, Aztec sculptures and Inca textiles were considered ma-
terial for ethnographic inquiry.

266
f i g u r e 7.7
Plan of the Museum of Natural History, Vienna, from the Guide to the Museum (Vienna,
1902). The Mexican collections are in rooms XVIIIa and XVIIIb, across the courtyard from
the prehistoric collections.

In contrast to official museography, based on a form of cultural segrega-

tion, Freud’s collecting and exhibition practices were astoundingly progressive.
Freud placed all of his antiquities, European and non-European, in the same
space, and made no efforts to relegate the products of cultural others to separate
quarters. His museography did not even distinguish between ancient and mod-
ern—thus his lithograph of Charcot’s lecture, Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière,
hangs over a vitrine holding scores of Greek and Egyptian antiquities. Like
Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism,
Freud’s museography is an experiment in applied psychoanalysis. Freud treats
antiquities as universal products of the psyche, as evidence that Chinese and
Egyptians, Greeks and Africans, shared the same complexes and phantasies as his
Viennese contemporaries. Like the unconscious, the objects grouped in Freud’s
collection exists in a realm that is zeitlos, timeless: four-thousand-year-old
Egyptian masks sit next to Greek vases from the fifth century BCE and Mexican
pieces from the pre-Columbian era—as if the same creative drive to produce
art had remained constant through the ages. If Freud had opened a museum

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 267
in Vienna, it would have been neither art-historical nor ethnographic: it
would have been a Museum des Unbewussten, a Museum of the Unconscious.
One could raise the objection that even if Freud’s museography was
egalitarian, forward-looking, and multicultural, a visitor could still perceive the
analyst’s predilection for some cultures over others. The art of Egypt, for ex-
ample, occupies center stage on the desk—and in the collection. Pieces from
American civilizations, on the other hand, were relegated to a less visible place
in the Museum. One of the photographs taken by Engelman in 1938 shows the
Moche figurine hidden in a dark corner, on the bottom shelf of a display case
in the consulting room (figure 7.8). The Mexican pieces are nowhere to be seen
in the photographs, but we can assume that they, like the Peruvian figure, were
tucked away in secluded nooks. How are we to explain this marginalization?
After reading Frazer’s and Heine’s detailed accounts of the Mexican
penchant for human sacrifice, Freud would have associated his pre-Columbian
gods with ritual slayings, heart extractions, ceremonial flaying, and cannibal-
istic orgies. Freud referred to his antiquities as “Meinen alten und dreckigen
Götter”; the gods represented in his Mexican pieces were not only old and
grubby . . . but also, like Heine’s Vitzliputzli, “Mexiko’s blutdürst’ger Kriegs-
gott,” bloodthirsty creatures.98
After his readings, Freud would have seen his Mexican objects as rem-
nants from sacrificial rituals—as instruments of violence that he, a Viennese
bourgeois after all, would prefer not to look at too often. Perhaps he remem-
bered that Heine’s Vitzliputzli threatened to spend eternity haunting and tor-
turing Europeans, and thus feared his pre-Columbian gods would follow suit:

“Quälen will ich dort die Feinde, [“There I’ll plague our foes with
Mit Phantomen sie erschrecken— torments,
Vorgeschmack der Hölle, Schwefel Frighten them with ghostly
Sollen sie beständig riechen. phantoms—
Ihr Weisen, ihre Narren As a foretaste of Hell’s terrors
Will ich ködern und verlocken; They will keep on smelling
Ihre Tugend will ich kitzeln, brimstone.
Bis sie lacht wie ein Metze.”99 “Both their sages and their fools will
Be seduced by my allurements,
And their virtue will I tickle
Till it giggles like a harlot.”]100

268
f i g u r e 7.8
Edmund Engelman, The Consulting Room, Berggasse 19, 1938. From Berggasse 19: Sigmund
Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (New York: Basic Books, 1972). The Moche piece is
visible in the lower shelf of the vitrine on the left. Photo courtesy Thomas Engelman.

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 269
Professor Freud, who was certainly a sage, though not one prone to giggling,
elected to tuck away his Mexican bloodthirsty gods in a hidden corner of his
study, lest he fall victim to Vitzliputzli’s revengeful tickling.

f r e u d a m i d m o c t e z u m a’s t r e a s u r e s

In addition to his readings, Freud would have come into contact with an im-
portant collection of Mexican objects during his frequent visits to the Vien-
nese museums of Art and Natural History, where he often visited Julius Banko,
director of the antiquities collection and an expert who authenticated some of
his purchases.101
Banko worked at the Museum of Art History. Across the street, the
Museum of Natural History held one of Europe’s most important collections
of Mexican antiquities, including several Aztec pieces sent to Europe during
the first days of the Conquest. This collection has an unusual and fascinating
history worth retelling.
The Museum of Natural History was founded in 1876, but it did not
open its doors to the public until 1899. It was designed by the architect Carl
Hasenauer (1833–1894) as part of the monumental transformation of the Vi-
ennese Ringstrasse, a grand project that also included the construction of the
Museum of Art History, the Burgtheater, and the new Hofburg.102
The Museum of Natural History started with a small but valuable col-
lection that included an Aztec headdress and other rare examples of Mexican
feather art that had been sent to Europe shortly after the Conquest. The first
director, Ferdinand von Hochstetter (1829–1884), spent the first years of his
tenure enlarging the collection and purchasing important holdings of Mexican
art scattered throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the space of a few
years he acquired some of Europe’s most important American objects, includ-
ing the Ambras Collection—assembled by Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol in
the late sixteenth century—as well as the collection amassed by Maximilian
von Hapsburg during his years in Mexico.
By the time the Museum of Natural History opened to the public, its
holdings had grown exponentially to include hundreds of Mexican objects:
Aztec featherwork, stone sculptures from Central Mexico, slate artifacts from
Mezcala, and even various codices. The Mexican collection was among the

270
most important in Europe, and it also attested to the close historical ties that
had bound Austria and Mexico since the sixteenth century: at the time of the
Conquest, Spain was ruled by a Hapsburg, Charles V, an heir to the dynasty
that to this day Spanish speakers call “la casa de los Austrias,” the House of Aus-
tria. During the rule of this “Austrian” monarch, hundreds of treasures were
shipped from the Americas to Europe; Charles V distributed them among rela-
tives and friends, and many of them eventually wound up in Vienna.
The treasures sent to Charles V from the Americas included the set of
objects known as “Moctezuma’s presents.” In 1519, when Cortés and his men
disembarked on the Gulf coast of Mexico, the Aztec emperor Moctezuma sent
an envoy to present the newcomers with a treasure trove of gifts. Cortés ac-
cepted the goods, cataloged them, and sent them to the King. In 1520 Charles
took them to Belgium, where they were seen by Albrecht Dürer—an artist
Freud admired and whose engravings decorated his study.103 In his diary, Dürer
marveled at the exotic beauty of these Mexican treasures: “In all my life,” he
wrote, “I have never seen anything that so rejoiced my heart. I saw among them
wonderful artistic objects and marveled at the subtle ingenuity of men in for-
eign lands. I do not know how to express all that I experienced there.”104
Moctezuma’s presents were dispersed in the centuries following the
Conquest, but at least two—a mosaic shield and a codex—surfaced in Vi-
enna, where they can still be seen today at the Ethnographic Museum and the
Prunksaal.105
The historical ties binding Austria to Mexico remained strong. In 1908,
an American archaeologist named Zelia Nuttall traveled to Vienna to attend
the International Congress of Americanists, and stunned her audience with a
paper in which she argued that the feather headdress in the Museum of Natu-
ral History (figure 7.9) had belonged to the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and
was part of the original set of gifts sent by Cortés to Charles V. Even though
this hypothesis has since been proven wrong (the object is indeed sixteenth-
century, but cannot be traced to Moctezuma), it turned the headdress into one
of the museum’s main attractions: for decades visitors flocked to see the head-
piece that had supposedly been worn by the Aztec emperor, and even as re-
cently as 2006 the Mexican government made an official diplomatic request
for the repatriation of “el penacho de Moctezuma,” as the feather object is
known in Spanish.106 Freud would have most likely been impressed by the sight
of this headdress, made of bright quetzal feathers, and, like most of his con-
temporaries, he would have believed that it once belonged to Moctezuma, the

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 271
f i g u r e 7.9
Aztec feather headdress, known as “Moctezuma’s headdress.” Early 16th century CE. Museum
für Völkerkunde, Vienna, 10402.

melancholic ruler who met such a tragic fate and had inspired a long tradition
of European iconography depicting him as a majestic hero in all his glory, as we
can see in the engraving owned by the Austrian National Library reproduced
in figure 7.10. Some scholars believe that the headdress was actually part of a
Huitzilopochtli outfit worn by Aztec priests—a hypothesis that would link the
celebrated object to the long tradition of Vitzliputzli imagery represented in
Heine’s poetry and Frazer’s studies.
But Charles V was not the last Hapsburg with a Mexican connection—
nor the last one to send antiquities to Vienna. In 1864, Archduke Maximilian,
the younger brother of Kaiser Franz Josef, was tricked into accepting the crown
of Mexico—an outlandish plot concocted by Napoleon III to expand the
French territories. Kaiser Max—as he was affectionately known in Austria—
was a collector, and he spent a good part of his three years in Mexico acquiring
hundreds of Aztec and Maya sculptures. Maximilian was so serious about this
project that he founded an Imperial Museum in Mexico City devoted, like its

272
f i g u r e 7.10
Muteczuma, rex ultimus Mexicanorum, 19th century. Engraving. Austrian National Library,
photography collection.
Viennese model, to archaeology and natural history. The emperor appointed a
fellow Austrian, a Cistercian priest named Dominik Bilimek, as its first director.
Maximilian’s reign was short-lived—he was executed by firing squad in
1867—but his collection of Mexican antiquities survived: it was shipped back
to Austria and eventually acquired by the Museum of Natural History. Bilimek
escaped alive from the imperial misadventure, and returned to Vienna with an
extensive collection of his own that he eventually sold to the same Museum.
The Museum of Natural history not only housed an important col-
lection of Mexikanische Kostbarkeiten—Mexican treasures, as they are still
known—but, since so many of its objects were the remnants of Hapsburg
imperial ventures, it also doubled as a Museum of Austro‒Mexican relations.
Walking through the Mexican galleries, Freud surely pondered on the bloody
rituals described by Frazer and Heine for which so many of the objects on dis-
play were made to serve; and he must have meditated on the close ties that
bound Austrians of his generation to Mexican sacrificial violence: Maximilian’s
execution—one of the most traumatic events in nineteenth-century Austrian
history—was perceived by his contemporaries as proof that human sacrifice
persisted in Mexico four hundred years after the Conquest.
Unlike most of his compatriots, Freud would have considered the ex-
ecution of Maximilian not as an outburst of Mexican savagery but as a dramatic
illustration of the ideas presented in Totem and Taboo. His essay argued that
one of the most primitive traits in the human psyche involved a murderous im-
pulse against father figures—a primal drive that had often erupted into actual
killings of kings, rulers, or prophets. Freud analyzed many instances of these
historical murders—the father of the primal horde, Moses, Christ—and he
would have seen Maximilian’s execution as yet another eruption of the Oedipal
tensions that were part and parcel of human nature.
As he strolled through Vienna’s Natural History Museum, Freud would
have witnessed the evidence of Austria’s long and complicated ties to Mexico:
he would have seen gifts given by Moctezuma to Cortés, treasures sent from the
New Spain to Charles V, antiquities amassed by Maximilian, and stone sculp-
tures purchased by Bilimek for the Imperial Museum. As he contemplated
these objects, Freud would have recalled his readings on Mexico: Frazer’s hair-
raising accounts of Aztec cannibalism and human sacrifice; Robertson Smith’s
discussions of theantropic rituals; and Heine’s mischievous tale of a defeated
Vitzliputzli who decided to spend the rest of his days tormenting Europeans to
avenge the destruction of Aztec culture.

274
 Upon returning home to Berggasse, Freud would have seen his own col-
lection of antiquities as a miniature version of the imperial museums: his rooms,
filled with Greek vases and Roman figurines, were a small-scale re-creation of
the classical galleries of the Art History Museum; and his Chinese screens, Jap-
anese figurines, and pre-Columbian objects echoed the much larger holdings
of the Natural History Museum. But unlike the museums on the Ringstrasse,
Freud did not impose a geographical order on his collection.
In Freud’s home museum Roman statuettes rubbed shoulders with Chi-
nese animals, and Hellenic figurines stood under Egyptian masks. The Moche
vase was stored in the same case as Greek vases, and although we can’t be cer-
tain of the exact location of the Mexican pieces, we know they were housed un-
der the same roof as the many other Western and non-Western objects. Freud
considered all antiquities, whether Roman or Mexican, Egyptian or Peruvian,
as evidence of the shared history of humanity in its advancement from primal
horde to modern civilization.

conclusion

But perhaps Freud’s museography, in which Mexican, Egyptian, Greek, and Ro-
man antiquities share the same space, calls for a slightly more pessimistic read-
ing. Could not Freud’s refusal to allocate separate spaces to the various peoples
in his collection be read as a denial of cultural difference? Doesn’t his arrange-
ment of objects ignore the deep differences between Greek and Chinese, Peru-
vian and Egyptian cultures, collapsing them all into an overarching concept of
“the primitive”?
Could Freud’s museography be interpreted as another instance of the
many efforts by Europeans to deny the importance of American cultures? Af-
ter Columbus’s discovery, European intellectuals were baffled by the sudden
emergence of a new continent inhabited by a people who were radically dif-
ferent from all existing cultural paradigms. Faced with an enigmatic America,
some argued that the cultures of the Aztecs and the Inca were not new, but
merely variations of civilizations that were already known. One of the most
famous of these deniers of American originality was the German Jesuit Atha-
nasius Kircher. In his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Kircher argued that Aztec religion
was simply a variant of Egyptian idolatry: like the Egyptians, the Mexicans built

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 275
pyramids, practiced a polytheistic cult, and worshipped the sun. “It seems to
surpass all marvels,” Kircher concluded, “that the Egyptian rites traveled as far
as the New World, separated by a nearly endless interruption of land and sea.”107
Others argued that Mexico was settled by the lost tribes of Israel, or
by Phoenicians or Carthaginians. All of these hypotheses had one element in
common: they denied the cultural originality of American civilizations by as-
similating them into cultural models that were already known to the Europe-
ans. As Octavio Paz has written, “It would not be an exaggeration to conclude
that the discovery [descubrimiento] of America was followed by a long period
of covering-up [encubrimiento]. We had to wait until the end of the eighteenth
century for the beginning of the slow discovery of American civilizations—
a process that has not yet concluded. . . . To accept the originality of the two
great American civilizations—Andean and Mesoamerican—was and still is
difficult.”108
Did Freud’s museography, like Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus, amount
to a denial of the originality of American civilizations? Did the placement of
Mexican and Peruvian antiquities in a room filled with Egyptian, Greek, and
Roman antiquities serve to flatten out the differences among the people who
created these objects? Did Freud, like Kircher, believe that the Aztecs and the
Incas were ultimately indistinguishable from the Egyptians? Would Paz have
criticized Freud’s display of Mexican and Peruvian pieces as yet another ex-
ample of the “covering-up” of American cultures?
But whereas Kircher and his followers gave primacy of place to Euro-
pean civilization and considered all other cultures—from China to Mexico—
as derivative, Freud had a different set of values. If we look at Freud’s desk as the
central exhibition space of his museum, we discover that Europe does not have
a monopoly over the center: Greek and Roman figurines, longstanding sym-
bols of European civilization, share center stage with Chinese jades and even
a New World porcupine cast in bronze—a souvenir from Freud’s only visit to
America in 1909.109
Freud placed objects from non-European civilizations at the center
of his museum, refusing to establish a hierarchy between European and non-
European cultures. Unlike ethnocentric critics, he did not see distant civiliza-
tions as mere copies of a superior European model; and unlike Europhobic
thinkers, he did not merely invert the equation to make Europe’s others into
noble savages. Freud’s museum refuses all hierarchies, and places all cultures on
the same plane . . . and on the same desk.

276
 In chapter 3 we discussed Edward Said’s claim that by making Moses
into a non-Jew, Moses and Monotheism placed alterity at the center of Freud’s
construction of Judaism as a polyvalent identity. Freud reached a similar con-
clusion through the excavation of the archaeological past represented by his
collection of antiquities: digging further and further into the origins of civili-
zation, he discovered that the earliest artistic representation sprang up, simulta-
neously, in Europe, Egypt, China, Japan, Mexico and Peru. There is not a single
one of these cultures that trumps the other, not one that can claim primacy over
the rest. European and non-European civilizations coexist in Freud’s museum
as different manifestations of the same universal human drive to make art.
Freud could have taken Rimbaud’s famous utterance—“Je est un au-
tre”—as the motto for his museum of antiquities, but he might have added
that je—the “I” of every speaking subject—is not only an other but is also un-
conscious. Or rather, as Said suggested, identity—whether European or non-
European—is built on the double pillars of the unconscious and alterity. “Je
suis inconscient” and, as we all know, “L’inconscient est un autre”—an otherness
that, as we will see in the next chapter, Freud’s dreams linked to Mexico.

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ROCKEFELLER

In addition to Freud’s library, the collection of antiquities, and the family’s fur-
niture, the Freud Museum houses dozens of random artifacts acquired over the
years by various members of the Freud family: Ernst Freud’s architectural draw-
ings, Anna Freud’s loom, the various prostheses used by the ailing Herr Profes-
sor. Among these curiosities there is a small leather suitcase containing objects
that once belonged to Martin Freud: inside, a curious caricature depicts the
elder Freud analyzing Jean Harlow (figure 7.11; plate 7).
In the cartoon, a stern Freud directs his penetrating gaze toward the
curvaceous Hollywood beauty known for her roles in films like Bombshell
and Platinum Blonde. Harlow lies on the couch as if she were on the beach:
stretched out, hands behind her head, starry eyes directed toward the viewer.
In the background, a window opens up to a tropical landscape: phallic cacti rise
in the distance, their verticality providing a playful visual counterpart to the ac-
tress’s pointy breasts. A tiny man stands on one of the rocks, spying on the ana-
lytic scene from a distance, like a comic-strip version of the third figure in the
Oedipal triangle: a portrait of the artist as a voyeur, spying on a primal scene
pitting the father of psychoanalysis against the mother of platinum blondes.
Freud never analyzed Harlow or any other Hollywood stars: the ana-
lyst did not think highly of cinema and he famously snubbed Samuel Goldwyn
when he asked him to consult on a film about love.110 And of course Freud
never lived in a tropical climate: neither Berggasse nor Maresfield Gardens

279
f i g u r e 7.11
Miguel Covarrubias, “Sigmund Freud and Jean Harlow,” Vanity Fair (May 1935): 29. Courtesy
Library of Congress. © María Elena Rico Covarrubias.

280
 opened up onto the kind of cactus landscape depicted in the cartoon, which
evokes not Vienna or London but Mexico.
The cartoon in question was the work of Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexi-
can artist who moved to New York in 1923 and soon became one of the most
celebrated figures in the art scene: he published his drawings in the New Yorker,
Forbes, and Vanity Fair, organized the first major exhibition of Mexican Art at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and befriended New York’s most famous
intellectuals and philanthropists. The Freud cartoon was part of a series of
“Impossible Interviews” he did for Vanity Fair in the 1930s, featuring unlikely
pairings: John D. Rockefeller and Joseph Stalin, Clark Gable and the Prince of
Wales, Arthur Brisbane and the Sphinx. These imaginary conversations were
collaborations between Covarrubias and Corey Ford, who wrote the brief texts
accompanying the cartoons.111 Covarrubias spent most of his life promoting
Mexico’s culture and art in New York, and it comes as no surprise that he would
have used one of these impossible interviews to place Freud—and Jean Har-
low—against a Mexican landscape.
Covarrubias had family ties to Vienna: his uncle, also named Miguel
Covarrubias (1856–1924), served as Mexico’s ambassador to Austria between
1911 and 1912. At the time, Freud had just completed his article on “Wild Psy-
choanalysis” (1910) and was at work on the Schreber case. The younger Co-
varrubias had much in common with Freud: like the analyst, he had a passion
for archaeology as a privileged window into the origins of civilization. He too
was an avid collector, and over the years he amassed thousands of pieces, mostly
from Mexico. After his initial stint as a cartoonist, he became an amateur ar-
chaeologist and published several books on pre-Columbian cultures, including
Indian Art of Mexico and Central America (1957).
Covarrubias became interested in Mezcala art at a time when very few
people had heard the name of this region. In 1956 he published a monograph
to accompany an exhibition of Mezcala figurines at the André Emmerich Gal-
lery in New York.112 Some of the pieces reproduced in the catalog (see for in-
stance figure 7.12) are strikingly similar to the Mezcala object owned by Freud.
Could Covarrubias have been the source of Freud’s Mexican antiquity?
Thus far I have found no evidence of a meeting between Freud and
Covarrubias. We do know, however, of an unusual encounter that brought the
two men within one degree of separation. During the 1930s Covarrubias had
tirelessly promoted Mexican art in New York and his efforts caught the atten-
tion of Nelson Rockefeller, who began collecting pre-Columbian art, including

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 281
f i g u r e 7.12
Mezcala object. From Mezcala: Ancient Mexican Sculpture (New York: André Emmerich
Gallery, 1956).

282
some Mezcala objects, and in 1957 opened the Museum of Primitive Art to
showcase his collection. In Masterpieces of Primitive Art, Nelson Rockefeller
remembers how he traveled with Covarrubias to Mexico City in 1933 “to pore
over the great collections of Olmec, Toltec, and Aztec Precolumbian art,” and
to acquire pieces for the Museum of Primitive Art.113 This New York museum
was short-lived—it closed in the 1970s and its collection was transferred to the
Metropolitan Museum, where it can still be seen—but the friendship between
Covarrubias and Nelson Rockefeller endured: the two maintained a correspon-
dence, and Rockefeller visited Covarrubias in Mexico City at least once during
the 1940s.
A few weeks after Covarrubias published his cartoon in the May 1935 is-
sue of Vanity Fair, another Rockefeller went to visit Sigmund Freud at his Berg-
gasse apartment. David Rockefeller, Nelson’s younger brother, who was then
a twenty-year-old college student on summer break from Harvard, spent the
summer of 1935 driving around Europe in his Ford Model A, accompanied by
his sister-in-law and a friend. After visiting Germany and Switzerland this mot-
ley crew arrived in Vienna, where they called on Freud. The analyst took note
of the August 2 meeting—an encounter as unlikely as one of the “impossible
interviews” imagined by Covarrubias—in his diary. In his usual telegraphic
style, he jotted only two words: “Rockefeller Jr.”114
David Rockefeller also took note of the meeting. In his Memoirs, he re-
calls that Freud “seemed less interested in discussing Freudian psychology than
in talking about his extraordinary collection of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman
artifacts, which crowded his study and living areas.”115 The analyst questioned
his young guest at length about a trip the Rockefeller family had made to Egypt
in 1929. Freud must have made quite an impression on the young Rockefeller,
for after the meeting he wrote his parents: “certainly the Freudian doctrine has
been much twisted by half-baked critics.”116
Miguel Covarrubias, Nelson Rockefeller, and Sigmund Freud: the
three men shared a connection to the obscure Mezcala region of Mexico. Co-
varrubias researched and promoted its artistic legacy; Rockefeller collected its
artifacts; and Freud came to acquire one of its ancient objects as well as a car-
toon by Covarrubias. Could this triangle explain the presence of the mysteri-
ous Mexican piece in Freud’s collection?

Chapter 7 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n a n t i q u i t i e s 283
 | 8 |

FREUD’S
MEXICAN
DREAMS

In addition to owning Mexican books and collecting Mexican antiquities,

Freud included several dreams with Mexican content in The Interpretation of
Dreams. His interpretations offer the most candid insights into his perception
of that distant country, and attest to the special place it occupied in his affec-
tive life. As it often happens with extremely important elements in dreams, the
Mexican elements have been condensed, deformed, and displaced, and it takes
a creative reading to analyze them in the proper light.
The Interpretation of Dreams was Freud’s most personal book. In it he
revealed the most intimate aspects of his psychic life: his anxieties, fears, pho-
bias, fantasies, desires, and sexual feelings. To write this work, Freud embarked
on a long and complex self-analysis and painstakingly interpreted every one of
his dreams, in search of “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious,” as
he later wrote.1 Scholars from Didier Anzieu to Peter Gay have read The Inter-
pretation of Dreams as a veiled autobiography: though Freud conceived it as
a theoretical work—and though the dreams do not appear in chronological
order—its pages narrate a story of self-discovery that can be compared to Au-
gustine’s Confessions or Montaigne’s Essays. At no other time in his long career
would Freud reveal as much about his private life and about his fears, anxieties,
and desires.
The “dream book”—as Freud often called it in his letters to Fliess—is a
treasure trove of unconscious material, including unacknowledged wishes, lost

285
memories, and repressed ideas. Could it also shed light on Freud’s perception
of Mexico? Mexico did not figure as an important theme in Freud’s published
work, but perhaps a detailed analysis of his unconscious associations could re-
veal his feelings about the land of Aztec sacrifices, Spanish conquistadors, and
psychoanalytic judges.
Amid the dozens of dreams reported in The Interpretation of Dreams, I
have identified three that deal with Mexican themes: the “breakfast-ship” (also
known as “castle by the sea”), “Count Thun” (or “Revolutionary”), and “self-
dissection” dreams. Freud had these three dreams between 1898 and 1899—a
crucial year during which Freud completed the last revisions of The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams, and a period marked by intense anxieties and insecurities about
the success of his project.

t h e b r e a k fa s t - s h i p d r e a m

Freud had the first of his Mexican dreams between May 10 and May 11, 1898. It
was a short dream of which he gave the following summary:

A castle by the sea; later it was no longer immediately on the sea, but on a nar-
row canal leading to the sea. The Governor was a Herr P. I was standing with
him in a big reception room—with three windows in front of which there rose
buttresses with what looked like crenellations [in einem großen dreifernstrigen
Salon, vor dem sich Mauervorsprunge wie Festungszinnen erheben]. I had been
attached to the garrison as something in the nature of a volunteer naval officer.
We feared the arrival of enemy warships, since we were in a state of war. Herr P.
intended to leave, and gave me instructions as to what was to be done if the
event that we feared took place. His invalid wife was with their children in the
threatened castle. If the bombardment began, the great hall was to be evacuated.
He breathed heavily and turned to go; I held him back and asked him how I
was to communicate with him in case of necessity. He added something in re-
ply, but immediately fell down dead. No doubt I had put an unnecessary strain
upon him with my questions. After his death, which made no further impres-
sion on me, I wondered whether his widow would remain in the castle, whether
I should report his death to the Higher Command and whether I should take

286
 over command of the castle as being next in order of rank. I was standing at the
window, and observing the ships as they went past. They were merchant vessels
rushing past rapidly through the dark water, some of them with several funnels
and others with bulging decks ( just like the station buildings in the introductory
dream—not reported here). Then my brother was standing beside me and we
were both looking at the window at the canal. At the sight of one ship we were
frightened and cried out: “Here comes the warship!” But it turned out that it
was only the same ships that I already knew returning. There now came a small
ship, cut off short, in a comic fashion, in the middle. On its deck some curious
cup-shaped or box-shaped objects were visible. We called out with one voice:
“That’s the breakfast-ship!”2

Freud included this dream in chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams as an

example of the mysterious dynamics of “Affects in Dreams.” Often disturbing
dream images—like the death of the governor—fail to arouse the appropri-
ate emotions, while situations that would ordinarily offer no cause for alarm—
like the appearance of a seemingly harmless “breakfast-ship”—can make the
dreamer shiver with fear. A careful analysis uncovered a logical explanation for
these apparently arbitrary affective responses: Freud’s associations revealed that
the “sensation of fright” was real, but it was connected to a different dream-
thought. It was not the ship but, rather, “the future of my family after my pre-
mature death” that provoked a feeling of anxiety. The substitution of this idea
for a breakfast-ship illustrates how “the dream-work is at liberty to detach an
affect from its connections in the dream-thoughts and introduce it at any other
point it chooses in the manifest dream.”3
Freud also explained that before the dream he had read an article on a na-
val battle between Spain and the United States that led him to fear for the safety
of his relatives in New York. Leslie Adams was the first to date this dream, on
the basis of Freud’s mention of the Spanish-American War. She discovered that
the Neue Freie Presse had published a front-page article on the war on May 10,
1898, and thus concluded that Freud must have had the dream on that night.4
In Freud’s Self-Analysis, Didier Anzieu offers an elaborate interpreta-
tion of this dream. He notes that by 1898 the “fear of an imminent death had
gradually become more insistent in Freud’s dreams [until they] now occupied
a central position,” and interprets Herr P.’s death as a veiled Oedipal tale. “The
latent infantile wish,” he writes, “is an Oedipal one: the Governor, Herr P. (the

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 287
father) falls down dead; his widow remains in the castle, where she is ‘threat-
ened’ (by incest); Freud takes the place of the Governor, and is suddenly afraid
for his own life . . . the dream in fact ends with . . . ‘a small ship, cut off short . . .’:
thus the Oedipal punishment is not death but castration.”5
But there is an extremely important detail Anzieu does not mention:
this dream has the unusual characteristic of featuring a clearly identifiable set-
ting: it takes place “in a castle by the sea,” described in rich visual detail. Freud
sees himself standing “in a big reception room—with three windows.” Outside,
he can see “buttresses with what looked like crenellations.”
Could this castle by the sea correspond to a real-life location? In his
gloss on the dream Freud noted that the setting’s images “were brought to-
gether from several trips of mine to the Adriatic (to Miramare, Duino, Venice,
and Aquilea).” These four towns are all on the water, but only two of them—
Duino and Miramare—have castles by the sea. Both of these castles are near
Trieste, and they are both adorned by crenellations.
Of these two castles by the sea, Miramare corresponds exactly to the
images in Freud’s dream: the castle is at the water’s edge and seems to rise from
the sea; it was built on a retaining wall shaped like a fortress; the main room
has three windows facing the ocean; and, most importantly, Miramare was the
home of an important man who—like Herr P.—held the title of governor.
The Castle of Miramare was built in the 1850s by the younger brother
of Kaiser Franz Josef of Austria, Archduke Maximilian von Hapsburg, who
served as the general governor of the provinces of Lombardy and the Veneto
from 1857 until 1859, the year the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost Lombardy
to Italy. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud describes Herr P. as a “gouver-
neur,” the same French term used in Austria for Maximilian’s position. But
this is not the only similarity between Maximilian and Herr P. Like the gov-
ernor in Freud’s dream, Maximilian found himself involved in dangerous na-
val battles: he had a short but brilliant career in the navy and rose to the rank
of commander-in-chief of the Imperial Austrian Navy. During the 1858 war
against France and Italy, Maximilian witnessed the blockade of Venice by
French ships.6 Both Herr P. and Maximilian had a connection to England:
Freud associates the vessels in his dream with English warships and the English
language; Maximilian became known for modernizing the Austrian Navy by
purchasing the most modern ironclad warships from Britain.7
It is not surprising that Freud would dream of Maximilian and his
castle at Miramare. In 1875, when Freud spent the summer living in Trieste

288
f i g u r e 8.1
Miramare. Photo courtesy the author.

and researching the reproduction of eels analyzed in chapter 5, he had many

opportunities to visit the nearby castle of Miramare. He visited again in the
1890s, around the time of the breakfast-ship dream, and again in the summer of
1904, when he sent a postcard of the castle to his wife Martha.8 The palace by
the sea—and the story of the governor who built it—impressed him so much
that his unconscious transformed them into the dream he considered “the most
vivid and beautiful . . . of the last few years.”9
Freud had many reasons to be impressed by Miramare, an exquisite pal-
ace admired by all visitors with an artistic sensibility: it was nestled on the Adri-
atic coast, one of Freud’s favorite destinations; it housed one of the world’s most
important collections of Egyptian antiquities, ranking below only the Louvre
and the British Museum in breadth and quality. But out of all the things to ad-
mire in Miramare, Freud would have been most impressed—as are, even today,

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 289
all visitors to the castle—by the story of Maximilian von Hapsburg, whose
life was so unusual and so full of fantasy that it has captivated the imagination
of artists and poets and inspired dozens of paintings, novels, and plays.
Maximilian was born into one of Europe’s oldest and wealthiest fami-
lies, and spent his life cradled in privilege. Unlike his older brother, who would
eventually become Kaiser Franz Josef, Archduke Max was a dreamer and spent
much of his life building castles in various parts of the world: Miramare on
the Adriatic; a country estate on the island of Lacroma, now part of Croatia;
Chapultepec in Mexico. Out of his many palatial projects, Miramare was the
first and the most elaborate.
Maximilian first conceived of a castle by the sea in the 1850s, while he
was still an officer in the Austrian Navy. He bought the land near Trieste and
hired the architect Carl Junker to design the palace and its gardens. Construc-
tion began in 1856 and it took over four years to complete. It was not until 1860
that Maximilian could move in, accompanied by his wife Charlotte, a daughter
of King Leopold of the Belgians.
After he had lived in his dream castle for only three years, a delegation
of ultraconservative Mexican royalists came to visit the archduke with a most
unusual offer: the throne of Mexico, a country he had never visited, but which
made him dream of a faraway empire in the land of the Aztecs. Maximilian
did not realize that behind this offer was a Machiavellian plot devised by the
French Emperor Napoleon III to turn Mexico into a colony: the Mexican Em-
pire would be supported by French troops, commanded by Marshal François
Achille Bazaine, and in exchange France was to receive most of the customs rev-
enues from the port of Veracruz—the main source of income for the Mexican
government. Franz Josef allowed his younger brother to accept this offer, but
on the condition that he sign a “family pact” renouncing his rights to the Aus-
trian throne and relinquishing many of the privileges he enjoyed as a Hapsburg
archduke.
Maximilian and Charlotte sailed from Miramare to Veracruz in 1864.
They did not realize that they would arrive in a war-torn country, occupied by
European soldiers, and inhabited by a population that rightly saw the empire
as a foreign intervention.
Maximilian lived in Mexico as long as he lived in Miramare: three years.
By 1866 the empire was falling apart at the seams: the United States had never
recognized Maximilian, and was providing money and weapons to his repub-
lican enemies; Napoleon III, under the threat of an imminent war with Prus-
sia, recalled Bazaine and his troops to Europe; depleted by the cost of war and

290
corrupt officials, the Imperial Mexican Treasury lay in ruins; and republican
forces were gaining strength and conquering more territory each day. Faced
with this panorama of hopelessness, Charlotte traveled back to Europe in a des-
perate attempt to secure financial and military help from Napoleon III.
Maximilian’s closest advisers urged him to abdicate and return to Eu-
rope. Without French money and soldiers, the republican troops would over-
power the imperial forces in a matter of weeks. The Emperor hesitated, but in
the end opted to stay, in part because the family pact had stripped him of his
privileges and access to the Hapsburg fortune. In the spring of 1867 he left Mex-
ico City for the nearby town of Querétaro, where he was arrested by republi-
can troops. He was tried and found responsible for the deaths of the thousands
of Mexicans who had lost their lives during the French intervention. Around
the world, politicians and intellectuals worried about the fate of the Emperor.
Kings and queens sent messages pleading for Maximilian’s life to Benito Juárez,
who would emerge from this conflict as the new Mexican president. Victor
Hugo, a liberal and a supporter of the republic, sent an eloquent letter to Juárez
that closed with the following words:

Aujourd’hui je demande au [Today I ask Mexico to spare the life

Mexique la vie de Maximilien. of Maximilian. Will my plea be
L’obtiendrai-je? answered?
Oui. Et peut-être à cette heure est-ce Yes. It might even be that at this
déjà fait. moment my request has already
Maximilien devra la vie à Juárez. been granted.
Et le châtiment ? dira-t-on. Maximilian will owe his life to Juárez.
Le châtiment, le voilà. And his punishment? One might ask.
Maximilien vivra “par la grâce de la This will be his punishment:
République.”10 Maximilian will live “by the grace of
the Republic.”]

Despite its eloquence, Victor Hugo’s request was not granted. Maximilian was
sentenced to death and shot by a firing squad on June 19, 1867. The aftermath of
the execution was photographed by court photographer François Aubert, and
later inspired Edouard Manet to paint a series of canvases. Inspired by Goya’s
scenes of wartime carnage, Manet’s paintings capture the horror with which
the execution of Maximilian was received in Europe: he was a Hapsburg prince,
a brother of the Austrian emperor, a son-in-law of the king of Belgium, a cousin

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 291
of Queens Victoria of England and Isabella II of Spain, but neither his birth
nor his immensely powerful royal relatives could save him from a terrible death.
In the meantime, Charlotte, who had sailed for Europe months before,
had been unsuccessful in her efforts to convince Napoleon III to rescue the
Mexican Empire. Her mind began to unravel and by the time Maximilian was
executed she had gone mad, tormented by paranoid fears of being poisoned.
Her family took her back to Belgium and installed her in the royal castle of
Laeken, where she lived until her death in 1927—almost sixty years after the
tragic end of the Mexican adventure.
Freud was eleven years old when Maximilian was executed in 1867. He
had recently left his native Freiberg and was now living in Vienna with his fam-
ily. The final days and execution of the charismatic archduke made the front
page of the Neue Freie Presse and other Austrian newspapers during the months
of May, June, July, and August of that year. At eleven, Freud was perhaps too
young to read the press, but he would have heard the adults around him com-
ment on the tragic end of Kaiser Max. In the minds of most Austrians—rich
and poor, liberal and conservative, young and old—Mexico would forever be
linked with the event that one journalist decried as a “Kaisertragödie.” An ar-
ticle published in the Neue Freie Presse described the events as follows:

We have long dreaded that some tragic fate could befall Archduke Max. When
word about Querétaro’s fall and the emperor’s arrest reached Vienna, only a
few doubted his impending violent death. The wild agitation of the Mexicans,
the hot blood of the south, the cruel rules of the Imperial government against
imprisoned republicans accounted for this apprehension. A court-martial con-
vened in order to render judgment on the captive emperor. The world awaited
the verdict with suspense.11

Freud never commented on the execution of Maximilian in his published work

or in his correspondence. Nevertheless, an event of such magnitude—and one
that pitted Hapsburgs against “hot-blooded” Mexicans—would have certainly
left an impression on him, as we can ascertain from an analysis of the breakfast-
ship dream.
There are near-perfect parallels between Herr P., the dream’s protago-
nist, and Maximilian von Hapsburg: like Maximilian, Herr P. is a governor who
finds himself under siege. If Maximilian’s empire was supported by an army
of Austrian and Belgian volunteers, Freud’s dream features a “volunteer naval

292
officer” assigned to an “occupying force.” Like Maximilian in Mexico, Herr P. is
caught in a “state of war” and considers fleeing; like Maximilian, Herr P. chooses
to stay and dies in the end; and, also like Maximilian, Herr P. leaves behind an
ill wife (legend has it that Maximilian’s last words were “Poor Charlotte”).12
After the execution, the archduke’s body was embalmed and shipped back to
Miramare, where it arrived in January 1868 to be taken to Vienna for burial in
the imperial crypt of the Kapuzinenkirche, and even this last journey finds a
parallel in Freud’s dream, for he associates the naval vessel with death and fu-
nerals. “The breakfast-ship,” Freud writes, “reminded me of the funeral boats
in which in early times dead bodies were placed and committed to the sea for
burial.” Continuing his associations, Freud remembers a verse from Schiller’s
Nachträge zu den Xenien: “Safe on his ship, the old man quietly sails into port.”
Could it be that the old man was Maximilian and the port was Miramare?13
The allusions to Maximilian’s life feature prominently in almost every
element of the dream. The action unfolds against a maritime scenario—ships,
a naval war—a setting that evokes Maximilian’s well-known passion for the sea:
he sailed to faraway lands, including Egypt and Brazil, and had several rooms
in Miramare (the name means “Look at the sea”) designed to resemble a ship’s
cabin, with rounded windows and wood paneling. Freud mentions several
times that his dream was unusually plastic and full of intensely colorful visual
imagery. Could the visual images in the dream have been inspired by a sight
from real life?
During his visit to Miramare, Freud would have seen a number of paint-
ings depicting Maximilian’s life, including Cesare Dell’Acqua’s The Departure of
Maximilian and Charlotte from Miramare to Mexico (1866; figure 8.2; plate 8),
a work linking Maximilian’s Mexican adventure to his passion for sailing. The
painting shows Maximilian and Charlotte aboard the barge that took them to
the Novara, the ship in which they sailed to Veracruz. Dell’Acqua’s painting
contains all the elements present in Freud’s dream: the castle with its fortified
foundations; “governor” Max and his wife; an imposing ship and a number of
smaller black boats that look “truncated” in contrast to the grand Novara. Spec-
tators familiar with the tragic end would see this scene as a rather gruesome
memento mori. Maximilian sailed to Mexico . . . and to his death. Never again
would he see Miramare or his native Vienna.
A second painting, also exhibited at Miramare, could have been the in-
spiration for the funerary imagery that figures so prominently in Freud’s associ-
ations: The Return of Maximilian to Miramare (figure 8.3) shows the archduke’s
body arriving at the castle in early 1868, after endless delays and administrative

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 293
f i g u r e 8.2
Cesare Dell’Acqua, The Departure of Maximilian and Charlotte from Miramare to Mexico,
1866. Courtesy Castello di Miramare, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali—
Soprintendenza per i Beni Storici, Artistici ed Etnoantropologici del Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

294
f i g u r e 8.3
Anonymous, The Return of Maximilian to Miramare. Courtesy Castello di Miramare,
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali—Soprintendenza per i Beni Storici, Artistici ed
Etnoantropologici del Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 295
 hurdles that kept it in Mexico for almost six months after the execution. The
painting shows a crowd of notables, dressed in mourning and standing on the
pier to receive a barge carrying the body of the dead archduke: a melancholy
landscape that corresponds to the gloomy affects expressed in Freud’s dream.
Illustrating the dream-work’s operation of condensation, Freud’s dream
refashions the visual elements from Miramare’s facade and Dell’Acqua’s paint-
ings of Maximilian’s departure and return.
But what does the breakfast-ship dream tell us about Freud’s percep-
tion of the Mexican Empire, the sad fate of Maximilian, and the troubled
nineteenth-century relations between Austria-Hungary and Mexico? If every
dream is the fulfillment of a wish—one of the central arguments in The Inter-
pretation of Dreams—what is being fulfilled by the story of Herr P.?
The punctum of the dream comes after Herr P.’s sudden death. Freud
observes that “his death . . . made no further impression on me,” and wonders
“whether I should take over command of the castle as being next in rank.” Freud
considers this moment one of the most interesting in the dream: he is surprised
at the absence of an appropriate emotional reaction to the governor’s death,
and that is why he includes this dream as an example of the unexpected work-
ings of “affects in dreams.” In his interpretation, Freud explains that “the anal-
ysis showed . . . that Herr P. was only a substitute for my own self (In the dream
I was the substitute for him). I was the Governor who suddenly died.”
If we listen carefully to the associations we can arrive at a slightly differ-
ent interpretation: in the dream Freud considers himself responsible for Herr
P’s demise. Immediately after the governor falls down dead, Freud remarks:
“No doubt I had put an unnecessary strain on him with my questions.” Freud
imagines himself as a larger-than-life figure, stronger, firmer, and more valorous
than the governor of the castle; he is not only fearless—the sight of a dead man
provokes no emotions in him—but he attributes immense powers to speech:
it is his “questions” that “tired out” Herr P. and precipitated his death. Ques-
tions are one of the fundamental tools of psychoanalysis; thus the dream pits
Freud, the interrogating analyst, against Herr P., governor of the castle. In this
imaginary landscape, Freud envisions the analyst as an invincible figure, whose
command of language is more powerful than the warships around him: the
only death in the dream is brought about not by weapons but by questions. In
this fantasy, the psychoanalyst uses words to achieve what governors and naval
officers cannot bring about: by the end of the dream, he has “take[n] over com-
mand of the castle.”14

296
 If the castle is indeed Miramare, then the breakfast-ship dream tells
a truly astonishing tale: “In the dream,” Freud writes, explaining his relation
to Herr P., “I was the substitute [Ersatzmann] for him.”15 In other words, the
dream expresses Freud’s unconscious desire to take the place of Maximilian as
“governor” of Miramare. But why would Freud, a liberal intellectual who even
admitted to having “revolutionary” ideas in his youth, want to take the place of
a Hapsburg nobleman whose name has been forever linked to a failed colonial
adventure? In other dreams Freud established unconscious identifications with
Masséna, with Hannibal, even with Moses—logical role models for a secular
Jewish scholar who yearned for vindication against the injustices committed
against his family and his people. But why would a liberal Jew identify with a
member of one of Europe’s oldest, most traditional and most conservative im-
perial families?
Despite their radically different origins—one was born a prince, the
other to a modest Jewish family—Maximilian and Freud shared many interests.
Both were fascinated by science in general and by marine biology in particular:
in his twenties, Maximilian founded a maritime museum and hydrographical
institute near Trieste, the same city to which Freud would travel in 1876 to con-
duct his eel research at the Institute for Marine Zoology;16 both Maximilian
and Freud traded their early interest in the sea for more ambitious careers; and
finally, they both were conquistadors of sorts: Freud was an explorer of the un-
conscious while Maximilian, following the footsteps of Hernán Cortés, led an
occupying army into Mexico.
Freud and Maximilian also shared many intellectual affinities. Like
Freud, the archduke was fascinated by ancient civilizations: first by Egypt, a
country he visited in his youth, and later by the pre-Columbian cultures of Mex-
ico. Like Freud, he was an avid collector: during his 1855 expedition to Egypt
he assembled an impressive collection of sarcophagi and other antiquities that
became one of Miramare’s main attractions, and while in Mexico he acquired a
collection of pre-Columbian pieces that, as we saw in chapter 7, would eventu-
ally find their way to Vienna’s Natural History Museum. Like Kircher, Maxi-
milian believed there was a connection between pre-Columbian civilizations
and Ancient Egypt, and he organized a “Commission Scientifique du Mexique”
devoted, in part, to exploring the historical and archaeological connections be-
tween these two cultures. As V. Duruy, the French Minister of Education, wrote
in the preface to the Commission’s report, “Ce qui s’est fait au bord du Nil
par celui qui devait être Napoléon Ier s’accomplit au Mexique sous les auspices

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 297
de Napoleón III.” [That which was achieved on the banks of the Nile by Na-
poleon I has come to fruition in Mexico under the auspices of Napoleon III.]17
There was one key figure involved in Maximilian’s Mexican-Egyptian ex-
plorations who provided a crucial link between the archduke and Freud: Simon
Leo Reinisch (1832–1919) (figure 8.4), the most distinguished Austrian Egyp-
tologist of this time and author of numerous studies on hieroglyphs, archaeology,
and history. After Maximilian brought dozens of antiquities from Egypt to Mi-
ramare, Reinisch undertook a comprehensive study of the collection. In 1865 he
published his results in Aegyptischen Denkmaeler in Miramar (figure 8.5), a book
dedicated to Maximilian, who by then had moved to Mexico. Reinisch became
one of the first recipients of the Order of Guadalupe, one of the imperial decora-
tions Maximilian invented on the model of the French Légion d’Honneur. Rein-
isch’s book—which features an elegant print of Miramare Castle as a frontispiece
(figure 8.6)—offers a detailed reading of the markings and hieroglyphs found in
the sarcophagi, mummy fragments, and other funerary pieces at Maximilian’s
castle. In 1865 Maximilian sent Reinisch to Egypt with the mission of purchas-
ing more antiquities for the collection of his Imperial Museum in Mexico City.
Freud acquired a copy of Reinisch’s book on Egyptian antiquities and,
in a rare move, underlined a passage on the Egyptian belief in the immortality
of the soul:

Nach Herodot’s Zeugnis waren die Aegypter “die Ersten, welche die Lehre auf-
gestellt hatten, dass die menschliche Seele unsterblich sei.” Dieser Glaube an
die Fortdauer der Seele, welcher in dem Mythus vom Tode und dem Wieder-
erwachen des Gottes Osiris zu neuen Leben niedergelegt ist, erwesit sich als Re-
sultat einer Reflexion, welche aus einer Beobachtung der Natur des ägyptischen
Landes hervorgegangen ist.18

[According to Herodotus, the Egyptians were “the first to introduce the doc-
trine of the immortality of the soul.” This belief in the longevity of the soul,
which is at the basis of the myth of the death of Osiris and his awakening into a
new life, turns out to be the result of a reflection that goes back to the observa-
tion of nature in the Egyptian lands.]

Reinisch’s research on Egypt, financed in large part by Maximilian, influenced

Freud’s views on this ancient civilization and his interest in the Egyptian reli-
gion—an idea he later explored in Moses and Monotheism. Freud held on to his

298
f i g u r e 8.4
Simon Leo Reinisch (1832–1919). Austrian National Library, photography collection.

copy of Aegyptischen Denkmaeler in Miramar until his death, and the book is
now kept in the library at the Freud Museum London.
In addition to a shared interest in Egypt, Freud and the archduke held
similar political viewpoints: Maximilian, despite his noble birth, was a liberal;
his remarkably progressive opinions irked his imperial brother and later put
him at odds with the Mexican conservatives who had offered him their coun-
try’s crown. Like Freud, Maximilian was critical of the Catholic Church and
especially of Rome’s influence on internal politics: as Mexican emperor, his
first decrees sought to limit the powers of the Church and to sanction religious
freedom—a concept that scandalized local royalists.
It is now easy to see why Freud would identify with Maximilian to the
point of expressing an unconscious desire to become his Ersatzmann: Freud
shared the archduke’s scientific curiosity, his passion for archaeology, his love of
antiquities, and even his role as a conquistador. Maximilian had all the advan-
tages of noble birth and a vast family fortune; thus Freud dreamed of becoming
like him, of taking his place as governor of Miramare and having the castle, the
views of the Adriatic, and the vast Hapsburg fortune all to himself.
Like most dreams, the breakfast-ship dream gives expression to contra-
dictory affects. On the one hand, Freud identifies with Herr P. and wishes to

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 299
f i g u r e 8.5
Simon Leo Reinisch, Aegyptischen Denkmaeler in Miramar (1865), title page. Courtesy Freud
Museum London.

300
f i g u r e 8.6
Simon Leo Reinisch, Aegyptischen Denkmaeler in Miramar (1865), frontispiece. Courtesy
Freud Museum London.

take his place by becoming his Ersatzmann. On the other, he precipitates the
death of Herr P. by means of his relentless questioning. Freud stated that “his
death made no further impression on me,” but the psychoanalytic theory of ne-
gation invites us to interpret this part of the dream as expressing a death wish
against Herr P. and, by extension, against Maximilian.
But why would Freud unconsciously wish the death of Maximilian, a
man who shared so many of his interests? Despite their intellectual and even
political affinities, Maximilian was a member of the aristocracy, a class that pro-
voked intense passions in Freud. The archduke was not only an aristocrat but
a Hapsburg and an heir to one of Europe’s largest fortunes. From a very early
age, Freud, who was born to a modest family, became aware of the extreme
and unfair advantages that noble birth could confer on an individual. As an
eighteen-year-old, he expressed his anti-Hapsburg feelings in a letter to Silber-
stein: Vienna had recently celebrated Franz Josef ’s birthday and Freud, who
did not share the generalized enthusiasm, derided monarchs as “the most use-
less things in the world” and parodied the crown prince as a “chick.”19 A few

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 301
years later he became even more radical: in 1875 he declared to Silberstein: “I
am a republican, but only in as much as I consider a republic as the only sen-
sible, indeed self-evident system.”20 His anti-monarchical feelings became so
pronounced that as a university student he considered himself a “revolution-
ary.”21 These radical youthful ideals would later give way to a more balanced
liberalism, but the adult Freud retained an intense dislike of the aristocratic
privilege enjoyed by the Hapsburgs—a feeling that is most clearly expressed in
the Count Thun dream that will occupy us in the next section.
Freud would have found plenty to dislike in the figure of Maximilian.
Just by virtue of being born, the archduke was given a vast personal fortune
that allowed him to live as he wished: researching marine biology one day and
founding a Mexican Empire the next. Freud, in contrast, spent his life struggling
to prove his merits and to overcome Austrian prejudices against his race and his
class. When Freud had the breakfast-ship dream in 1898, he had been waiting
for years for an elusive promotion to a full professorship—a promotion that
was entirely deserved but subject to endless delays because of his Jewish origins.
When Freud first visited Miramare, he would have admired Maximil-
ian’s Egyptian collection, his liberal ideals, and his conquistador spirit. But he
would have disapproved of Max’s frivolous whims and aristocratic excesses. The
archduke had at his disposal a vast fortune, family palaces in Austria and Eu-
rope, and an imperial pedigree that opened every door in the world. In contrast
to Freud, who experienced his professional life in Vienna as an uphill struggle
against social prejudice, all Maximilian had to do was express a wish—to build
a new palace, to become emperor of a distant country—and a small army of
footmen and imperial assistants would do everything in their power to turn
his desires into reality. The archduke’s aristocratic privilege sparked the nega-
tive affects in the dream: feelings of jealousy—he wants to be in the governor’s
place—as well as an unconscious death wish against Maximilian’s Ersatzmann.
At this point we can offer a comprehensive interpretation of Freud’s
breakfast-ship dream. At some point between 1876—the date of his first visit
to Trieste—and 1898—the date of the dream—Freud visited Miramare Castle,
where he may have purchased a copy of Reinisch’s Die Aegyptischen Denkmaeler
in Miramar. As he toured the castle and its park, Freud was impressed by its
monumental architecture and by its panoramic views over the Adriatic coast.
He admired the collection of Egyptian antiquities and Cesare Dell’Acqua’s
paintings of the life and death of Maximilian, whose adventures he remem-
bered—like every Austrian of his generation—from his childhood years, when
the “Kaisertragödie” was the talk of the town. As Didier Anzieu has pointed

302
out, this dream occurred at a period in Freud’s self-analysis when “he was begin-
ning to recall memories from the second part of his childhood (between the
ages of five and ten in Vienna).”22
In May 1898, the news of the Spanish-American War awakened the
memory of the Kaisertragödie, an earlier conflict that pitted Europe against
Spanish America. Freud feared for his relatives in New York—an experience
that rekindled the anxiety he felt when he first learned of the archduke’s execu-
tion: an event that exposed the vulnerability of all Austrians, including himself,
to murderous impulses.
The dream’s rich visual imagery was condensed from three sources:
the exterior of Miramare Castle and two paintings exhibited in its museum:
Dell’Acqua’s The Departure of Maximilian and Charlotte from Miramare to
Mexico and The Return of Maximilian to Miramare.
The dream expresses a deeply ambivalent vision of the archduke: on
the one hand, Freud identifies with Maximilian the scientist, the liberal, and
the conquistador; on the other, he despises the Hapsburg, the archduke, the
emperor. The dream also stages a clash between two irreconcilable feelings:
Freud the scientist yearned to take the place of Maximilian, to be the archduke’s
Ersatzmann and have access to his fortune and to the Hapsburg family con-
nections that would have secured his professorship; but Freud the liberal and
anti-monarchist also hoped for the abolition of the monarchy, for an end to
aristocratic privilege, and thus wished to see Maximilian—and the institution
he represented—fall dead. The censorship covers up this unconscious wish, re-
placing it with the feelings of “fright” and “horror” Freud experiences upon
waking up. The dream condenses these two contradictory wishes—to become
Maximilian and to kill him, to enjoy and to destroy aristocratic privilege—in
the figure of the governor who dies and is replaced by Freud.

the count thun dream

In July 1898, two months after the breakfast-ship dream, Freud had a second
dream that was closely linked to the first: the “Count Thun” or “Revolutionary”
dream, one of the most famous, most elaborate, and most studied passages in
The Interpretation of Dreams. Out of all the dreams presented in the book, this
one has been the object of the lengthiest and most detailed interpretation: it
has been read as a political manifesto, as Freud’s account of his relationship to

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 303
his father, and as a testimonial of life in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. As we
will see, this dream also shed light on Freud’s perception of Mexico.
Unlike most other sections in The Interpretation of Dreams, in which
dream summaries are followed by interpretations, the Count Thun dream has
the peculiarity of opening with a “rather long preamble” describing the events
that took place before Freud went to sleep. As he tells his readers, he had gone
to the Westbahnhof to catch a train to the summer resort town of Aussee. On the
platform, he saw Count Thun, the Prime Minister, behave in an arrogant man-
ner toward the ticket collector—a sight that sparked a series of thoughts about
social inequalities. Once aboard his train, Freud was forced to take a cabin with-
out a private toilet, an inconvenience that upset him. He woke up in the middle
of the night “with a pressing need to micturate” after having the following dream:

A crowd of people, a meeting of students.—A count (Thun or Taaffe) was

speaking. He was challenged to say something about the Germans, and de-
clared with a contemptuous gesture that their favourite flower was colt’s foot
[Huflattich], and put some sort of dilapidated leaf—or rather the crumpled
skeleton of a leaf—into his buttonhole. I fired up—so I fired up, though I was
surprised by my taking such an attitude.

(Then, less distinctly:) It was as though I was in the Aula; the entrances were
cordoned off and we had to escape. I made my way through a series of beau-
tifully furnished rooms, evidently ministerial or public apartments, with fur-
niture upholstered in a colour between brown and violet; at last I came to a
corridor, in which a housekeeper was sitting, an elderly stout woman. I avoided
speaking to her, but she evidently thought I had a right to pass, for she asked
whether she should accompany me with the lamp. I indicated to her, by word or
gesture, that she was to stop on the staircase; and felt I was being very cunning
in thus avoiding inspection at the exit. I got downstairs and found a narrow and
ascending path, along which I went.

(Becoming indistinct again) . . . It was as though the second problem was to get
out of town, just as the first one had been to get out of the house. I was driv-
ing in a cab and ordered the driver to drive me to a station. “I can’t drive with
you along the railway-line itself,” I said, after he had raised some objection, as
though I had overtired him. It was as if I had already driven with him for some
of the distance one normally travels by train. The stations were cordoned off.

304
I wondered whether to go to Krems or Znaim, but reflected that the Court
would be at residence there, so I decided in favour of Graz, or some such place.
I was now sitting in the compartment, which was like a carriage on the Stadt-
bahn [the suburban railway]; and in my buttonhole I had a peculiar plaited,
long shaped object, and beside it some violet-brown violets made of a stiff ma-
terial. This greatly struck people. (At this point the scene broke off.)

Once more I was in front of the station, but this time in this company of an el-
derly gentleman. I thought of a plan for remaining unrecognized; and then saw
that this plan had already been put into effect. It was as though thinking and ex-
periencing were one and the same thing. He appeared to be blind, at all events
with one eye, and I handed him a male glass urinal [Uringlas] (which he had
to buy or had brought in town). So I was a sick-nurse and had to give him the
urinal because he was blind. If the ticket-collector were to see us like that, he
would be certain to let us get away without noticing us. Here the man’s attitude
and his micturating penis appeared in plastic form [ist . . . plastisch gesehen].
(This was the point at which I awoke, feeling a need to micturate.)23

Freud included this summary in the chapter on “infantile material in dreams.”

He interpreted it as a dream about his father, who appears as the old blind man
in the last section. Freud’s associations led to a childhood memory of being rep-
rimanded after “obey[ing] the calls of nature in [his] parents’ bedroom while
they were present”: his father scolded him and lamented that “the boy will
come to nothing.” The dream stages a curious revenge for this infantile humili-
ation by inverting the roles of father and son: in the dream it is Freud’s father
who urinates into a glass; and it is the father who “has come to nothing,” de-
bilitated by illness and old age. “The whole rebellious content of the dream,”
concludes Freud, “with its lèse majesté and its derision of the higher authori-
ties, went back to rebellion against my father.” The figure of Count Thun, he
explains, is merely an Ersatzmann for his father, since “a Prince is known as the
father of his country; the father is the oldest, first, and for children the only au-
thority, and from his autocratic power the other social authorities have devel-
oped in the course of the history of human civilization.”24
Didier Anzieu takes Freud’s interpretation a step further and reads the
dream as expressing an “infantile wish” to “take revenge on the prohibiting
father figure: to soil him with urine and faeces, to devaluate him, to disobey
him by chasing girls and going with public women, and to belie the curse once

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 305
 uttered by him by having ambitions and achieving them.”25 Alexander Grin-
stein concurs, noting that “Freud’s intensity of aggression against his father,
summarized in his calling in the ‘revolutionary dream,’ became so acute that he
had to awaken with a ‘pressing need to micturate,’ a symptom which combined
sexual feelings, aggression, and probably anxiety.”26
The most famous—and controversial—interpretation of the Count
Thun dream was advanced by Carl E. Schorske in his article “Politics and Pat-
ricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” later reprinted in his Fin-de-siècle
Vienna.27 Schorske reads the dream as an intellectual biography narrating the
evolution of Freud’s political beliefs: the analyst, he argues, went through a
“revolutionary” period in his youth but later abandoned all interest in politics
in favor of scientific inquiry. In Freud’s mature work, Schorske writes, “all poli-
tics is reducible to the primal conflict between father and son”—the Oedipus
complex that forms the backbone of psychoanalytic theory.
The dream resurrects a younger, more radical Freud, who “took the field
as a liberal-scientific David against a very real political Goliath, [Count Thun],
the incumbent prime minister.” Behind Freud’s associations, Schorske finds a
comprehensive intellectual autobiography dramatizing the turn from politics
to psychoanalysis: “The Revolutionary Dream, miraculously, contained this
conclusion in its very scenario: from political encounter, through flight into
academia, to the conquest of the father who has replaced Count Thun. Patri-
cide replaces regicide; psychoanalysis overcomes history. Politics is neutralized
by a counterpolitical psychology.”28
Schorske’s interpretation sparked a lively debate that pitted histori-
ans—most notably Peter Gay—against literary critics. “The trouble with this
political reading of Freud’s inner history,” quipped Gay, “is that there is virtually
no evidence for, and much evidence against it.”29
In my reading, the Count Thun dream continues many of the same
ideas represented in the breakfast-ship dream. Freud had these two dreams dur-
ing 1898—one in May, the other in July—and they function as psychic book-
ends to his yearly summer vacation. They are linked by a common setting (Freud
notes that the breakfast-ship’s prefatory dream featured a railway station—a
site that reappears here as the setting of the encounter with Count Thun), by
the theme of escape (Herr P. considers escaping; here it is Freud who tries to
escape), and by the references to Spanish naval wars (the Spanish-American
War in the first; the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in the second). Both
of these dreams feature powerful, official protagonists—Herr P. and Count

306
Thun—and they both express an unconscious wish to rebel against authority.
Both dreams reflect Freud’s critical views of Austrian aristocracy: Herr P. was
an Ersatzmann for Maximilian von Hapsburg, and Counts Thun and Taaffe
were powerful noblemen who served as Prime Ministers. Both dreams express
Freud’s unconscious wish to take the place of these privileged individuals: he
replaces Herr P. as governor of the castle and he imagines supplanting Count
Thun (Freud notes that the count was nicknamed “Count Nichtsthun” [Do-
nothing] but then adds: “I was the real Count Nichtsthun—just off on my
holidays”).30 Lastly, both dreams give expression to Freud’s ambivalent feelings
toward the Austrian aristocracy: a “revolutionary” rebellion against birth privi-
lege combined with an unconscious desire to enjoy the considerable advantages
reserved for aristocrats. As Freud explains in his interpretation, one of the main
themes of the Count Thun dream is aristocratic privilege or “Bevorzugung”: he
is irked by the sight of Count Thun arrogantly dismissing the station inspector
who attempted to check his ticket, and also by the civil servant who attempted
to obtain preferential treatment.31
In his interpretation Freud associates to a curious Spanish couplet: “Isa-
belita no llores / que se marchitan las flores” [Isabelita don’t cry / because the
flowers wither]. This is one of the extremely rare instances in which the adult
Freud uses Spanish, the secret language of his friendship with Silberstein. Freud
explains that this couplet, which “slipped into the analysis,” was taken from
The Marriage of Figaro, a revolutionary text that played a key role in the dream:
after seeing Count Thun dismiss the ticket inspector, a defiant Freud began
humming an aria from the Mozart opera deriding the “little count”—“se vuol
ballare signor contino . . . il chitarino gli suonerò”32 —thereby giving full ex-
pression to his anti-aristocratic sentiments.
Surprisingly, a remarkable slip of the pen on Freud’s part has gone un-
noticed: Freud writes that the Spanish couplet came from Figaro, but neither
Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro nor Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro includes
anything resembling the “Isabelita” verse. Not even Alexander Grinstein, who
has meticulously studied the dozens of literary references mentioned in Freud’s
analysis of this dream, noticed this parapraxis. Yet the “Isabelita” couplet sticks
out like a sore thumb: even readers who are not opera aficionados would in-
stantly realize that a Spanish verse about “las flores” has no place in either Beau-
marchais’s play or Mozart’s opera.
So where does the phrase “Isabelita no llores / que se marchitan las
flores” come from? The couplet, it turns out, is taken not from Figaro but from

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 307
a novel by Cecilia Bohl de Faber, the nineteenth-century Spanish novelist who
published under the masculine pseudonym Fernán Caballero. As we saw in
chapter 5, the adolescent Freud mentioned Caballero’s name several times in
his letters to Eduard (at one time he worried that she might have died, but
later confirmed she was still alive). The “Isabelita” couplet appears in Caba-
llero’s Lágrimas (1853), a novel Freud probably have read in the Spanish edition
printed in Leipzig by the publisher F. A. Brockhaus as part of its “Colección de
autores españoles”—a series that also included Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares
and most of the other works mentioned in the correspondence with Silberstein.
The “Isabelita” couplet actually appears in two Brockhaus volumes: Lágrimas
and Cuentos, poesías populares andaluzas (1866), a compilation of popular verse
edited by Fernán Caballero. Caballero collaborated extensively with Brock-
haus, which published over ten of her works and made her one of the most vis-
ible Spanish authors in German-speaking countries.33
Caballero’s novel tells the story of a sickly, melancholic girl called
Lágrimas who is psychologically abused by her sadistic father. Lágrimas—the
word means “tears” in Spanish—was born in Cuba and later taken to live in
Spain, her father’s homeland. Her mother died while she was still an infant, and
though her father, Don Roque, amassed a considerable fortune in Havana, she
spends her childhood as an orphan at a convent school. She is extremely sensi-
tive and the smallest setback reduces her to tears or throws her into convulsions.
As with Freud’s hysteric patients, doctors could not decide whether Lágrimas
suffered from an organic illness or psychological problems. Mystified by the
girl’s poor health, one of the nuns exclaims: “unos dicen que es asma, otros que
hipocondría; otros piensan que podrá declararse un aneurisma, y otros que es
todo nervioso [some say it is asthma; others point to hypochondria; yet others
think it might lead to an aneurism; and others opine it is nothing but nerves].”34
Lágrimas is the perfect name for the girl. She spends most of the novel
crying, and displays the classic symptoms of melancholia. As one of her class-
mates tells it: “¡no le gusta correr! Nada le gusta: ni correr, ni jugar, ni hablar, ni
comer, ni dormir [she doesn’t like running. She doesn’t like anything: not run-
ning, not playing, not talking, not eating, not sleeping].”35 The plot follows her
from one terrible situation to the next, always exacerbated by the cruelty of her
father, until she dies of grief at the end of the novel.
The couplet quoted by Freud appears in a passage illustrating Lágri-
mas’s emotional fragility. One of the schoolgirls plans to kill a bug, but then
imagines the grief it would cause her poor friend:

308
—Mira, mira, un bicho. ¡Qué feo es! [—Look: a bug. How ugly!
— . . . es una chinita de humedad. En —It’s a woodlouse. If you touch it
tocándola se pone redonda, como curls into a ball.
una bola . . . —I’m going to kill it.
—La voy a matar. —Heavens! Don’t. If Lágrimas sees
—¡Jesús! No, no, que si lo ve you she’ll start crying and we’ll get
Lágrimas va a llorar y nos va a scolded by Sister Socorro.
reñir la Madre Socorro . . . —I’ll make her stop crying. I know
—Pues yo haré que no llore: yo sé how . . . by singing a couplet I
cómo . . . con una copla que yo sé, know, one that is sung to children
y se la canta a los niños para que to calm them down:
callen: Isabelita don’t cry
Isabelita no llores, Because flowers wither
Que se marchitan las flores; Don’t cry Isabelita
No llores Isabelita Because it withers the flowers.]
Que las flores se marchitan36

“Isabelita no llores” is a phrase endowed with therapeutic powers: the girls use
it to stop Lágrimas’s tears. Like Freud’s psychoanalytic technique, it is a talking
cure, one designed to bring the patient out of her melancholic state.
The “Isabelita” couplet links Freud’s Count Thun dream to Spanish
America. One of the themes developed in Caballero’s deeply conservative novel
is the nefarious influence of the Americas on Spanish culture. Don Roque,
Lágrimas’s father, is an Indiano, a Spaniard who left his homeland and traveled
to Cuba in search of fortune. He succeeds, and returns to Spain a rich man,
but one who has lost his principles and his culture. The story of Lágrimas is a
cautionary tale about the corrupting influence of American money on Span-
ish values. As the narrator laments at one point: “¡Europa, Europa! Hija mía,
te ha dado por el dinero, como a una vieja, y te vas volviendo todo lo sin gracia
de un avaro [Europe, Europe, my daughter: you’ve chosen money, like an old
woman, and you’ve become as graceless as a scrooge].”37 Even Lágrimas’s illness
is blamed on America: Don Roque sees his daughter’s frailty as a result of the
weakness of American blood, “which is like molasses.”38
Through his associations to the “Isabelita” couplet, Freud evoked a se-
ries of adolescent memories: his friendship with Silberstein, his adolescent ex-
periments with the Spanish language, his passion for Spanish literature, and his
early perception of Spanish America—reinforced by Caballero’s novel—as a

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 309
land of pain and death. These negative associations are developed in another
element in the dream: the figure of Count Thun.
Historians from Peter Gay to Carl Schorske have identified the Count
Thun figure in the dream as Count Franz Anton von Thun-Hohenstein (1847–
1916), a powerful statesman who served as Governor of Bohemia and became
Prime Minister of Austria-Hungary. Thun was close to Franz Josef and tried,
unsuccessfully, to reconcile the Bohemian and Austrian factions of the empire.
Schorske reads the dream as expressing Freud’s rebellion against the Prime Min-
ister’s conservative politics: “in the dream he had discharged, by his defiance of
the count, the commitment of his youth to anti-authoritarian political activism,
which was also his unpaid debt to his father.”39
But Franz Anton von Thun was not the only Count Thun in nineteenth-
century Austria. There were several notable figures involved in Austrian politics
who bore the title of Count Thun. One of them, who had the same given name
as the Prime Minister, was Count Franz von Thun-Hohenstein (1826–1888), a
high-ranking military officer who played a key role in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire’s army and rose to the rank of Feldzeugmeister.
This particular Count Thun—who has never been mentioned in con-
nection with Freud’s dream—crossed paths with Maximilian von Hapsburg
on various occasions. During the 1859 war against Italy and France, Maximil-
ian served in the Navy while Count Thun commanded the land forces (he was
eventually honored by Franz Josef for his performance at the Battle of Sol-
ferino). After accepting the Mexican crown, Maximilian launched a campaign
to recruit Austrian and Belgian volunteers for the Mexican Empire, and he ap-
pointed Franz Thun as commander of the Österreichische Freikorps, an army
of 6,000 volunteers from every corner of the empire. Count Thun arrived in
Mexico in 1864 and established his military headquarters in Puebla.40
Count Thun played a crucial role in propping up the short-lived Mexi-
can Empire: most of Mexico supported the republican government in exile led
by Benito Juárez, and it was only the tens of thousands of European soldiers—
the French legion led by Marshal Bazaine, along with the Austrian and Belgian
volunteer corps—that allowed Maximilian to maintain control of the strate-
gic corridor that ran from Mexico City to the port of Veracruz. The Count,
who was decorated by Maximilian with the medal of the Order of Guadalupe,
stayed in Mexico for just over two years: in 1866 Franz Josef—under pressure
from the United States—recalled all Austrian volunteers, and Thun followed

310
f i g u r e 8.7
Count Franz von Thun-Hohenstein (1826–1888). Austrian National Library, photography
collection.

his men back to Europe. The departure of the volunteer corps under his lead-
ership—along with the return of French soldiers ordered by Napoleon III—
dealt the death blow to the Mexican Empire and left Maximilian at the mercy
of the republicans.41
Surprisingly, there was a second Count Thun involved in Maximil-
ian’s Mexican adventure: Count Guido Thun-Hohenstein (1823–1904), a
brother of Franz (the military commander), who was a career diplomat and
served as Austria’s ambassador to Mexico from 1864 to 1866.42 These two
Count Thuns in Maximilian’s Mexico were aristocratic siblings who repre-
sented Austria-Hungary’s interests before the imperial court. They were sent
to Mexico together because the Austrian Foreign Minister “valued the service
of two brothers, on excellent personal terms, both of whom were devoted to
the dynasty and both of whom might expect to penetrate the Mexican inner
court circle.”43 Guido’s task was a delicate one: he had to represent the inter-
ests of Franz Josef in a country ruled by his younger brother at a time when the
relations between the two imperial siblings were strained, in part because of
Maximilian’s continued resentment over the family pact. Guido’s most impor-
tant duty in Mexico was “to see that the Emperor Maximilian made no move

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 311
to breach his agreement concerning the renunciation of his Austrian rights.”44
The Thun brothers were thus charged with handling the delicate dealings be-
tween another pair of brothers, the Austrian and Mexican monarchs. The
themes of brothers and sibling rivalry play a prominent role in the Count Thun
dream, as Freud’s associations to his brother Alexander reveal.
In Mexico Count Guido became known for his aristocratic tastes and
attachment to the strictest form of protocol. Other diplomats described him as
arrogant and contemptuous of those below his social stature—the same criti-
cisms Freud leveled against the Count Thun appearing in his dream.45 Count
Guido issued a number of sharply worded diplomatic protests relating to the
portrayal of Franz Josef in the Mexican press that infuriated Maximilian and
exacerbated the tension between the two imperial brothers. His difficult per-
sonal style and arrogant demands contributed to the demise of the fragile em-
pire. In April 1866, anticipating the collapse of Maximilian’s government and
the triumph of Benito Juárez, Count Guido—along with most of the remain-
ing European ambassadors—left Mexico City and returned to Europe.46
In his associations, Freud mentions another Austrian politician who
was linked—though to a much smaller degree—to Maximilian’s adven-
ture: Count Eduard Taaffe (1833–1895), another aristocrat politician who, as
Schorske and Grinstein have noted, became linked to the rise of anti-Semitism
in Vienna. Taaffe was appointed Prime Minister in 1868, the same year Maximil-
ian’s body was finally returned to Austria, and as a high-ranking government of-
ficial he would have been involved in the delicate negotiations to secure its
release from Mexico. The count was also one of the donors—he contributed
10,000 gulden—to the construction of the Votivkirche, the monumental
Gothic church that was one of Maximilian’s grand projects.47
There is a clear link between the “Isabelita” couplet and the two Count
Thuns who went to Mexico: Freud arrives at “Isabelita no llores / que se marchi-
tan las flores” by reflecting on the opening scene of his dream, in which Count
Thun (or Taaffe) declares his favorite flower to be colt’s foot: his associations
start with the Wars of the Roses, as depicted in Shakespeare’s Henry VI , and
lead him to think first of carnations, then of the German couplet “Rosen, Tul-
pen, Nelken / alle Blumen welken” [Roses, tulips, weeds / all flowers wither]
before finally remembering the “Isabelita” verses from Lágrimas. Freud inter-
prets these associations about civil war—the English Wars of the Roses—as
pointing to the Viennese political tensions pitting Social Democrats against
ultraconservatives.

312
 There is, however, another important thread running through Freud’s
associations: both “Isabelita no llores” and Count Thun are linked to Spanish
America. Lágrimas is a novel about the pernicious influence of the Americas
on Spanish culture; and not one but two Count Thuns played crucial roles in
Maximilian’s Mexican Empire. And if Freud associates flowers with civil war,
“flores” point to a civil war in a Spanish-speaking country. Freud’s chain of as-
sociation also includes a reference to Henry VI, the Lancaster king who—like
Maximilian—fell from power, was imprisoned and murdered. Putting all these
elements together, we can see that Freud’s dream tells the story of a Spanish
American country torn apart by civil war, in which an arrogant Count Thun
became involved in the death of a monarch. This country was Mexico between
1864 and 1867. The Count Thun dream thus continues the unconscious rep-
resentation of Maximilian and his Mexican adventure that had begun a few
weeks earlier in the breakfast-ship dream.
This conclusion might seem rather far-fetched, were it not for the fact
that the dream contains a number of other elements pointing to Maximilian
von Hapsburg: Freud interprets this dream as relating to a shameful event—
obeying the call of nature in his parents’ room—that took place when “[he]
was seven or eight years old,” that is to say, around 1863, a date marking the be-
ginning of Maximilian’s Mexican odyssey (he was first approached by Mexican
royalists in 1863 and finally accepted the crown in 1864); Freud writes that this
is fundamentally a dream about his father, but adds, in his associations, that “a
Prince is known as the father of his country,” thus revealing that this dream—
like the breakfast-ship dream—might be less about his father than about a na-
tional father figure; in English, “Isabelita” translates as Elizabeth, the name of
the Austrian empress—known affectionately as Sisi—who shed more than
one tear after learning the news of Maximilian’s execution (“Isabelita no llores”
might have been the words relatives and friends used to comfort Sisi); and fi-
nally, Freud decodes the male urinal in the dream as a representation of the
“poisoned chalice belonging to Lucrezia Borgia exhibited at a Gschnas party.”
Readers familiar with the story of Maximilian—and its many literary and ar-
tistic elaborations—will recognize Lucrezia as a stand-in for Charlotte, whose
legendary madness led her to reject all food and drink that had not been pre-
pared in front of her for fear of being poisoned.48
We have thus arrived at a comprehensive interpretation of the Revolu-
tionary dream: the sight of Count Thun at the Westbahnhof sparked a child-
hood memory dating from around 1863, when Freud was eight years old and

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 313
the news of Maximilian leaving Europe for Mexico dominated the Viennese
press. Illustrating the mechanism of condensation, Count Thun appears as a
synthesis of various characters linked to the Mexican adventure: Count Franz
Thun, the Commander of the Austrian volunteer corps, Count Guido Thun,
Austrian Ambassador to Mexico, and Count Taaffe, a close friend of the Haps-
burgs: aristocrats who enjoyed the privileges of noble birth and often behaved
in an arrogant manner. Fragments of Freud’s childhood memories of the Mexi-
can Empire flicker through a chain of associations that includes Spain, Spanish,
civil war, “flores,” and murdered kings.
Like the breakfast-ship dream, this dream is marked by a deep ambiva-
lence: Freud derides Count Thun as “Count Nichtstun”—a symbolic anni-
hilation—but then expresses a wish to take his place: “I was the real Count
Nichtsthun,” he writes. As Didier Anzieu comments: “Freud identifies both
with Count Thun, who is received by the Emperor, and with the literal mean-
ing of his name (thun = to do): he has indeed done much.”49
The dream opens with an arrogant Count Thun giving a speech and
closes with the image of a frail old man who needs assistance even to relieve
himself. The dream fulfills an unconscious wish to see the aristocracy’s powers
curtailed, and arrogant counts reduced to nothing. This tale of Nichtsification
reflects a desire to see the European aristocracy abandon arrogant colonial am-
bitions, and the liberal bourgeoisie—represented in the dream by Freud, the
Jewish doctor holding the urine glass for the enfeebled old count—take a more
active part in society.50

the self-dissection dream

In 1899, a year after the summer of Maximilian dreams, Freud had a third dream
about Mexico: the self-dissection dream, which he analyzed in the section on
“Intellectual Activity in Dreams” in the “Dreamwork” chapter. He summarized
in a single paragraph:

Old Brücke must have set me some task; STRANGELY ENOUGH, it related to a
dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and legs, which I saw be-
fore me as though in the dissecting-room, but without noticing their absence in
myself and also without a trace of any gruesome feeling. Louise N. was standing

314
beside me and doing the work with me. The pelvis had been eviscerated, and
it was visible now in its superior, now in its inferior, aspect, the two mixed to-
gether. Thick fleshed-coloured protuberances (which, in the dream itself, made
me think of haemorrhoids) could be seen. Something which lay over it and was
like crumpled silver-paper has also to be carefully fished out. I was then once
more in possession of my legs and was making my way through the town. But
(being tired) I took a cab. To my astonishment the cab drove in through the
door of a house, which opened and allowed it to pass along a passage which
turned a corner at its end and finally led into the open air again (it was the place
on the ground-floor of my block of flats where the tenants keep their peram-
bulators).51 Finally I was making a journey through a changing landscape with
an Alpine guide who was carrying my belongings. Part of the way he carried
me too, out of consideration for my tired legs. The ground was boggy; we went
round the edge; people were sitting on the ground like Indians [Indianer] or
gypsies—among them a girl.52 Before this I had been making my own way for-
ward over the slippery ground with a constant feeling of surprise that I was able
to do it so well after the dissection. At last we reached a small wooden house at
the end of which was an open window. There the guide set me down and laid
two wooden boards, which were standing ready, upon the window-sill, so as to
bridge the chasm which had to be crossed over from the window. At that point
I really became frightened about my legs, but instead of the expected crossing, I
saw two grown-up men lying on the wooden benches that were along the walls
of the hut, and what seemed to be two children sleeping beside them. It was as
though what was going to make the crossing possible was not the boards but
the children. I awoke in a mental fright.53

Freud explains that before the dream Louise N. had come to visit and asked
him for a book to read. Freud offered her She, an adventure novel by the popu-
lar nineteenth-century British author Henry Rider Haggard, but she pushed it
aside and asked for something written by Freud. Freud declined, with the ex-
cuse that “my own immortal works have not yet been written,” but the request
stirred a number of unconscious anxieties: that The Interpretation of Dreams,
which he had been writing for several years, would never see the light of day;
that the work revealed too much about his personal life; that it would be un-
kindly received by the critics. The dream represents the process of analyzing
dreams as a painful self-dissection: “the task which was imposed on me in the
dream of carrying out a dissection of my own body was thus my self-analysis

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 315
 which was linked up with my giving an account of my dreams.” The wooden
house in the Alpine setting, Freud explains, was taken from Haggard’s novels
and represents a tomb, a symbol that revealed his fear of dying before publish-
ing his great work, and which his associations link to the Etruscan graves near
Orvieto. By arousing the pleasant memory of Italy, a country Freud loved, the
dream fulfilled an unconscious wish: “The dream seems to have been saying: ‘If
you must rest in a grave, let it be the Etruscan one.’ And, by making this replace-
ment, it transformed the gloomiest of expectations into one that was highly
desirable.”54
Grinstein’s interpretation highlights the painful nature of the pelvis op-
eration visualized in the dream. He believes that “Freud’s associations appear
to indicate that he regarded his self-dissection as an inevitable punishment for
his wishes and fantasies,” and that the self-chastisement was related to his anxi-
eties about “the reception of his work by the scientific society and by the public
who would read his major opus.”55 In his reading, the scene of dissection in the
dream emerges as a metaphor for the psychic suffering, and underlines the self-
reflexive nature of the operation.
Anzieu, in contrast, reads the dream as a therapeutic invention that
“gave Freud the confidence he needed to complete his book and publish his
discoveries, despite the price that had to be paid—a willingness on his part to
expose himself and his self-analysis to public scrutiny.”56 In his view—closer
to Freud’s than to Grinstein’s—the dissection was not a metaphor for self-
punishment but a visual representation of the painful nature of self-analysis.
My reading will highlight the Mexican references present in the self-
dissection dream. Freud mentions that several elements in the dream—includ-
ing the Indians, the girl, the wooden house—were taken from Rider Haggard’s
The Heart of the World. This popular adventure novel is set in nineteenth-
century Mexico and was probably the most eccentric book Freud ever read
about that country.
Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was a Victorian writer who spent
the earlier part of his life living in various outposts of the British Empire. He
published several fantastic tales of adventures set in Africa, including King Sol-
omon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887), a novel that inspired comments by both
Freud and Jung: Freud called it a tale of the “eternal feminine,” and Jung repeat-
edly pointed to this work as an illustration of his psychological concept of “an-
ima.”57 Most of Haggard’s novels feature an English protagonist who travels to
a distant land and embarks on a hyperbolic chain of adventure to save himself
from the threats posed by treacherous locals.

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 In 1891, Haggard made a short trip to Mexico to gather material for a
new book: Montezuma’s Daughter (1894), the tale of an English adventurer in
search of the Aztec emperor’s hidden treasure. Haggard stayed in Mexico for a
few weeks, and was not very impressed with its inhabitants, whom he described
as “half-savage and half-breed people—the product, many of them, of inter-
course between the Spaniard and the Indian.” He visited Querétaro, where he
was “taken up a hill and shown the wall against which the unhappy Emperor
Maximilian had been butchered some five-and-twenty years before.”58 His
overall impression of the country was negative and colored by a certain colonial-
ist arrogance, as evidenced in the following passage from his autobiography:

What a land of bloodshed Mexico has been, is still, in this year of revolution,
and some prophetic spirit tempts me to add, shall be! The curse of the bloody
Aztec gods seems to rest upon its head. There, from generation to generation,
blood calls for blood. And yet, if only it were inhabited by some righteous race,
what a land it might be with its richness and beauty! For my part, I believe it
would be well for it if it should pass into the power of the United States.59

A similar imperial worldview runs through Heart of the World, a sequel of

sorts to Montezuma’s Daughter. Jones, the novel’s English protagonist, travels
to southern Mexico to work in a mine. Though surrounded by “half-breeds
of the lowest class, living in an atmosphere of notorious vice,” he admires an-
cient Mexican cultures and befriends the Indians living around him.60 To thank
him for his kindness, an Indian named Ignatio entrusts him with a voluminous
manuscript: the story of how another Englishman, James Strickland, journeyed
to Heart of the World, a secret city inhabited by the descendants of the Aztec
emperors.
The novel’s description of Mexico, its inhabitants, and its culture in-
vokes every imaginable stereotype. The female characters of Heart of the World
are named “Maya” and “Nahua”; the settings include haciendas and pyramids;
and the action revolves around a secret Indian plan to overthrow the Mexican
government and resurrect the Aztec Empire. Through various plot twists, the
English protagonist is even inducted into the secret society of Aztec noblemen!
Haggard’s work—and in particular his two Mexican novels—have not
aged well. They now read as illustrations of the tendency Edward Said explored
in Orientalism: the use of literature to further the ends of nineteenth-century
colonial expansion. Orientalist fictions like Heart of the World used words for

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 317
 the same purposes the Royal Navy used battleships: to subdue other cultures
into submission.
Given Haggard’s aggressively imperialistic beliefs, it comes as a surprise
that Freud would have been such an admirer of his work: he read the novels
carefully—so carefully that their plot elements reappear in his dreams—and
recommended them to his acquaintances. But why would a liberal Jewish in-
tellectual, who at one point considered himself a “revolutionary,” express such
enthusiasm for a reactionary English royalist? How did Haggard’s colonialist
vision affect Freud’s perception of Mexico? After all, though Haggard’s nov-
els are not in Freud’s library, their author was—along with Heine, Frazer, and
Robertson Smith—one of the key sources of Mexican material.
Freud might have rejected Haggard’s colonialist outlook, but he would
have found a kindred spirit in the English protagonist of Heart of the World.
Jones is a man fascinated by ancient civilizations who “devoted himself, so far
as his time would allow, to the collection of antiquities, and to the study of such
of the numerous ruins of pre-Aztec cities and temples as lay within his reach.”61
He is even able “to decipher hieroglyphic writings of which the key was sup-
posed to be lost, and to give an outline of the history of the races who built the
great temples and palaces.”62 Despite Haggard’s arrogant colonial vision, Freud
would have sympathized with his protagonist: an avid collector of antiquities,
a man fascinated by ancient civilizations, and an adventurer who undertakes a
dangerous but ultimately rewarding journey.
But there are other, more important elements from Haggard’s novel
that appear in the self-dissection dream. After the operation, Freud sees himself
“making a journey” through an Alpine setting, where he sees a group of Indians
sitting on the ground, and eventually arrives at a wooden house he finds partic-
ularly disturbing. Freud explains that the props in this scene—the Indians, the
girl, and the wooden house—were taken from Heart of the World.
Freud’s dream projects him into the Mexican setting of Haggard’s novel.
Freud dreams of himself walking through the mountains (the Sierra Madre
displaced into the Alps), embarking on a “perilous journey,” and crossing paths
with Indians before arriving at the frightening wooden house. But why is this
Mexican wooden house so terrifying? Freud’s associations link it to the Etrus-
can tombs he had recently visited in Orvieto: “the ‘wooden house,’ ” he writes,
“was also, no doubt, a coffin, that is to say, the grave.”63 But there are no wooden
structures in Heart of the World.64 The novel does feature, however, a monu-
mental tomb made not of wood but of stone, a great pyramid one of the char-
acters describes as follows:

318
This home of mine, of which you are so fond of talking is nothing but a
great burying place, and those who dwell in it are like ghosts who wander to
and fro thinking of the things that they did, or did not do, a thousand years
before.65

The pyramid dominating the secret city of the Aztecs is a tomb of the living
dead—as well as the setting for a number of gruesome deaths.
Freud’s dream concludes with him walking into a frightening place: the
wooden house crowded with bodies disposed horizontally on benches as if they
were mummies. Since Freud associates this house with the setting of Heart of
the World, his dream ends with him walking into a Mexican tomb filled with
dead bodies—an image he finds so terrifying that he wakes up “in a mental
fright.”
Freud interprets the self-dissection as an allegory of his self-analysis:
a psychic operation that he had to perform on himself, using not a scalpel but
the technique of free association. But his dream-thoughts also link his self-
dissection to the plot of Haggard’s novel. And if we consider the Mexican
associations running through the dream—Indians, Aztec pyramids, tombs,
Haggard’s descriptions of a dangerous and deadly country—we arrive at a sur-
prising conclusion: the dissection structuring the dream represents another,
more disturbing form of dissection practiced by the Aztecs atop their pyra-
mids—human sacrifice. Could it be that Freud’s dream of self-dissection is ac-
tually a dream about self-sacrifice?
Freud had this dream at a time when the term “conquistador” had been
on his mind: he used it in a letter to Fliess from April 1897 to describe a phi-
landering guide who showed him the caves in the Carso and then again in Feb-
ruary 1900, in an oft-cited passage, to refer to his discovery of psychoanalysis.
Freud borrowed the term “conquistador” from the history of Mexico, and by
using it he compared himself to men like Hernán Cortés or Maximilian, who
embarked on a perilous adventure to an unknown land.
If Freud was a conquistador, the unconscious was his Mexico: a land to
be discovered, explored, mapped, and ultimately conquered. He was well aware
that conquering a foreign country was no easy task. Conquistadors faced many
obstacles and many perils, including the risk of being turned into sacrificial vic-
tims—an idea that obsessively haunts the writings of Cortés.
Reading Heart of the World would have intensified Freud’s anxi-
eties about being a conquistador. The novel paints the Spanish Conquest as a

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 319
catastrophic failure: Cortés did not succeed in destroying Aztec culture and
religion, which had been preserved in a hidden city. Haggard shows that the
deeds of conquerors can easily be undone, and that what was repressed during
the Conquest can come back to haunt Europeans.
The self-dissection dream thus expresses Freud’s anxiety about failing as
a conquistador: he envisions himself as an explorer, but a frail one, who needs
to be carried by others around the mountains populated by Haggard’s Indians.
In this imaginary Mexican landscape, Freud suffers a deadly defeat and, in the
end, is taken to a wooden tomb to be buried alive; he is dissected and, like an
Aztec prisoner on an altar, eviscerated. The conquistador has been turned into
a sacrificial victim.
Louise N.’s request, followed by Freud’s admission that “[his] own im-
mortal works [had] not yet been written,” awaken an intense fear of failure: fail-
ure to complete The Interpretation of Dreams, failure to achieve his discovery,
failure to conquer the unconscious. Real-life conquistadors who failed were
left at the mercy of sacrificial priests. If Freud failed, he would be at the mercy
of his high ideals, his great ambition, and his sense of guilt. There would be no
Aztec priest, but his superego would be as harsh and as merciless as the cruelest
of executioners.
Freud thus represents his failure as a conquistador as culminating in a
human sacrifice. But since the realm to be conquered is within himself, he is
both conquistador and conquered one, and his punishment is a self-sacrifice.
Instead of an Aztec priest, it is his superego that rips him open.
Putting together these elements, we arrive at the following interpre-
tation of the dream: sometime between 1896 and 1899 Freud read Haggard’s
Heart of the World. The novel, with its descriptions of a secret Aztec city, hid-
den pyramids, and terrible deaths, stirred unconscious associations about Mex-
ico: his early childhood memories of adults discussing Maximilian’s execution;
his visit to Miramare and his readings about Mexican sacrificial rituals. Hag-
gard’s book would have reinforced Freud’s perception of Mexico as a perilous
land, haunted by the specter of human sacrifice. At a time when he had identi-
fied with the figure of the Spanish conquistador, Haggard’s tale reminded him
that such adventurers can fail—and that their failure can be deadly. Tormented
by anxieties about his work in progress and his place in the Viennese medical
world, Freud dreamed of himself as a failed conquistador, one who ends on the
dissecting table, a modern version of the sacrificial altar.

320
conclusion

The breakfast-ship, Count Thun, and self-dissection dreams form a Mexi-

can triptych. Between April 1898 and the summer of 1899, images of Mexico
flickered in Freud’s mind. His associations to this distant land were sparked
by his visit to Miramare, where he admired the Egyptian antiquities, took in
the views of the Adriatic, marveled at Maximilian’s saga, and shivered before
Cesare Dell’Acqua’s paintings of the emperor’s death.
In the breakfast-ship dream, Freud identified with Maximilian’s lib-
eral views, passion for Egypt, and love of collecting, to the point of wishing
to take his place—a makeover that would give him ownership of Miramare
and shower him with all the privileged afforded to a Hapsburg archduke. At
the same time, Maximilian represented everything that Freud rejected in his
conscious life: aristocratic privilege, frivolous expenditures, and European im-
perialism. These thoughts find a more dramatic expression in the Count Thun
dream, where the vision of the Prime Minister at the Westbahnhof unleashes
a series of associations related to the numerous Count Thuns involved in Aus-
trian politics, including the two noble brothers who accompanied Maximilian
to Mexico. This second dream gives full expression to Freud’s revolutionary
views and fulfills the unconscious wish of debunking aristocratic privilege: the
Count Thun who appears so arrogant and powerful at the beginning of the
dream is transformed into the impotent old man in the final scene.
In the self-dissection dream Freud appears less confident: as the dead-
line for his Interpretation of Dreams approached, he was overwhelmed with
fears of failure. Haggard’s Heart of the World awakened his unconscious associa-
tions of Mexico as a land where would-be conquistadors could be defeated and
turned into sacrificial victims. In this dream, an anxious Freud imagines himself
as a conquistador-turned-sacrificial-victim. If the triptych began with Freud
wishing to supplant Maximilian as the governor of Miramare, it ends with him
taking the archduke’s place as a victim of Mexican violence.
It is worth noting that these three Mexican dreams produce intense
affects in Freud: the breakfast-ship leaves him with “a tense and sinister im-
pression,” while the Count Thun and self-dissection dreams wake him up (the
former with a “need to micturate” and the latter with a “mental fright”).
The three dreams are also marked by a series of parapraxes, slips of the
pen, and telling omissions: in the breakfast-ship dream, Freud omits the details

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 321
about his visit to Miramare: he recounts his recent trip to the Adriatic but ne-
glects to mention his excursion to Maximilian’s castle. In the Revolutionary
dream Freud makes a series of slips: he erroneously identifies the “Isabelita”
couplet as taken from The Marriage of Figaro, thus preventing Spanish Amer-
ica from coming into consciousness. And in the self-dissection dream, he incor-
rectly describes the structures in Haggard’s novel as wooden houses, whereas in
the novel they appear as stone pyramids.
These numerous examples of parapraxes—psychic acts Freud would
analyze in his 1905 Psychopathology of Everyday Life—reveal a strong uncon-
scious resistance against memories and associations touching on Mexican ma-
terial. As Freud once wrote to Fliess about the many errors he uncovered in an
author’s book, “these are not lapses of memory . . . but rather are displacements,
symptoms.”66
We know that Freud visited Miramare, knew Maximilian’s life story,
and read the fantastic account of Mexico presented in Haggard’s novel, but
these facts are hidden under layers and layers of resistances, accessible only to
those readers on the lookout for Mexican references.
Interestingly, these three Mexican dreams give expression to Freud’s
most candid thoughts about the European colonial expansion that unfolded
during the late nineteenth century. Freud dreams of Maximilian and his failed
attempt to establish an empire on Mexican soil; he dreams of the Count Thuns
who backed the imperial adventure; he dreams of Rider Haggard, the arche-
typal English imperialist, who crisscrossed the world from Africa to Mexico
proclaiming the superiority of the British Empire.
Against this political background of European expansion, Freud elected
to call himself a conquistador. But unlike Cortés, Maximilian, or Haggard,
he was not after land, gold, or riches. The land he wished to conquer was the
unconscious, and it lay deep within himself. The real conquistadors sailed for
Mexico; Freud simply embarked on a self-analysis, analyzing his dreams and
questioning his associations. His Mexico was not a distant land; it was a region
within himself.
In the end, Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis can be interpreted as a
more ethical alternative to European colonial expansion. At a time when coun-
tries from France to Italy and from Belgium to Austria colonized the globe,
Freud demonstrated that the richest terra incognita was hidden deep within
ourselves. In the end, Europe’s colonial adventure turned into a nightmare: it

322
 left behind dead emperors, broken countries, and deep psychic scars—scars
that psychoanalysis would be charged with healing.
Some of my readers might object that the interpretations of Freud’s
dreams offered in this chapter are too speculative. We know for a fact that
Freud never wrote openly about Mexico or Maximilian, so how can we be cer-
tain that the interpretations offered here are correct, and that these ideas were
indeed present in the analyst’s unconscious? Some might even wonder what
Freud would have thought of my hypotheses about his forgotten childhood
memories and unconscious resistances to any idea relating to Mexico. Would
he have deemed these interpretations a scholarly form of wild analysis?
Freud often asked these very questions about his own work after his
contemporaries raised a number of objections to the psychoanalytic art of in-
terpretation: What if the analyst crosses the fine line between interpreting and
inventing? What if an interpretation happens to be wrong? Don’t interpreta-
tions express the analyst’s own wishes and fantasies rather than the patient’s?
Freud took these objections seriously. During the course of an analysis, he
explained, the therapist responds to the patient’s narrative with his own inter-
pretations. Occasionally the analyst offers a more complex assessment of the
patient’s unconscious material that strings together a series of interpretations
to arrive at a more complex hypothesis. Freud called these meta-interpretations
“constructions”: “‘Interpretation’ applies to something that one does to some
single element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it is
a ‘construction’ when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his
early history that he has forgotten.”67 Constructions, Freud continued, can be
compared to archaeological work:

[The analyst’s] work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, re-

sembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place
that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice. The two pro-
cesses are in fact identical, except that the analyst works under better condi-
tions and has more material at his command to assist him, since what he is
dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive—and
perhaps for another reason as well. But just as the archaeologist builds up the
walls of the building from the foundations that have remained standing, deter-
mines the number and position of the columns from depressions in the floor
and reconstructs the mural decorations and paintings from the remains found

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 323
in the debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from the
fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behaviour of the
subject of the analysis. Both of them have an undisputed right to reconstruct by
means of supplementing and combining the surviving remains. Both of them,
moreover, are subject to many of the same difficulties and sources of error.68

Freud acknowledged that due to their highly speculative nature, constructions

could very well be erroneous—in this case, no harm would be done to the pa-
tient, who would simply remain unmoved, and the analysis would continue its
course. “We do not pretend,” he concluded, “that an individual construction is
anything more than a conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation or
rejection. We claim no authority for it, we require no direct agreement from
the patient, nor do we argue with him if at first he denies it.” Only the further
development of the analysis “enables us to decide whether our constructions
are correct or unserviceable.”69
In this chapter I have offered a construction: a series of interpretations,
based on the material presented in The Interpretation of Dreams, strung to-
gether in order to re-create Freud’s ideas about Mexico. The task was a difficult
one: Freud’s dreams contained only the most remote, vague, and distant refer-
ences to that country. Like the archaeologist who finds only a mound of stones
and a fallen pillar, I had to use these scant traces to envision the aspect of the
entire edifice as it once stood, guessing the placement of walls and columns,
windows and doors. The result was a hypothetical reconstruction of Freud’s
childhood memories, unconscious fears and fantasies about Mexico: a “con-
struction” in psychoanalytic terms.
Freud believed that only the course of the analysis would prove the
usefulness of a construction. And the analysis will indeed continue as histori-
ans, philosophers, literary critics, and art historians continue their research on
the life and work of Sigmund Freud. But what if Doctor Freud, like Marshall
McLuhan in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, were suddenly to come back to life and
voice his objections to my argument? In that case, and with the utmost respect,
I would invoke Caliban’s words in The Tempest: “You taught me language; and
my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning
me your language!”

324
ELECTRICIANS

In the spring of 1938, the Mexican press reported on the perils faced by Freud
in post-Anschluss Austria: the Gestapo had raided the offices of the Psycho-
analytic Publishing House, searched the apartment at Berggasse 19, and briefly
detained his daughter Anna. Freud himself—once reluctant to consider emi-
gration—made up his mind to leave Vienna, but his decision seemed to come
too late: obtaining an exit visa had become a nearly impossible ordeal for Aus-
trian Jews. Freud would have been trapped in Vienna had it not been for a
group of powerful friends who launched a full-scale diplomatic campaign on
his behalf: William Bullitt, the American ambassador to France; Ernest Jones,
who lobbied British Members of Parliament; and Princess Marie Bonaparte,
who was in direct communication with President Roosevelt himself.70
In Mexico, President Lázaro Cárdenas—one of the most popular lead-
ers in twentieth-century history—had turned his country into a haven for per-
secuted intellectuals: after the fall of the Spanish Republic, he offered political
asylum to thousands of refugees, and Mexico received a massive influx of artists,
poets, academics, and philosophers who played a crucial role in postwar culture.
In a world threatened by the rise of fascism, Cárdenas opened his nation’s doors
to socialists and fellow travelers of all kinds. Leon Trotsky accepted Cárdenas’s
invitation and settled in Mexico City in 1937. He would be followed by an im-
pressive lineup of cosmopolitan refugees from Spain, France, Germany, Austria,
and many other countries.

325
 After the press reported Freud’s troubles in Nazi Austria, a group of ac-
tivists launched a campaign to bring the professor to Mexico. The local chapter
of Red Aid International sent a telegram to Cárdenas, urging him to offer asy-
lum to Freud, described as “the greatest researcher of the diverse manifestations
of the spirit, who demolished prejudices and has built the foundations of the
new universal morality.”71 Over the next three weeks, the Mexican president
received five more telegrams from various organizations urging him to offer
Freud a safe haven. Surprisingly, all of these requests came from labor unions:
the Union of Workers in the Graphic Arts, the Union of Education Workers,
and the Union of Metal Miners all cabled on April 21; the Union of Mexican
Electricians followed suit on April 27 (figure 8.8). Even the Union of Sugarcane
Workers jumped on the bandwagon and sent a telegram.72
The perception of Freud had certainly changed since 1932, when Excél-
sior attacked the Viennese doctor as a “teratólogo” and psychoanalysis as a “de-
pressed school of thought.” In merely a few years, Freud had become a patron
saint of leftist causes, embraced by unions and hailed by sugarcane workers and
electricians alike. Even Red Aid International jumped to Freud’s defense, sug-
gesting that Mexican Stalinists were equally enthusiastic about Freudian theo-
ries as they were about Marxist teachings (unless they had a more Machiavellian
plan in mind, and hoped to lure the Viennese doctor to Mexico in order to do
with him as they would do with Trotsky!).
The plan to bring Freud to Mexico did not get very far. Eduardo Hay,
the Mexican Foreign Minister, replied to the telegram sent by Red Aid Inter-
national, noting that President Cárdenas “had already offered to help all Aus-
trian political refugees.” If Freud requested asylum at the Mexican Embassy, he
wrote, “his application would be forwarded to the Interior Ministry.”73
Had Freud accepted the hospitality extended by Mexico’s electricians
and sugarcane workers, he would have probably settled in Coyoacán, the quiet
neighborhood in the south of Mexico City that was home to artists and intel-
lectuals. For old times’ sake he might have chosen to live on Calle Viena, a few
doors down from the Trotskys and a short walk from Frida Kahlo’s blue house.
He would have had scores of visitors and a fresh supply of new patients: Sal-
vador Novo would have been among the first to knock at his door . . . along
with Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Jorge Cuesta, and other
members of the Contemporáneos group. Octavio Paz would have lain down
on the couch, and possibly Elena Garro, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, and Frida
Kahlo. Trotsky would have jumped at the chance to reconcile psychoanalysis

326
f i g u r e 8.8
Letter to President Lázaro Cárdenas from the Union of Electricians requesting political
asylum for Freud, April 19, 1938. Archivo Histórico, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores,
Mexico City.

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 327
 and Marxism. Freud’s waiting room would have been a setting for the most un-
likely encounters: Paz and Kahlo, Garro and Villaurrutia, Cuesta and Trotsky.
Diego Rivera would have come to chat—and to pontificate about psychoanaly-
sis and Marxism—but the professor would have probably deemed him unana-
lyzable. Ramos would have most likely stayed away. Even Cárdenas, a man of
tremendous intellectual curiosity, might have come in for a consultation, thus
becoming the first sitting head of state to be analyzed. After his death, follow-
ing Mexican tradition, Freud’s body would have been taken to Bellas Artes for
a public wake, then buried with great pomp at the Rotunda of Illustrious Men.
Anna Freud would have stayed in Mexico and might have become best friends
with Natalia Sedova, Trotsky’s widow. The Freud House—including the li-
brary and collection of antiquities—would be run by the Mexico City govern-
ment, and visitors to Coyoacán would, in one day, have the chance to visit the
houses of Kahlo, Trotsky, and Freud.
But, alas, the professor never filed his application for asylum at the
Mexican Embassy.
Though the campaign to bring Freud to Mexico came to nothing,
Cárdenas expressed his outrage at Germany’s takeover of Austria: he instructed
his representative at the Society of Nations in Geneva to file a formal protest
against the Anschluss. Mexico was the only country to do so—an expression of
solidarity postwar Austria recognized by naming a small plaza by the Danube
canal “Mexikoplatz.” 74
The Red Aid campaign was not the last time Mexico would be consid-
ered a potential haven for Austrian Jews. In November 1938, after Freud had
finally left Vienna and settled in London, Princess Marie Bonaparte came up
with a plan to save European Jews. She wrote to Bullitt and proposed that the
United States government purchase Baja California from Mexico and establish
a Jewish state on that territory. Freud, she added, liked the idea. Bullitt sent her
a polite, evasive reply, but the princess—accustomed to having the last word—
wrote directly to Roosevelt, urging him to consider her proposal. Freud was
bemused by this fantastic campaign, but told the princess he could not take her
“colonial plans” seriously.75
Marie Bonaparte, a niece of Napoleon III, had inherited her uncle’s
perception of Mexico as an easy target of colonial expansion. Though her pro-
posal—like the campaign launched by Red Aid—did not get very far, one
wonders what would have been the fate of a Jewish state in Baja California.
(Advantages: the Hebrew University of Tijuana, kibbutzim on the Pacific, a

328
steady stream of analysts into northern Mexico; disadvantages: kosher Mexi-
can food, the missing Western Wall, Hamas in San Diego.)
If both Marie Bonaparte and the Mexican unions had been successful
in their petitions, bringing Freud to Mexico and establishing a Jewish state in
Lower California, then this book might have been called Freud in Baja.
The link between Freud, Mexico, and a Jewish state surfaced again in
2008, when the poet Kevin Davies included the following verses—a classic
example of the mechanisms of condensation and displacement—in his The
Golden Age of Paraphernalia:

Freud once attempted to purchase Mexico.

Darwin feared meteors and their connection to lichen.
Matthew Arnold hated ducks, just hated ’em.76

Chapter 8 | f r e u d ’s m e x i c a n d r e a m s 329
EPILOGUE: FREUD’S
MEXICAN VIENNA

Vienna, 1937: On this bright spring day Freud received—along with the usual
letters from patients, admirers, detractors, and friends—a package containing
Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo’s Derecho penal mexicano: Parte general. He would
not have been too surprised: for years, doctors from Argentina, Brazil, Peru,
and Ecuador had been mailing him their psychoanalytic publications. These
dispatches from a distant Latin America pleased Freud: they were proof that
analysis was gaining ground around the world, and they also afforded him an
increasingly rare opportunity to exercise his schoolboy Spanish.1
Freud would have received Derecho penal at a low point in his life: Eu-
rope was bracing for another war, his health was failing, and his most recent
project, Moses and Monotheism, which he had been writing since 1934, was
stalled. During this bleak time, Carrancá’s book would have brightened his day
with some unexpected good news about the increasing influence of the psy-
choanalytic movement. But did Freud remember his Mexican disciple’s earlier
missives? Did he recognize him as the psychoanalytic judge who had sent him
an article about his case studies in 1934? Did he recall writing him a letter, con-
gratulating him on his experiments, and telling him that psychoanalysis had
always yearned to have judges as allies?
As Freud leafed through the pages of Derecho penal, he would have mar-
veled at the fact that a Mexican author, living on the other side of the world,
had become an enthusiast of psychoanalysis. Raising his eyes from the book,

331
he could have seen several Mexican objects around him: the seated figure from
West Mexico, the carved green stone from Mezcala, Covarrubias’s caricature
of Doctor Freud against a background of prickly cacti. Following his old habit
of using antiquities as paperweights, he might have placed the Mezcala idol on
Carrancá’s treatise, bringing together his Mexican book, one of his Mexican an-
tiquities, and his associations about the Aztecs and human sacrifice.
Putting aside Derecho penal, Freud would have continued his daily rou-
tine: analytic sessions in the morning, then lunch followed by a walk. To get to
the city center, he would have taken his usual route: down the stairs, right on
Berggasse, left on Währingerstrasse, and past the Votivkirche. Carrancá’s mis-
sive had put Mexico on his mind, and he could have paused for a moment in
front of the towering Gothic structure to reflect on its tragic history.
The Votivkirche (figure 9.1) was nearly the same age as Freud: the first
stone was laid by Maximilian von Hapsburg in 1856, the year the future analyst
was born. The church was meant to commemorate Franz Josef ’s survival of
an assassination attempt, but it soon became—like Miramare and Lacroma—
another of Max’s extravagant building projects: the archduke insisted it be
constructed using no new materials or techniques; only the most traditional
medieval elements were allowed, rendering the construction a laborious and
painfully slow process. The church had not been finished when Maximilian
moved to Miramare in 1861; it had not been finished when he embarked for
Mexico in 1864; and it was still not finished when the archduke was shot in
1867. It would not be finished until 1879—more than two decades after it had
been started—and by then it was no longer a monument to Franz Josef ’s good
fortune; it had become a bleak memorial to Kaiser Max and his failed Mexican
adventure. Inside, a marble tablet under an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe
bore the inscription: “Maximilian von Hapsburg, Kaiser von Mexico, 1864–
1867.” Freud might have remembered—as he did whenever the tragic fate of
Kaiser Max came up—his visits to Miramare, the castle by the sea.
On that day, Freud could have walked as far as the Art History Museum,
which he visited often to meet with Julius Banko, director of the antiquities
collection.2 If he felt like prolonging his stroll, he could have stopped at the
Museum of Ethnography in the Hofburg. Inside, Freud would have admired
the celebrated Mexican treasures: Moctezuma’s headdress, exquisite samples of
Aztec featherwork, and a turquoise shield that was rumored to be one of the
original presents given by Moctezuma to Cortés.

332
f i g u r e 9.1
The Votivkirche during construction in 1865. Austrian National Library, photography
collection.

epilogue 333
f i g u r e 9.2
Kaiser Franz Joseph riding past the Votivkirche. Austrian National Library, photography
collection.

334
 While marveling at the colorful quetzal feathers on Moctezuma’s head-
dress, Freud might have remembered the day, almost thirty years before, when
the Viennese newspapers announced the surprising news that one of Moctezu-
ma’s treasures had been erroneously classified. It happened in 1908, when the
city hosted the 16th Congress of Americanists, a four-day symposium presided
by Princess Theresa of Bavaria, who was accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting,
countesses and duchesses from the German royal families, and attended by
the Mexican chargé d’affaires, Herr Crespo y Martínez. One of the highlights
of the Congress came on September 10, 1908, when Franz Boas and Professor
Seeler examined the object known as Moctezuma’s cape and subjected it to a se-
ries of microscopic tests. Three days later, Seeler delivered a paper proving that
Vienna’s most prized Mexican treasure was not a cape but a headdress, designed
to be worn by a ruler or other figure of high authority. Austrian newspapers, in-
cluding the Neue Freie Presse, reported the striking discovery.3
As he thought of Moctezuma’s headdress, Freud might have recalled
Heine’s poem about the conquest of Mexico and recited the verses he learned by
heart as a schoolboy: “Vitzliputzli, Putzlivitzli / Liebstes Göttchen Vitzliputzli!”
Heading home, Freud would have walked past the Burgtheater. Mex-
ico had been on his mind all day—Carrancá’s book, Maximilian’s Votivkirche,
Moctezuma’s headdress—and he might have recalled a staging of Gerhard
Hauptmann’s play Der weiße Heiland: Dramatische Phantasie (The white sav-
ior, 1920)—a fanciful dramatization of the Moctezuma story, based on Stuck-
en’s novel Die weiße Götter (The white gods, 1918–1922), that became one of
the most popular productions on the German-language stage in the 1920s. He
might have thought some more about Stucken, remembered he owned a copy
of Astralmythen: Religionsgeschichtliche (1907) back at Berggasse, and won-
dered about the writer’s fascination for both Mexico and Egypt, two cultures
that so many thinkers had discussed in the same breath. He might have recalled
that the actor who played Moctezuma in Hauptmann’s play wore a reproduc-
tion of the famous headdress, copied from the original housed in the Museum
für Völkerkunde.4
Freud would have then returned to Berggasse, climbed up the stairs, and
resumed his daily routine: more patients, a light supper, some hours of writing
in the study. Before heading to bed, he might have thought once more about
the curious book delivered with the day’s mail and concluded that Mexico was a
strange place indeed: a country stained by the blood of human sacrifice; a coun-
try of exquisitely delicate feather artworks; a country that lured Maximilian

epilogue 335
f i g u r e 9.3
The Votivkirche, seen from the park (now Sigmund Freud Park), 1920. Austrian National
Library, photography collection.

336
away from his castle by the sea; a country of revolutions and civil wars; a coun-
try where judges practiced wild analysis; a country of friendly readers. Freud
might have tried to recall whether he had corresponded with Carrancá in the
past, but in the end he might have put his doubts to rest by invoking one of his
favorite Spanish expressions: “¡Quién sabe!”
Thus might have unfolded a day in Freud’s Vienna, a city whose his-
tory had been intertwined with that of Mexico since 1521, when both territo-
ries came under the rule of Charles V. Traces of the common history shared by
the two countries dotted the city: the spoils of Moctezuma’s empire preserved
at the Museum of Ethnography; the body of Kaiser Max buried in the Kapu-
zinnenkirche; the Virgin of Guadalupe placed inside Votivkirche. These frag-
ments, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, can be assembled to form a coherent
picture of a city shaped by its ties to a faraway land: Freud’s Mexican Vienna.
History would draw Freud closer to Mexico: in the 1990s, city officials
took note of a large but neglected park directly across from the Votivkirche. It
had been known as the Votiv Park, but since it was a few blocks away from Berg-
gasse 19, they renamed it “Sigmund Freud Park,” thus offering a late tribute to
the founder of psychoanalysis, who walked across the green thousands of times
during his years in Vienna. In the middle of the park, the city erected a stone
monument to Freud inscribed with the Greek letters “ΨΑ” and the phrase “Die
Stimme des Intellekts ist Leise [Soft is the voice of the intellect].” This gesture
placed a monument to the father of psychoanalysis directly across the street
from a monument to the ill-fated Mexican emperor. Freud and Maximilian
never met during their lifetime, but they were brought together, post mortem,
by the whims of urban planners. If specters could talk, what would the two say
to each other? Freud’s ghost, in the habit of asking leading questions, might
have broken the ice with a casual inquiry: “And how was Mexico?”

epilogue 337
 NOTES

introduction

1. See the catalog: Sigmund Freud: coleccionista, ed. Sergio Rivera (Mexico City: Antiguo Co-
legio de San Ildefonso, 2000).

2. The most comprehensive history of psychoanalytic institutions in Mexico is Fernando M.

González, “Notas para una historia del psicoanálisis en México,” in Psicoanálisis y realidad,
ed. Armando Suárez (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1989), 75–110; Ramón Parres and Santiago
Ramírez, two of the APM’s original founders, have written a short but informative account of
the movement: “Historia del movimiento psicoanalítico en México,” Revista de la Asociación
Psicoanalítica Mexicana (1968): 19–29; Raúl Páramo Ortega, an analyst from Guadalajara, has
published two historical overviews that are biased toward his own association: “Mexico,” in
Psychoanalysis International: A Guide to Psychoanalysis throughout the World, ed. Peter Kut-
ter (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), 2: 149–159; as well as the more extensive Freud in
Mexiko: Ein Essay zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Mexiko (Munich: Quintessenz, 1992).

3. The titles of three of Fromm’s books reflect the eclecticism of his interests: Psychoanalysis
and Religion (1950), Art and Loving (1956), Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism (1960).

4. Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby, Social Character in a Mexican Village: A Sociopsycho-
analytic Study (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970).

5. Santiago Ramírez, El mexicano: Psicología de sus motivaciones (Mexico City: Editorial Pax,
1959), 127.

6. González, “Notas para una historia,” 84.

339
7. Santiago Ramírez, Ajuste de cuentas (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1979), 79.

8. Thomas F. Glick, “Science and Society in Twentieth Century Latin America,” in The
Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 6:
486–491; see also the same author’s unpublished manuscript “Huellas de Einstein y Freud en
México,” n.d.

9. Glick, “Science and Society,” 490.

10. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–
1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

11. Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1997).

12. Mariano Ben Plotkin, Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of Psychoana-
lytic Culture in Argentina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 4.

13. Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy-
chological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Insti-
tute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974), 23: 261. Hereafter cited as SE.

14. Carlos Monsiváis, “Ortodoxia y heterodoxia en las alcobas (Hacia una crónica de costum-
bres y creencias sexuales en las alcobas),” Debate feminista (April 1995): 191–192.

15. Robert McKee Irwin, Mexican Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2003), 157.

chapter 1

1. F. T. Marinetti, Critical Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 44.

2. For a discussion of Novo and John Dos Passos, see my “John Dos Passos in Mexico,” Mod-
ernism/Modernity 14 (2007): 329–345.

3. Rubén Gallo, “La biblioteca española de Sigmund Freud,” Revista de Occidente 307 (De-
cember 2006): 17–26.

4. “El correo me había traído grueso libro de un alemán. Llámese este Foroed o Freud su hase
de escribir a la alemana usanza” [The mail had delivered a thick volume by a German writer.
Call him Foroed or Freud, his name should be written following the German style]. Salvador
Novo, “Confesiones de pequeños filósofos,” El Universal Ilustrado 334 (October 4, 1923): 27;
reprinted in Toda la prosa (Mexico City: Empresas Editoriales, 1964), 51ff.

5. Novo writes that El joven was written in 1923 but published in 1928. The 1928 edition is
extremely rare. There is also a 1933 edition: Salvador Novo, El joven (Mexico City: Imprenta
Mundial, 1933).

340
6. Salvador Novo, “Estantería,” El Universal Ilustrado 599 (November 1, 1928): 48.

7. Salvador Novo’s library includes dozens of psychoanalytic texts. Here is a list of the most
relevant titles: Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of
Men and Women (New York: M. Kennerley, 1912); Havelock Ellis, Amor y dolor: Estudio sobre
el sadismo y el masoquismo (Madrid, 1906); Havelock Ellis, Estudios de psicología sexual (Ma-
drid: Hijos de Reus, 1913), 7 vols.

8. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE 7: 139; Obras completas del Profe-
sor Sigmund Freud (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1923), 2: 12.

9. The passage in question reads: “Los enfermos atacados de neurosis narcisista carecen de la
facultad de transferencia o sólo la poseen en grado insignificante. Estos enfermos rechazan la
intervención del médico, pero no con hostilidad sino con indiferencia.” [Those suffering from
a narcissistic neurosis lack the capacity for transference. . . those patients reject the doctors’ in-
terventions, not out of hostility but out of indifference.] Freud, Obras, 5: 287.

10. “La neurosis obsesiva corresponde a la emergencia de una supermoralidad,” Freud, Obras,
6: 281.

11. Freud, Obras, 5: 96.

12. Ibid., 24.

13. Ibid., 256.

14. Ibid., 137.

15. Freud, Obras, 2: 33.

16. Freud, Obras, 5: 234.

17. Ibid., 125.

18. Ibid., 110.

19. Ibid.

20. Novo’s poetry often plays on the sexual connotations of the word “cosa.” In one of the son-
nets included in Dueño mío, he writes: “Deja tu mano encima de la mía; / dígame tu mirada
milagrosa / si es verdad que te gusto—todavía. / Y hazme después la consabida cosa / mientras
un Santa Claus de utilería / cava un invierno más en nuestra fosa.” [Leave your hand on mine /
and let your marvelous gaze tell me / if it is true you still desire me / and later make love to me /
which a toy Santa Claus / digs another winter into our grave.] Novo, “Ya se acerca el invierno,
dueño mío,” Dueño mío (1944), quoted in Carlos Monsiváis, Salvador Novo: Lo marginal en el
centro (Mexico City: Era, 2001), 112–113.

21. In English the phrase reads: “[homosexuals] are men and women who are often, though
not always, irreproachably fashioned in other respects, of high intellectual and ethical devel-
opment, the victims of this one fatal deviation” (SE 15: 304, emphasis mine). López Ballesteros
translated this passage as “son hombres o mujeres, que muchas veces, aunque no siempre, han

notes 341
recibido una esmerada educación, poseen un nivel moral o intelectual muy elevado, y no pre-
sentan, fuera de esta triste anomalía, ninguna otra tara” (Obras 5: 95, emphasis mine).

22. Erasmo Castellanos Quinto was born in 1880 in Tuxtla, Veracruz. He held the “Amado
Nervo” chair at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria from 1906 to 1955. He published Del fondo
del obra (1919), a book of poems, Las siete murallas o el castello de la fama, an essay on Dante,
and El triunfo de los encantadores, a study of Cervantes. In the last years of his life he was of-
ten seen wandering the streets of downtown Mexico City feeding stray dogs and dressed like
a beggar. Novo sketched the following portrait of his teacher: “Don Erasmo era todo un tipo.
Aquejado de paranoia: paternal hasta las lágrimas, saludaba a diestro y siniestro levantando el
bombín como la tapa de una azucarera mientras hacía avanzar fuera del área del sombrero una
cabeza de tortuga humilde, custodiada por barbas que entonces empezaban a encanecer. Luego
retrocedía la cabeza, como una tortuga que se reintegra al caparazón, y hacía descender hasta
ella, verticalmente, su bombín nunca cepillado. Don Erasmo me tomó particular afecto. Leía
mis versos y me recitaba los suyos. Pronto dejé de ir a sus clases (daba literatura castellana y ge-
neral) porque todo cuanto en ellas enseñaba, yo lo conocía ya por mis lecturas solitarias de To-
rreón, y don Erasmo me eximió de ir a clases. Sencillamente presentaría yo los reconocimientos
trimestrales y los finales—y él me calificaría con 10. . . . Vivía don Erasmo en San Pedro de los
Pinos, entonces pueblecillo remoto al que había que ir en lento tranvía a recoger y entregarle
los trabajos de los muchachos. Una casa pequeña, bodega de libros debajo de los muebles cor-
rientes, que a su viudez de la amada Bella—a quien todavía conocí—llenó de gatos trashuman-
tes que salía por las noches en traza de mendigo a alimentar y a recoger en costales para su asilo
particular de animales desamparados.” [Don Erasmo was quite a character. He suffered from
paranoia, was very paternal, and greeted everyone by raising his bowler as if it were the lid of a
sugar bowl. . . . Don Erasmo took an interest in me. He read my verses and declaimed his poems
for me. I soon stopped going to his classes (Spanish and world literature) because everything he
lectured on I have already read by myself in Torreón. So Don Erasmo excused me from going
to classes . . .]. Novo, La estatua de sal (Mexico City: Era, 2001), 99.

23. Freud, Obras, 5: 229; Salvador Novo, “El trato con escritores,” quoted in Novo, La estatua
de sal, 26.

24. Novo, La estatua de sal, 115; Monsiváis, Salvador Novo, 54.

25. Abate Chorizo [pseud.], “H. Ford entrevistado por nuestro corresponsal en Detroit Mich-
igan,” El Chafirete 1, no. 2 (March 22, 1923): 3.

26. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Soneto 145,” in Obras completas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cul-
tura Económica, 1951), 1: 277.

27. Juana Inés del Cabus [pseud.], “Sonetos lubricantes de Sor Juana Inés del Cabuz. Va-
cilográficas de arranque automático,” El Chafirete (May 20, 1923): 1.

28. Radiador [Salvador Novo], “Derrapones,” El Chafirete 1, no. 28 (October 1, 1923): 1.

29. Gabriela Sidral, “Te chispo un ojo y te acomodo un Ford,” El Chafirete 1, no. 24 (Septem-
ber 3, 1923): 1, 8.

342
30. Luis Quintanilla, “Verano,” in El estridentismo o una literatura de la estrategia (Mexico
City: CONACULTA, 1997), 338.

31. Saint Chaumond [pseud.], “Literatura Cursi: Poemas el libro ‘Avio-camión’ de Luis Sin
Semilla,” El Chafirete (September 3, 1923): 6.

32. Novo, La estatua de sal, 84.

33. “Los choferes eran mi fogosa predilección,” ibid., 111.

34. As Carlos Monsiváis notes: “El eje de la sensualidad es el atractivo de los obreros, el único
que el autor registra.” [The axis of sensuality is the attraction for workers, the only kind of at-
traction experienced by the author.] Monsiváis, Salvador Novo, 54.

35. Novo, La estatua de sal, 111.

36. Ibid., 115.

37. “Maniel Cabrera (alias) ‘El Sapo Marino’ de la línea ‘San Rafael-San Lázaro,’ Campeón de
la fealdad gasolinera,” El Chafirete (August 20, 1923): 4.

38. Fray Lucas [pseud.], “El aviso gratuito,” El Chafirete 1, no. 22 (August 20, 1923): 4.

39. Julián Mondragón [pseud.], “Poemas del libro francés ‘Chaudement Je Suis Accouchant’,”
El Chafirete 1, no. 25 (September 10, 1923): 1.

40. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE 7: 202.

41. Ibid., 163.

42. Ibid., 165.

43. Ibid., 202.

44. Ibid., 165.

45. Ibid., 172.

46. The most recent critical writings on Salvador Novo—especially those invoking the meth-
odology of queer studies—continue to debate the relationship between psychoanalysis and
homosexuality. In Salvador Novo: Lo marginal en el centro, Carlos Monsiváis seems bewildered
by Novo’s passionate embrace of Freudian theory, and explains it as a desire for therapeutic
healing: “. . . la reverencia por la mitología freudiana que, al situar su conducta en el terreno de
lo impostergable, le confiere identidad y lo aleja de las tentativas de suicidio” [the reverence for
Freudian mythology which, by situating its conduct in the realm of the immediate, gives him
an identity and distances him from suicidal tendencies] (Monsiváis, Salvador Novo, 158). In his
Mexican Masculinities, Robert McKee Irwin makes a more daring claim: “Mexico’s homopho-
bia in the first half of the twentieth century,” he writes, “authorized itself in a number of ways,
but since much of the most authoritative discourse on homosexuality came out of the fields of
sexology and psychoanalysis, it was natural that psychoanalytic discourse fueled homophobia

notes 343
as well.” He continues: “psychoanalysis was not innocently applied in Mexico but rather cyn-
ically misread to rationalize existing hegemonic structures, including patriarchal ideologies,
which had been threatened openly by male effeminacy and homosexuality since at least 1901.”
Robert McKee Irwin, Mexican Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003), 153. Novo performs a reading of Freud that argues against this reading of psychoanalysis
as hostile to homosexual practices.

47. Freud to an anonymous American mother, April 9, 1935. Sigmund Freud Papers, Library
of Congress, Box 44, Folder 20. Reprinted in The Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud
(New York: Basic Books, 1960), 420–421.

48. Novo, La estatua de sal, 115.

49. Novo, El joven, 16.

50. Octavio Paz, “Siete vistas de la poesía mexicana,” in Obras completas, vol. 4: Generaciones y
semblanzas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), 17–178.

51. Novo, “Estantería,” 48.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987), 1.

55. Carlos Monsiváis, “El mundo soslayado,” preface to La estatua de sal.

56. Novo, La estatua de sal, 95.

57. Ibid., 45.

58. Monsiváis, Salvador Novo, 158.

59. Didier Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis (Madison: International Universities Press, 1986), xv.

60. Novo, La estatua de sal, 84.

61. David Wojnarowicz, Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (New York: Artspace Books,
1992).

62. Salvador Novo, “Soneto I,” in La estatua de sal, 123.

63. Salvador Novo, “Radio-conferencia sobre el radio,” El Universal Ilustrado 399 (January 1,
1925): 4–5; reprinted in Ensayos (Mexico City: Cultura, 1925), 17–19.

64. Salvador Novo, “Meditaciones sobre el radio,” in Toda la prosa (Mexico City: Empresas
Editoriales, 1964), 93–94.

65. Ibid., 88.

66. Ibid., 89.

344
67. Ibid., 95–96.

68. Ibid., 94.

69. In her Nouvelles maladies de l’âme (Paris: Fayard, 1993), Julia Kristeva argues that since
Freud’s time, new social, political, and technological developments have introduced “new mal-
adies of the psyche”—vandalism, racial complexes—that were never imagined by Freud.

70. Novo, “Meditaciones,” 95.

71. Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974).

72. Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” in Selected Writings (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 555–571.

73. Sigmund Freud, “‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis,” SE 11: 222–223.

74. For a discussion of Dr. Gonzalo Lafora, a Spanish émigré who arrived in Mexico City in
the 1930s and treated Jorge Cuesta, see Miguel Capistrán, Los contemporáneos por si mismos
(Mexico City: CONACULTA, 1994), pp. 144ff.; and Robert McKee Irwin, “The Legend of
Jorge Cuesta: The Perils of Alchemy and the Paranoia of Gender,” in Hispanisms and Homo-
sexualities, ed. Robert McKee Irwin and Sylvia Molloy (Durham: Duke University Press,
1998), 29–53.

chapter 2

1. Juan Hernández Luna, Samuel Ramos: Etapas de su formación espiritual (Morelia: Univer-
sidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 1982), 99.

2. Samuel Ramos, “Otto Weininger: El simposio en el año 1925,” Hipótesis (Mexico City: Edi-
ciones de Ulises, 1928), 64.

3. Ibid.

4. Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 58.

5. Ibid., 5.

6. Samuel Ramos, “El psicoanálisis del mexicano,” Examen 1 (August 1932): 8‒11; reprinted in
El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (Mexico City: Espasa-Calpe, 1951), 50–51.

7. Ibid., 51.

8. Ibid., 51–52.

9. Ibid., 65.

10. Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), 56.

notes 345
11. Bernard Handlbauer, The Freud-Adler Controversy (New York: Oneworld, 1990), 176ff ;
Paul E. Stepansky, In Freud’s Shadow: Adler in Context (New York: Analytic Press, 1983), 12.

12. Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, ed. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn (New
York: International Universities Press, 1962), 1: 36–47. Adler’s paper was later published as
Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Compensation: A Contribution to Clinical Medicine,
trans. Smith Ely Jelliffe (New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1907).

13. Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 1: 41.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 259–266.

16. Ibid., 2: 432.

17. Ibid., 3: 104.

18. Ibid., 107.

19. Ibid., 145.

20. Ibid., 146–147.

21. Ibid., 175.

22. Ibid., 281, 289.

23. Adler’s writings were popular in Spain, and two of his books were published the year be-
fore Ramos wrote his “Psychoanalysis of the Mexican”: La psicología individual y la escuela
(Madrid: Revista de Pedagogía, 1930) and Conocimiento del hombre (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe,
1931).

24. Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution: Outlines of a Comparative Individualistic Psychol-
ogy and Psychotherapy (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1921), 7.

25. Ibid., 9.

26. Ibid., 11.

27. Ibid., 49.

28. Sigmund Freud, “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” (1914), SE 19: 50–51.

29. Ibid., 56.

30. Ibid., 52.

31. Ibid., 58.

32. Ibid., 61.

33. “Conversing with Adler,” Salomé wrote in her diary, “I was much enlightened by the
history of his development as a student of Marx, primarily interested in economics and

346
philosophic speculation.” The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas Salomé, trans. Stanley A. Levy
(New York: Basic Books, 1964), 42.

34. Alfonso Rodríguez remarked that Ramos chose the theories of Adler over those of Freud,
but he neglects to explain the implications of this choice. Alfonso Rodríguez, “Samuel Ramos:
Influencia de Adler y Jung en su estudio sobre el carácter del mexicano,” Cuadernos Hispano-
americanos 325 ( July 1977): 420–430.

35. Hernández Luna, Samuel Ramos, 184–185.

36. Ramos, Perfil del hombre, 99.

37. Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 73.

38. Ramos, Perfil del hombre, 55.

39. Ibid., 55.

40. Ibid.

41. “Los mexicanos pintados por uno de ellos,” Excélsior, October 18, 1932, reprinted in
Hernández Luna, Samuel Ramos, 210.

42. Ibid., 215–224.

43. Ramos, Perfil del hombre, 70.

44. Ibid., 73.

45. Freud, “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” 56.

46. On the debates about “virile literature,” see Robert McKee Irwin, “Virile Literature and
Effeminate Literature: The 1920s and 1930s,” in Mexican Masculinities: (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2003), 116ff.

chapter 3

1. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, SE 23: 134.

2. Ibid., 113.

3. Ibid., 14.

4. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 1991); Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: Une impression freudienne
(Paris: Galilée, 1995); Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (New York: Verso, 2004).

5. “Moisés y la religión monoteísta,” Sur ( June 1939).

notes 347
6. Frida Kahlo, “Hablando de un cuadro mío, de cómo, partiendo de una sugestión del Ing.
José D. Lavín y una lectura de Freud, hice un cuadro de Moisés,” Así 249 (August 18, 1945),
reprinted in Escrituras, ed. Raquel Tibol (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, 2001), 254. The Spanish original reads: “Hace más o menos dos años, José Domingo
me dijo un día que le gustaría que leyera el Moisés de Freud, y pintara, como quisiera, mi in-
terpretación del libro. Este cuadro es el resultado de aquella pequeña conversación entre José
Domingo Lavín y yo. Leí el libro una sola vez y comencé a pintar el cuadro con la primera im-
presión que me dejó.”

7. Gannit Ankori argues that the halo above the Virgin Mary contains Kahlo’s features, but
we can only see a pair of eyes framed by a thick eyebrow—a fragmented image that could not
strictly be considered a self-portrait. Ankori, “Moses, Freud, and Frida Kahlo,” in New Perspec-
tives on Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism,” ed. Ruth Ginsburg and Ilana Paredes (Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 2006), 141.

8. Said argues that Freud belonged “to a place and time that were still not tremendously both-
ered by what today, in the current . . . jargon, we would call the problems of the other.” Said,
Freud and the Non-European, 14–16.

9. Ankori, “Moses, Freud, and Frida Kahlo,” 141.

10. Kahlo, “Hablando de un cuadro mío,” 256–257.

11. Ibid., 257.

12. Gannit Ankori, “The Hidden Frida: Covert Jewish Elements in the Art of Frida Kahlo,”
Jewish Art 19/20 (1993/94): 224–247.
13. A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907–1926,
ed. Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L. Freud, trans. Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham (New
York: Basic Books, 1966), 384.

14. Ankori, “Moses, Freud, and Frida Kahlo,” 147.

15. Octavio Paz, “Vuelta a El laberinto de la soledad (Conversación con Claude Fell),” in Paz,
El laberinto de la soledad (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001), 421.

16. Enrico Mario Santí, in his erudite introduction to the Cátedra edition of The Labyrinth,
mentions Moses and Monotheism as a source for Paz’s essay. Santí, “Introducción,” in Paz, El la-
berinto de la soledad, 72. Thomas Mermall has written an essay exploring “the psychoanalysis of
history” in The Labyrinth in which he examines Paz’s use of certain psychoanalytic concepts,
but he does not mention Moses and Monotheism. Thomas Mermall, “‘El laberinto de la soledad’
y el psicoanálisis de la historia,” Cuadernos americanos 27, no. 156 ( January–February 1958):
97–114. Reprinted in El laberinto de la soledad: Edición conmemorativa. 50 aniversario, ed. En-
rico Mario Santí (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 18–35.

17. Paz revised the titles and content of the chapters in the second edition, but the structure
of the book remained the same. See Enrico Mario Santí, “Introducción,” in El laberinto de la
soledad: Edición conmemorativa, 65–66.

348
18. Octavio Paz, Itinerario, in Ideas y costumbres I: La letra y el cetro, vol. 9 of Obras completas
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), 15–72.

19. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 41.

20. Ibid., 103.

21. Said, Freud and the Non-European, 27, 30.

22. Early in his career Said published Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic
Books, 1975). My discussion of “beginnings” differs from his.

23. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 97.

24. Ibid., 132.

25. Paz explains how the paucity of paternal figures is one of the explanations for the perennial
Mexican solitude. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 220.

26. Ibid., 134.

27. Carl E. Schorske, “Freud’s Egyptian Dig,” New York Review of Books 40, no. 10 (May 27,
1993): 35–40.

28. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 224.

29. Ibid., 225.

30. “El macho—no es el fundador de un pueblo; no es el patriarca que ejerce la patria potes-
tad; no es rey, jefe de clan . . . es el extraño.” Ibid., 220.

31. The Labyrinth, and especially the chapter on “The sons of La Malinche,” has been the
subject of numerous feminist critiques denouncing Paz as a patriarchal author who debases the
historical figure of Malinche. In my view, these critiques are based on a misreading of Paz’s text
that ignores his efforts to engage with Moses and Monotheism. Once we take this crucial fact
into account, we can see that The Labyrinth is in agreement with recent feminist and Chicana
efforts—especially in the work of Cherrie Moraga and Alicia Gaspar de Alba—to reclaim La
Malinche as a positive historical figure. See Alicia Gaspar de Alba, “Malinche’s Rights,” in Cur-
rents from the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1994), 261–266; and Cherrie Moraga, “A Long Line of Vendidas,” in Loving
the War Years (Cambridge: South End Press, 1983), 90–144.

32. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 112–113.

33. Ibid., 113.

34. Ibid., 114.

35. Ibid., 113.

36. Freud stresses that the development of Judaism required a rejection not only of Sinnlich-
keit but also of sexuality: “It is not that [ Judaism] would demand sexual abstinence; it is content

notes 349
with a marked restriction of sexual freedom. God, however, becomes entirely removed from
sexuality and elevated into the ideal of ethical perfection.” And “ethics,” he writes, “is a limita-
tion of instinct.” Ibid., 118.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., 115.

39. Freud used the analogy of a patriotic Briton to explain how the belief in a powerful God
leads to an increase in self-esteem: “we may perhaps make it easier to understand if we point
to the sense of superiority felt by a Briton in a foreign country which has been made insecure
owing to an insurrection—a feeling that is completely absent in a citizen of a small continental
state. For the Briton counts on the fact that his Government will send along a warship if a hair
of his head is hurt, and that the rebels understand that very well—whereas the small state pos-
sesses no warship at all. Thus, pride in the greatness of the British Empire has a root as well in
the consciousness of greater security—the protection—enjoyed by the individual Briton. This
may resemble the conception of a grand God.” Ibid., 112.

40. Ibid., 115.

41. The concept of “simulation” is a crucial one throughout The Labyrinth. Paz defines it as
“an activity not unlike acting . . . the actor has developed a complicity with his character that
nothing can break except for death or sacrifice. A lie takes root in his self and this becomes the
only background for his personality.” Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 178.

42. Ibid., 315.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 308.

45. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 54.

46. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 303.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid., 338.

49. Ibid., 263.

50. Ibid., 271.

51. Schorske, “Freud’s Egyptian Dig,” 35–40.

52. Schorske points out that in developing the concept of Geistigkeit, Freud was not only turn-
ing his back on many of the beliefs he held earlier in his career, but also going against the most
provocative findings reached by his sources. Freud writes about Akhenaton as the original de-
veloper of Geistigkeit, and presents him as a strict, purely rational ruler who invented laws and
an abstract concept of god. Schorske shows that one of Freud’s main sources, James Henry

350
Breasted, had written extensively on the sensual character of Akhenaton’s rule. “None of
the sensual side of the Akhenaten culture described by Breasted appears in Freud’s account,”
Schorske tells us. “Freud selected from Breasted’s History only what connects the Egyptian en-
lightenment to the Geistigkeit he sees in the Jews. In his own copy of Breasted’s history, Freud
marked only the passages that sustained this theme. The rest—and the richer information on
the sensuous culture of Akhenaten in The Dawn of Conscience—he ignored.” Schorske, “Freud’s
Egyptian Dig,” 35–40.

53. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 170.

54. Octavio Paz, “Frida y Tina: Vidas no paralelas,” Vuelta 82 (September 1983): 42.

55. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 415.

56. Ibid.

57. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” SE 14: 244.

58. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 200.

59. Ibid., 217.

60. Ibid., 356.

61. Ibid., 236.

62. Paz, in fact, differentiates between two experiences of solitude: one constructive, or
“open,” as he calls it; the other detrimental or “closed.”

63. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 146.

64. Ibid., 258.

65. Ibid., 307.

66. Aristotle, “Problem XXX,” in Problems, Books XXII–XXXVIII (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1957), 155.

67. Another similarity between Aristotelian melancholia and Paz’s solitude can be found
in mysticism. Aristotle links melancholia to furor—divine rapture—and Paz relates solitude
to mysticism: “our solitude,” he writes, “has the same roots as religious experience.” Paz, El la-
berinto de la soledad, 155.

68. Ibid., 352.

69. See, for instance, the references to Marx in Paz’s Obras completas, vol. 4: Generaciones y
semblanzas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994).

70. “All men are alone,” but not everyone experiences solitude in the same way. Paz is inter-
ested in detailing the differences in how Mexico and the United States deal with the solitude
that permeates their cultures. “Man is alone everywhere, but the solitude of Mexicans differs
from that of Americans.” Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 155.

notes 351
71. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 134.

72. Ibid., 135.

73. The German word Strachey translated as “malaise” is Unbehagen, which can also mean
“discontent,” as in Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur).

74. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, SE 21: 135–136.

75. Ibid., 134.

76. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, 155.

77. Ibid., 360.

78. Ibid., 342.

79. Kahlo, Escrituras, 255.

80. Said, Freud and the Non-European, 44.

81. Ibid., 45.

82. Alice Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo (New York: Abbe-
ville Press, 1988), 155.

83. Ricardo Ovalle et al., Remedios Varo: Catálogo razonado (Mexico City: Editorial Era,
2008), 118.

84. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 185.

85. Ibid.

chapter 4

1. Grégoire Lemercier, Dialogues avec le Christ: Moines en psychanalyse (Paris: Grasset,

1966), 47.

2. Ibid., 27.

3. Henri Fesquet, The Drama of Vatican II: The Ecumenical Council, June, 1962–December,
1965, trans. Bernard Murchland (New York: Random House, 1967), 50–51. Méndez Arceo
brought the issue of psychoanalysis before the Council once again in September 1965, when he
told the bishops: “I cannot understand why schema 13 [the document on the Church and the
modern world] is silent about psychoanalysis. It is a real science with its own object, method
and theories.” Ibid., 637–638.

4. Thomas Merton, The Silent Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 92.

352
5. Henri Fesquet, “L’actualité religieuse: Une expérience systématique de psychanalyse dans
un monastère bénédictin au Mexique,” Le Monde (September 12–13, 1965).

6. René Laurentin, “À propos de l’expérience de Cuernavaca: La psychanalyse, vide-t-elle les

monastères?” Le Figaro (October 11, 1965).

7. Robert Serrou, “Mexique: Le monastère en psychanalyse,” Paris Match 888 (April 16, 1965),
66; 78–79.

8. Vicente Leñero, “Psicoanálisis en el convento,” Panorama 34 (March 1966): 83–89.

9. Lemercier, Dialogues, 48.

10. Ibid., 56.

11. Ibid.

12. L’Osservatore Romano ( June 16, 1961): 3.

13. Vicente Leñero, Pueblo rechazado (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969), 9–10.

14. “Deja el sacerdocio el Prior Lemercier,” Excélsior (June 12, 1967): 1, 15.

15. Leñero, Pueblo rechazado, 72.

16. Ibid., 44.

17. Ibid., 87.

18. Ibid., 91.

19. Luis Suárez, Cuernavaca ante el Vaticano (Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo, 1970), 123.

20. Ibid., 111.

21. Ibid., 126.

22. For an objective overview of González de la Garza’s involvement with the monastery, see
Armando Ponce and Manuel Robles, “Lemercier, que conmocionó a la Iglesia, murió en el si-
lencio,” Proceso 584 ( January 9, 1988): 44ff.

23. Mauricio González de la Garza, El Padre Prior (Mexico City: Editorial Diógenes, 1971), 417.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 339, 472.

26. Ibid., 590–591.

27. Ibid., 620.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., 626.

notes 353
30. Ibid., 632.

31. “El monasterio de los buitres,” Sistema de Información Cultural (Mexico City: Consejo
Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes), accessed on July 28, 2009, at sic.gob.mx.

32. “Ingresé al monasterio de Santa María de las Muertes el mes de enero de 1956 . . . dos meses
después de que cumplí dieciocho años de edad” [I entered the monastery of Santa María de las
Muertes in January 1956, two months after my eighteenth birthday], writes Capetillo. Manuel
Capetillo, Monólogo de Santa María (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1985), 120.

33. Ibid., 81.

34. Ibid., 82.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., 111.

37. Ibid., 74.

38. Ibid., 46.

39. Serrou, “Mexique: Le monastère en psychanalyse,” 76.

40. On Fray Gabriel, see Alberto González Pozo, Gabriel Chávez de la Mora (Guadalajara:
ITESO, 2005); and Guillermo Plazola Anguiano, Arquitecto Fray Gabriel Chávez de la Mora
(Tlanepantla: Plazola Editores, 2006).

41. Suárez, Cuernavaca ante el Vaticano, 117.

42. Ponce and Robles, “Lemercier,” 48.

43. Frida Zmud, “Sublimation and Creativity in a Religious Community,” Dynamische Psy-
chiatrie 4, no. 4 (1971): 345.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., 347.

46. Ibid., 348.

47. Ibid., 349.

48. Ibid., 350–351.

49. Lemercier, Dialogues, 20–21.

50. Ibid., 79.

51. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, SE 21: 44.

52. Lemercier, Dialogues, 62.

53. Lemercier, “Eunuques pour le Royaume des Cieux,” Dialogues, 62–66. Emphasis mine.

354
54. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE 7: 136.

55. Mario Menéndez Rodríguez, “Lemercier: La otra cara,” Sucesos 1788 (September 9,
1967): 15.

56. Ibid.

57. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 31.

58. Ibid., 32.

59. Ibid., 47–56.

60. Ibid., 37.

61. Lemercier, Dialogues, 57.

62. Ibid., 73.

63. Ibid., 52, 27, 60.

64. Ibid., 54.

65. http://www.posadafreud.com/version_en/history.htm

chapter 5

1. Letter from Freud to Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, February 13, 1934. A facsimile was published
in “Sigmund Freud,” Criminalia I (April 1934): 160.

2. Freud described this instance of derealization in a letter to Romain Rolland: Sigmund

Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1936), SE 22: 239–248. For an insightful
reading of this passage, see Susan Sugarman, Freud on the Acropolis: Reflections on a Paradoxical
Response to the Real (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

3. See the letter from Freud to Martha Bernays, January 28, 1884, in The Letters of Sigmund
Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 92–94.

4. The wax seal is reproduced in Ernst Freud, Lucie Freud, and Ilse Grubich-Simitis, Sig-
mund Freud: His Life in Pictures and Words (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
The young Freud did not anticipate the need for a reverse image on the seal and thus the let-
ters are inverted.

5. Freud writes about “la ley de la A. E. que prescribe hacer uso y uso frecuente de la Noble Len-
gua Castellana,” The Letters from Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, ed. Walter Boehlich,
trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1990), 35. Hereafter cited as Letters.

6. “The Colloquy of the Dogs” is actually set in Valladolid, but one of its episodes takes place
in Seville. Several critics have commented on Freud’s slip. E. C. Riley remarks that “Freud

notes 355
persistently assigns the dogs to the hospital of Seville, not Valladolid. At no point does he cor-
rect his mistake, and presumably Silberstein never pointed it out to him either.” E. C. Riley,
“‘Cipión’ writes to ‘Berganza,’” in the Freudian Academia Española,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the
Cervantes Society of America 14, no. 1 (1994): 8.

7. Letters, 3.

8. Sigmund Freud, Jugendbriefe an Eduard Silberstein 1871–1881, ed. Walter Boehlich (Frank-
furt: Fischer, 1989), 4.

9. Letters, 2.

10. Jugendbriefe, 182. Letters, 160.

11. Letters, 125.

12. Ibid., 7.

13. Ibid., 99. Boehlich was the first to suggest that Cadiz might stand for Brăila.

14. Ibid., 2.

15. Ibid., 5.

16. Ibid., 177.

17. Ibid., 142.

18. Ibid., 47.

19. Ibid.

20. Jugendbriefe, 17. Emphasis mine.

21. Letters, 12. Emphasis mine.

22. John E. Gedo and Ernest S. Wolf, “Freud’s Novelas Ejemplares,” Psychological Issues 34–35
(1976), 90.

23. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1953), 2: 409.

24. Cartas de juventud, ed. Ángela Ackermann Pilári (Buenos Aires: Gedisa, 1992), 17–19.

25. Letters, 14.

26. Ibid., 12.

27. Ibid., xx.

28. Ibid., 136.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 137–138.

356
31. Ibid., xx.

32. Phyllis Grosskurth, “The Boy Friend,” New York Review of Books 38, nos. 1–2 (January 17,
1991).

33. S. B. Vranich, “Sigmund Freud and ‘The Case History of Berganza,’” Psychoanalytic Re-
view 63 (1976): 81.

34. Letters, 84.

35. In August 1873 Freud writes that he feels Eduard’s letters before opening them to see if
he might have sent a photo (Letters, 43); in January 1875 Freud sends Eduard a photo with a
poem inscribed on the back, and tells him: “I make bold to hope that the pleasure you have in
possessing me in effigy will soon cost you your own head in turn. Only one ‘written in light,
of course’”(84); in the same year, Freud asks again for a photo of Eduard on April 11 (112) and
April 28, quipping that “the procurement of your likeness is meeting with such remarkable dif-
ficulties” (113); five months later, in September, he reminds Eduard that he owes him a photo.
Finally, in October 1875—after insisting for over two years—Freud received Eduard’s portrait
and could write him “Soy muy satisfecho de tu fotografía” (139).

36. Letters, 16.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., 45.

39. Ibid., 19.

40. Ibid., 24.

41. Ibid., 28.

42. Ibid., 16.

43. Ibid., 86.

44. Ibid., 112.

45. Ibid., 126.

46. Ibid., 92.

47. Ibid., 92–94.

48. In a letter dated January 10, 1875, Freud tells Silberstein: “I am sending you the Don Qui-
xote herewith, the familiar copy from which I was reading, of value to me for that reason, in
the hope that you will welcome it more than a new one acquired by a casual sacrifice of money”
(Letters, 87–88). Freud read Don Quixote again in 1883. He wrote Martha Bernays a long letter
evoking his passion for the novel. See Freud’s letter to Martha dated August 22, 1883. The Let-
ters of Sigmund Freud, 41–44.

49. Letters, 16.

notes 357
50. William J. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1986), 59.

51. Miguel de Cervantes, “The Dialogue of the Dogs,” in Exemplary Stories, trans. Lesley Lip-
son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 252.

52. León Grinberg and Juan Francisco Rodríguez, “The Influence of Cervantes on the Future
Creator of Psychoanalysis,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 65 (1984): 158.

53. Riley, “‘Cipión’ writes to ‘Berganza,’” 5.

54. Vranich, “Sigmund Freud and ‘The Case History of Berganza,’” 80.

55. Grinberg and Rodríguez, “The Influence of Cervantes,” 156.

56. Gedo and Wolf, “Freud’s Novelas Ejemplares,” 90.

57. Grinberg and Rodríguez, “The Influence of Cervantes,” 160.

58. Joseph Beá and Víctor Hernández, “Don Quixote, Freud and Cervantes,” International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 65 (1984): 143–144.

59. Kurt R. Eissler, “Creativity and Adolescence: The Effect of Trauma in Freud’s Adoles-
cence,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 33 (1978): 461–517.

60. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis, 93.

61. Cervantes, “Dialogue of the Dogs,” 294.

62. Ibid., 282. Translation modified.

63. Ibid., 289–290.

64. Ibid., 290.

65. Ibid., 291.

66. Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A Study of El Casamiento
Engañoso and El Coloquio de los Perros (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 78.

67. Cervantes, “Dialogue of the Dogs,” 304.

68. There is no evidence that Freud knew “The Deceitful Marriage,” or even that he read the
entire text of the “Colloquy.” As he told Martha in a letter, he read the story of the dogs in a
language primer that has never been identified. E. C. Riley believes that “It is unlikely that the
primer contained the complete work, and there is no evidence that Freud read it anywhere else,
or that he read the companion piece, the Casamiento engañoso. He shows no sign of knowing
the Coloquio, or any part of it, particularly well. Neither is there any way of being sure that the
work had a marked effect on him at some less conscious level.” E. C. Riley, “Cipión writes to
Berganza,” 9, 16.

69. Miguel de Cervantes, “The Deceitful Marriage,” in Exemplary Novels (London: T. Ca-
dell, 1822), 115.

358
70. Ibid., 121.

71. Harry Sieber, “Introducción,” Novelas ejemplares (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001), 2: 32.

72. Ibid., 34.

73. Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, 293. Translation mine.

74. Ibid, 294.

75. In an illuminating article (“The Influence of Cervantes”), Grinberg and Rodriguez have
shown that Freud always considered Spanish a “secret” language, and that he felt guilty about
learning it—just like he felt guilty about reading Don Quixote—because it was a distraction
from his real-life obligations. To learn Spanish and read Cervantes, they argue, Freud had to
take time off from his studies—a pastime that he experienced as a wasteful excess given his
modest origins and the significant investment his family had placed in his education.

76. Letters, 95–96.

77. Letters, 101.

78. See the letter dated August 13, 1874. Letters, 47–52.

79. Letters, 56.

80. “[C]uando Freud dice que para renovar la Academia Española fue necesario el sacrifico de
Gisela, está diciendo algo más si tomamos por un momento la Academia Española como sím-
bolo de un horizonte intelectual y de una determinada orientación cultural. El encuentro con
Gisela, la intensidad amorosa y el sacrificio de este amor tienen una significación casi de ‘pri-
mera piedra’—debajo de la que Gisela quedaría enterrada—de la posterior construcción de la
teoría psicoanalítica.” [When Freud writes that in order to renovate the Academia Española it
was necessary to sacrifice Gisela, he is saying something more if we interpret the Academy as a
symbol of an intellectual horizon and of a particular cultural orientation. The encounter with
Gisela, the intensity of his love and the sacrifice of this love function like a first stone—under
which Gisela will remain buried—in the later construction of psychoanalytic theory.] Acker-
mann Pilári, “Presentación de la edición española,” in Cartas de juventud, 18.

81. Freud wrote one more letter to Silberstein on April 28, 1910, in response to a message from
his friend. Freud writes in a dry, serious tone—the intimacy that characterized their earlier cor-
respondence had disappeared. See Letters, 185–186.

82. Letters, 168.

83. Ibid., 97–98.

84. Commenting on the end of Freud’s friendship with Silberstein, Phyllis Grosskurth writes:
“Freud appears to have shed the gaiety that is evident in his relationship with his friend for the
sobering reality of marriage, poverty, and thwarted ambition” (“The Boy Friend,” 4).

85. Various critics have written about this unfortunate episode. Walter Boehlich mentions it
in his introduction to The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, and so does Rosita

notes 359
Braunstein Vieyra, Silberstein’s granddaughter, in a short autobiographical text included in the
same volume. The most detailed study is James W. Hamilton’s “Freud and the Suicide of Pau-
line Silberstein,” Psychoanalytic Review 89 (December 2002): 879–909.

86. Hamilton, “Freud and the Suicide of Pauline Silberstein,” 890.

87. Alexander Grinstein, “The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein: 1871–1881,”
International Review of Psychoanalysis 19 (1992): 232–234.

88. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis, 86.

89. Eissler, “Creativity and Adolescence,” 471.

90. Unser Herz zeigt nach dem Süden. Reisebriefe 1885–1923, ed. Christfried Tögel and Michael
Molnar (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2002).

91. Letters, 146.

92. Letters, 142.

93. Sigmund Freud, “Beobachtung über Gestaltung und feineren Bau der als Hoden be-
schriebenen Lappenorgane des Aals,” S.B. Akad. Wiss. Wien (Math,-Naturwiss. Kl), part I, 75
(1877): 419–431.

94. Letters, 146.

95. Ibid., 142.

96. Aristotle, History of Animals, trans. Richard Creswell (London: George Bell and Sons,
1897), VI: 16, 158.

97. Quoted in Léon Bertin, Eels: A Biological Study (London: Cleaver-Hume Press, 1957), 3.

98. Ibid.

99. Graham Swift, Waterland (New York: Poseidon Press, 2007).

100. Aristotle, 538, A 2.

101. Letters, 149.

102. Ibid.

103. Ibid.

104. Bertin, Eels, 152.

105. Ibid., 161.

106. Eissler, “Creativity and Adolescence,” 470.

107. Letters, 145–146.

108. Fernán Caballero is mentioned on pages 43 and 160 of the letters.

360
109. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone
Books, 2005), 133ff.

110. Freud to Honorio Delgado, October 20, 1919, facsimile reproduction in Álvaro Rey de
Castro, “Las cartas de Sigmund Freud a Honorio Delgado,” in Freud y el psicoanálisis. Escritos
y testimonio, ed. J. Mariátegui (Lima: Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, 1989), 522–523.

111. Freud to Honorio Delgado, February 22, 1920, in ibid., 529.

112. Letter from Freud to López Ballesteros, May 7, 1923. López Ballesteros included a Span-
ish translation of this letter in volume 4 of Obras completas de Sigmund Freud (Madrid: Biblio-
teca Nueva, 1923). The German original has never been found.
113. Grinstein has written on the similarities between Freud’s two male friendships. “What
is striking about these letters is that Freud’s intense feelings towards another man [Silberstein]
were so similar to his feelings towards Fliess years later.” Grinstein, “The Letters of Sigmund
Freud to Eduard Silberstein,” 232–234.

114. Freud to Fliess, December 6, 1896, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1985), 208.

115. Freud to Fliess, February 1, 1900, in ibid., 398.

116. Sigmund Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” SE 22: 239–248.

117. Freud to Arnold Zweig, July 15, 1934, quoted in Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund
Freud, 3: 190.

118. Freud to Marie Bonaparte, February 23, 1938, quoted in ibid., 217.

119. Freud to Ernest Jones, April 28, 1938, quoted in ibid., 225.

120. Freud to Fliess, February 1, 1900, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess, 398.

121. The University of Vienna now has a GBLTQ group called “Identity: Queer” and de-
scribed as a “LesBiSchwule Gruppe der Wiener Universitäten.” See http://www.univie.ac
.at/iq/

122. Octavio Paz, In Light of India, trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1995), 96.

123. Ibid.

124. Enrique Krauze, El poder y el delirio (Mexico City: Tusquets, 2008).

125. Paz, In Light of India, 125.

126. Ibid., 203–204.

notes 361
chapter 6

1. J. Keith Davies and Gerhard Fichtner, Freud’s Library: A Comprehensive Catalog (London:
Freud Museum; Tübingen: Diskord, 2006).

2. For a discussion of the Latin American books in Freud’s library, see Rubén Gallo, “La biblio-
teca española de Sigmund Freud,” Revista de Occidente 307 (December 2006): 17–26.

3. Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, Derecho penal mexicano: Parte general (Mexico City: Editorial
Porrúa, 1937).

4. Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, La evolución política de Iberoamérica (Madrid: Editorial Reus,

1925).

5. Carrancá, Derecho penal, 34.

6. “Certain crimes,” he writes, “can be traced back to the ‘complexes’ and thus positivist crimi-
nal law can turn to psychoanalysis in order to investigate their causes.” Ibid., 43.

7. Ibid., 42.

8. Ibid.

9. Carrancá’s article transcribes the prisoners’ use of Mexican slang: “Pregunta: Los ‘Jotos,’ ¿de
qué manera se dan a conocer a los demás presos? / Antonio: ‘Por su traje y afeites y por sus apo-
dos como ‘La Eva,’ ‘La Miss México,’ ‘La Morena,’ ‘La Bárbara Lamar,’ ‘La Cebollera’; acaba de
irse a las Islas ‘La Gloria.’” Carrancá y Trujillo, “Sexo y penal,” Criminalia (1933): 28.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 29.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 31.

14. Ibid.

15. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE 7: 140.

16. Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, “Un ensayo judicial de la psicotécnica,” Criminalia 6 (February
1934): 125.

17. Ibid., 127–128.

18. Ibid., 131.

19. Ibid., 127.

20. Ibid., 132.

21. Sigmund Freud, “‘Wild’ Psychoanalysis,” SE 11: 222–223.

362
22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 227.

24. Freud to Carrancá y Trujillo, February 13, 1934. Reproduced in Criminalia 8 (April
1934): 160.

25. Ibid.

26. This memorandum is described by Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
(New York: Basic Books, 1953–7), 3:93, and Strachey in SE 9: 102.

27. Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceed-
ings,” SE 9: 108.

28. Ibid., 111.

29. Ibid., 112.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., 113.

32. Sigmund Freud, “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work,” SE 14: 332.

33. Ibid., 333.

34. Sigmund Freud, “The Expert Opinion in the Halsmann Case,” SE 21: 252.

35. Ibid., 253.

36. Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, “El psicoanálisis en el examen de los delincuentes,” Criminalia
8–9 (November 1934): 183–190.

37. Carrancá, Derecho penal, 27ff.

38. Doctor Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón: Sus mejores casos de criminología, ed. José Ramón Garma-
bella (Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1980), 52.

39. Isaac Don Levine, Mind of an Assassin: The Man Who Killed Trotsky (New York: New
American Library, 1960), 150.

40. Quiroz Cuarón and Gómez Robleda incorporated transcripts of the tests in their report
to the court. In “Prisoner against Psychologist,” chapter 8 of Mind of an Assassin, Isaac Don
Levine draws on these tests to sketch a psychological portrait of Mercader. See Levine, Mind
of an Assassin, 149–194.

41. Levine, Mind of an Assassin, 174–175.

42. El caso Trotsky, ed. Federico Hemmer Colmenares (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional de
Posgrado en Derecho, 1994), 6: 287ff.

notes 363
43. Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, “El asesino de León Trotzky y su peligrosidad en vista de los datos
de su identidad,” Études Internationales de Psycho-Sociologie criminelle 2 (1957): 31.

44. The most complete account of Mercader’s life after his release from prison can be found
in José Ramón Garmabella’s El grito de Trotsky: Ramón Mercader, el asesino de un mito (Barce-
lona: Debate, 2007).

45. Julia Kristeva, Sens et non-sens de la révolte (Paris: Fayard, 1996).

46. Levine, Mind of an Assassin, 150.

47. Quiroz Cuarón’s findings were published in Revista criminalística de Cuba (1956) and in
Études Internationales de Psycho-sociologie criminelle (1957).

48. Quiroz Cuarón, “El asesino,” 46.

49. Ibid., 48.

50. John J. Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1988), 101–
102. See also “Naum Ettingon [sic],” in Vitaly Rapoport and Yuri Alexeev’s High Treason: Es-
says on the History of the Red Army, 1918–1938 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 391–392.
In The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), Mary-Kay
Wilmers writes that the abduction of General Miller was actually planned by Eitingon’s col-
league Yasha Serebriansky.

51. Garmabella, El grito de Trotsky.

52. Despite having provoked intense—and not always civil—arguments, the exact relation
between the two Eitingons has not been definitely established. Rapoport and Alexeev were
among the first to argue, in their 1985 book High Treason, that the two Eitingons—the au-
thors identify them as Mark and Leonid—were brothers. John Dziak repeated the claim in
his 1988 Chekisty, but conceded that “there is considerable confusion over the identities of the
two Eitingon brothers” (199, n. 79). Stephen Schwartz, in an article titled “Intellectuals and
Assassins—Annals of Stalin’s Killerati” and published in the January 24, 1988 issue of the New
York Times Book Review, repeated the claim that Max and Leonid were brothers, and asked to
what extent Max might have been implicated in his brother’s missions. “Could the case of Dr.
[Max] Eitingon,” he asked, “be merely an extreme example of . . . ‘the heartlessness of intellec-
tuals?’ Or might the psychoanalyst have been no more than the victim . . . of loyalty to fam-
ily relationships?” (3). Historian Theodore Draper responded to Schwartz’s article, arguing
that Max and Leonid were not brothers, and accused Schwartz and Dziak of sloppy historical
work. “The only apparent reason for making Max Eitingon the brother of Leonid,” he wrote,
“is that they had similar family names, as if every male with the name of Eitingon must have
been a brother of Max. . . . What we know of Dr. Max Eitingon taken as a whole makes it virtu-
ally impossible to believe that he was the murderous Soviet agent that he has been made out to
be. . . . There would appear to be a monstrous disparity between the gravity of the charges and
the seriousness of the evidence” (Theodore H. Draper, “The Mystery of Max Eitingon,” New

364
York Review of Books 35, no. 6 [April 14, 1988]). The debate between Schwarz and Draper con-
tinued in letters to the NYRB , each refusing to cede ground. On July 3, 1988, Robert Conquest
published a more level-headed response in the New York Times Book Review (“Max Eitingon:
Another View”), reminding all parties in the debate that “Max Eitingon’s guilt or innocence
[is] a question which has been discussed since 1938.” He notes that the issue of Max’s possible
involvement with the GPU “has so often been raised, and never adequately settled.” In his opin-
ion, Leonid is most probably Max’s first cousin, but even if he were not, “he is surely a relative.”
The debate was revisited almost a decade later by Alexander Etkind in his Eros of the Impos-
sible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), where he argues
that “Max Eitingon could have been an accomplice [to Leonid’s crimes] . . . the leader of inter-
national psychoanalysis carried out the commands of Stalin’s secret service” (250); even more
poignantly, he suggests that “Naum [Leonid] Eitingon, the head of Soviet counterintelligence,
certainly had at his disposal the means to force his relative, the head of international psycho-
analysis, to cooperate in covert operations” (252). In my view, the evidence supports the claim
that the two Eitingons were relatives, though not brothers.

53. Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 250.

54. Wilmers, The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story, 107, 265.

55. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 (London: Oxford University
Press, 1963), 474–475.

56. Isaac Don Levine writes that “while Ramon was careful to be polite to the two examining
psychologists, his attitude of angered contempt occasionally broke through.” Levine, Mind of
an Assassin, 160.

57. Ibid., 160.

58. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 180.

59. Trotsky, “In Defense of the Russian Revolution,” in Leon Trotsky Speaks (New York: Path-
finder Press, 1972), 269.

60. Ibid.

61. Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 236–237.

62. Trotsky, “In Defense of the Russian Revolution,” 269.

63. Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism (London: New Park Publications, 1963), 11.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 11–12.

66. Ibid., 12.

67. Quoted in Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 232.

notes 365
68. Rivera to Bertram D. Wolfe, March 19, 1939, Bertram Wolfe Papers, Hoover Institution
Archives, Box 12, Folder 54.

69. Patrick Marnham, Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera (New York:
Knopf, 1998), 294.

chapter 7

1. Sigmund Freud, “Draft H: Paranoia” [ January 24, 1895], in The Complete Letters of Sig-
mund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1985), 110.
2. Max Schur, Freud’s doctor, recalls that his patient referred to collecting as “an addiction,
second in intensity only to his nicotine addiction.” Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (New
York: International Universities Press, 1972), 547.

3. Lynn Gamwell, “A Collector Analyzes Collecting,” in Excavations and Their Objects: Freud’s
Collection of Antiquity, ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996),
1–12. See also Lynn Gamwell, Sigmund Freud and Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989).

4. Freud to Fliess, August 1, 1899, in The Complete Letters of Freud to Fliess, 363.

5. A patient recalls: “The other example [of departing from transference interpretations on
the part of Freud the analyst] was his taking me into the next room to show me his Euchap-
tis to explain that their colour was fading because they had been dug up—like relics from the
unconscious.” R. E. Money-Kyrle, “Looking Backwards—and Forward,” International Review
of Psycho-Analysis 6 (1979): 265–272. See also H. D., Tribute to Freud (New York: Pantheon,
1956).

6. Meine alten und dreckigen Götter: Aus Sigmund Freuds Sammlung (London: Freud Mu-
seum), 147.

7. The Moche pice and the green slate object were published in Meine alten und dreckigen Göt-
ter, 147; the West Mexican figure has been published in Le Sphinx de Vienne: Sigmund Freud,
l’art et l’archéologie, ed. Eric Gubel (Paris: Ludion), 174.

8. Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru, ed. Joanne Pillsbury (Washington, D.C.: Na-
tional Gallery of Art, 2001).

9. Richard F. Townsend, Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past (Chi-
cago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1998). One of the first foreign archaeologists to draw attention
to West Mexico was the Norwegian Carl Lumholtz, who traveled down the Sierra Madre at the
end of the nineteenth century and published the monumental study Unknown Mexico in 1902.

10. Ibid.

366
11. Ibid., 135.

12. Art in Ancient Mexico, ed. Gilbert Médioni and Marie-Thérèse Pinto (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1941). Emphasis mine. As was customary at the time, the authors refer to the
cultures of West Mexico as “Tarascan.”

13. Townsend, Ancient West Mexico, 18.

14. Michael D. Coe, Mexico (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 57.

15. Miguel Covarrubias, Indian Art of Ancient Mexico and Guatemala (New York: Knopf,
1957), 106.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. André Emmerich, “Inroduction,” Miguel Covarrubias, Mezcala: Ancient Mexican Sculp-
ture (New York: André Emmerich Gallery, 1956), 12.

20. Sigmund Freud, “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” SE 14: 34n; Del-
gado was also mentioned in “A Short Account of Psycho-Analysis,” SE 19: 202.

21. Freud to Delgado, November 14, 1927; Freud to Delgado, August 28, 1928. The analyst
thanks the Peruvian for his presents to “the children.” Álvaro Rey de Castro, “Las cartas de Sig-
mund Freud a Honorio Delgado,” in Honorio Delgado: Testimonio, 543, 553.

22. Rey de Castro, Honorio Delgado: Testimonio, 543n22.

23. Sigmund Freud, Cocaine Papers, ed. Robert Byck (New York: Stonehill, 1974), 49–52.

24. Ibid.

25. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE 13: 139.

26. Gabriele Anderl, Chronik einer Obsession: die Geschichte der Asiatika-Sammlung Exner
(Vienna: Czernin Verlag, 2009).

27. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: New
Left Books, 1979), 60. For a discussion of Benjamin’s Mexican studies, see John Kraniauskas,
“Beware Mexican Ruins!: ‘One-Way Street’ and the Colonial Unconscious,” in Walter Benja-
min’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1994), 139–154.

28. Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” 51.

29. Though Freud did not own a copy of Die weiße Götter, his library includes another text by
Stucken: Astralmythen: Religionsgeschichtliche (Leipzig: Eduard Pfeiffer 1907).

notes 367
30. Oswald Spengler, “Montezuma: Ein Trauerspiel,” unpublished manuscript, Oswald
Spengler Papers, Münchner Staatsbibliothek, Germany. I thank Anke Birkenmeier for bringing
this document to my attention.

31. Georges Bataille, “L’Amérique disparue,” Cahiers de la République des Lettres, des Sciences
et des Arts (1928): 5.

32. Ibid. For a commentary on this text and a discussion of Bataille’s fascination with Aztec
sacrifice, see Marina Galletti, “Georges Bataille et la ‘Sociologie du Mexique,’” L’Infini 83 (Sum-
mer 2003): 54–61.

33. Elias Canetti, Auto-da-fé (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 40.

34. Jean Renoir, dir., La règle du jeu (1939).

35. Frazer and Heine wrote long sections about Ancient Mexico; Robertson Smith men-
tioned the Aztec only in a footnote, quoted by both Frazer and Freud. Smith refers to the
Aztec practice of eating symbolic representations of the god: “As regards America, the most
conclusive evidence comes from Mexico, where the gods, though certainly of totem origin,
had become anthropomorphic, and the victim, who was regarded as the representative of the
god, was human. At other times paste idols of the god were eaten sacramentally.” W. Robertson
Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1896), 295n2.

36. Heine is one of the authors most often quoted by Freud. The Standard Edition includes
quotes from “Der Asra” (14: 290), “Aus der Matratzengruft” (6: 26; 15: 52n2; 22: 192; 24: 422),
“Deutschland” (21: 50, 122n3), “Ein Fichtenbaum Steht Einsam” (6: 18), Gedanken und Einfahle
(21: 110), Die Götter im Exil (17: 236), “Harzreise” (8: 39–41, 69, 87), “Die Heimkehr” (5: 490,
513; 22: 161), “Lazarus” (9: 245), “Lyrisches Intermezzo” (6: 18), “Nachlese” (24: 422), “Nord-
see” (22: 113), Reisebilder (8: 12–13, 16, 2, 46, 78–79, 87, 140), Romanzero (8: 85; 14: 290), “Der
Scheidende” (14: 294), “Schnabelewopski” (8: 36), “Der Arme Peter” (10: 294; 24: 436), “Bäder
von Lucca” (8: 12–13, 16, 78–79, 87, 140–141; 24: 431), “Die Wanderraten” (12: 167; 24: 440).

37. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Mac-
millan, 1890), 6: 315.

38. Ibid., 9: 297.

39. See, for instance, ibid., 300.

40. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 8: 88.

41. Ibid., 86–90.

42. Ibid., 89. Freud’s copy of The Golden Bough is kept at the Freud Museum London. I thank
Michael Molnar and Keith Davies for allowing me to consult these volumes.

43. Ibid., 92.

44. Ibid., 93.

45. Ibid., 138–139.

368
46. Ibid., 9: 257.

47. Ibid., 279.

48. Ibid., 298.

49. Ibid., 283.

50. Ibid., 296.

51. Ibid., 304–305.

52. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 139.

53. Freud owned several collections of Heine’s poetry: Sämtliche Werke (10 vols., Leipzig: In-
sel Verlag, 1910–1920), which includes “Vitzliputzli” in vol. 3 (pp. 58–81) and is owned by the
Freud Museum London; Sämtliche Werke (12 vols., Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1885),
now at the Freud Museum Vienna; and Buch der Lieder (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe,
1884), now in a private collection. This last book was a present to Martha Freud and bears the
following dedication: “Zur Erfüllung eines alten Wunsches / Dein Sigmund, Dez. 1884.”

54. Heinrich Heine, “Vitzliputlzi,” in The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern En-
glish Version, ed. Hal Draper (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982), 599.

55. Ibid., 602.

56. Ibid., 603.

57. Ibid., 605.

58. Ibid., 608.

59. Ibid., 607.

60. Heinrich Heine, Werke und Briefe, ed. Hans Kaufmann, 10 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau, 1961),
2: 68.

61. Heine, Complete Poems, 607.

62. Ibid., 608.

63. Ibid., 609.

64. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 235.

65. Heine, Werke, 2: 73.

66. Heine, Complete Poems, 611.

67. Ibid., 613–614.

68. Heine, Werke, 2: 78.

69. Heine, Complete Poems, 614.

notes 369
70. Both Frazer and Heine based their accounts on Sahagún’s chronicles. On Heine’s sources,
see “Vitzliputzli,” in Studien zu Heine’s Romanzero, ed. Helene Herrmann (Berlin: Weidman-
nische Buchhandlung, 1906), 12–41.

71. Heine, Werke, 2: 70.

72. Heine, Complete Poems, 609.

73. Rawson believes that “there is a corresponding pudeur over imputations of [cannibalism]
to oneself or one’s own people in any literal sense (it is said that even tribes known to practice
ritual cannibalism are given to denying it and to imputing the practice to their neighbours, a
matter which is a prominent theme in Melville’s Typee).” Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver and
Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (London: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 90.

74. Heine, Complete Poems, 612.

75. See, for instance, Frazer, The Golden Bough, 2: 280–281.

76. Heine, Complete Poems, 612.

77. Hal Draper renders “bei den Wilden” as “savage Indians,” but this translation introduces
the negative connotations of savagery, which are absent from “the wild ones,” who are wild and
untouched by the forces of civilization in the same way that America, in the preface, appears
as an untouched, wild land.

78. Heine, a liberal and anticlerical writer, spent the last years of his life in exile in Paris. Like
Vitzliputzli, he felt that his country had undergone a radical political transformation that
turned it into a place where he no longer belonged. Much of the work he wrote in exile presents
a scathingly negative image of Prussia. In “Vitzliputzli,” the narrator gazes at the buttocks of a
Mexican monkey to find . . . the colors of the Prussian flag: “these monkey-rumpish colors. . . .
They remind me with nostalgia / Of the flag of Barbarossa.” (Heine, “Vitzliputzli,” 601.).

79. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” SE 17: 2–40.

80. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 142.

81. Ibid., 147.

82. Ibid., 151.

83. Ibid.

84. Freud writes: “The Christian communion, however, is essentially a fresh elimination of
the father, a repetition of the guilty deed. We can see the full justice of Frazer’s pronouncement
that ‘the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far
older than Christianity.’” Ibid., 154. This passage is underlined in Freud’s copy of The Golden
Bough kept in the Freud Museum London.

85. Ibid., 151.

370
86. Ibid.

87. Ibid.

88. Theathropic rituals were discussed at length by two of Freud’s sources, James Frazer and
Robertson Smith. Both authors pointed to Aztec ceremonies in which the victim was treated
like a divinity for a period of time before being dismembered at a temple as the most dramatic
instances of this practice. Frazer, “Killing the God in Mexico,” The Golden Bough, 7: 275–305;
Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 410ff.

89. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 142.

90. Ibid.

91. For a discussion of love and introjection, see Julia Kristeva, Histoires d’amour (Paris: De-
noël, 1983).

92. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 154.

93. Ibid., 154–155.

94. Heine, Complete Poems, 612.

95. Tzvetan Todorov has argued that the Aztecs had not yet developed metaphorical thought
and thus remained bound by a strict literalism—to become a jaguar warriors, for instance,
young men had to wear the skin of a jaguar—that left them at a cultural disadvantage against
the wily Spaniards. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New
York: Harper & Row, 1987).

96. For a complete inventory of the antiquities Freud kept on his desk, see Edmund Engel-
man, Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (New York: Basic Books,
1972), 64 and plate 25.

97. Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

98. Heine, Werke, 2: 68.

99. Ibid., 77–78.

100. Heine, Complete Poems, 614.

101. Lynn Gamwell, “The Origins of Freud’s Antiquities Collection,” in Sigmund Freud and
Art, 24.

102. The redesign of the Ringtstrasse has been analyzed by Carl E. Schorske in Fin-de-siècle
Vienna (New York: Vintage, 1981), 82 n. 1.

103. Freud owned three prints by Dürer. One of them was a present from Emmanuel Löwy.
Gubel, Le Sphinx de Vienne, 20.

104. Albrecht Dürer, Schriftlicher Nachlass, ed. Hans Rupprich (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für
Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), 1: 155. For a discussion of this passage in the context of Renaissance

notes 371
collections of American antiquities, see Harold Jantz, “Images of America in the German Re-
naissance,” in First Images of America, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976), 1: 91–105.

105. Christian Feest writes: “Of a much larger number of Mexican objects whose presence in
the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Austrian collections can be documented, only ten are
now preserved at the Museum für Völkerkunde (plus the six stone pendants from the Ambras
Collection for which no early record has so far been found) and 3 at the Museum of Art His-
tory in Vienna.” Vienna’s Mexican Treasures (Vienna: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1990), 32.

106. Antonio Cerda Ardura, “El penacho de Moctezuma: Enorme embrollo jurídico,” Siem-
pre ( January 22, 2006).

107. Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome: Ex typographia V. Mascardi, 1652–

1654), 417.

108. Octavio Paz, Los privilegios de la vista, in Obras completas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cul-
tura Económica, 1995), 7: 28.

109. On Freud’s American porcupine, see George Prochnik, “The Porcupine Illusion,” Cabi-
net: A Quarterly of Art and Culture 26 (Summer 2007): 23–27.

110. “Freud Rebuffs Goldwyn: Viennese Psychoanalyst Is Not Interested in Motion Picture
Offer,” New York Times ( January 24, 1925): 13.

111. Beverly J. Cox and Denna Jones Anderson, Miguel Covarrubias Caricatures (Washing-
ton: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).

112. See Covarrubias, Mezcala: Ancient Mexican Sculpture.

113. Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Introduction,” in Masterpieces of Primitive Art, ed. Lee Boltin
(New York: Knopf, 1978), 20. The Museum of Primitive Art closed in the 1970s, but some of
the pieces in its collection are reproduced in this catalog. There is a Mezcala object on p. 124.

114. Sigmund Freud, The Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929–1939: A Record of the Final Decade
(New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 187–188.

115. David Rockefeller, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2002), 73.

116. Ibid.

chapter 8

1. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 608. See also his Five Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis, SE 11: 33.

372
2. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 463–464.

3. Ibid., 464–465.

4. Leslie Adams, “A New Look at Freud’s Dream: ‘The Breakfast-Ship,’” American Journal of
Psychiatry 110 (1953): 381–384.

5. Didier Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis (Madison: International Universities Press, 1986),

317–318.

6. Joan Haslip, The Crown of Mexico: Maximilian and His Empress Carlota (New York Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 56–65, 117–119.

7. Ibid., 64.

8. Postcard from Freud to Martha Freud, August 29, 1904. Reproduced in Unser Herz zeigt
nach dem Süden, ed. Christfried Tögel (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2002), 182.

9. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 546.

10. Victor Hugo to Benito Juárez, June 20, 1867. Reprinted in Actes et paroles II: Pendant l’exil
1852–1870 (Paris: Librairie Ollendorff, 1938), 238–241.

11. “Spanien und Mexiko,” Neue Freie Presse ( June 19, 1867).

12. In the dream Herr P. worries about the fate of his children; Maximilian and Charlotte did
not have any children but they did adopt a boy, Augustín de Iturbide, who was a direct descen-
dant of the first Mexican emperor after independence from Spain, and whose fate was directly
tied to the fortunes of the empire.

13. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 466.

14. Ibid., 464–465.

15. Ibid., 465.

16. Haslip, The Crown of Mexico, 64–65; Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York:
Norton, 1988), 31–32.

17. Archives de la Commission Scientifique du Mexique, 1865–1867 (Paris: Imprimerie Impéri-

ale, 1865–1867), 1: 3.

18. Simon Leo Reinisch, Aegyptischen Denkmaeler in Miramar (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumül-
ler, 1865), 5.
19. Freud to Silberstein, August 22, 1874, in The Letters from Sigmund Freud to Eduard Sil-
berstein, ed. Walter Boehlich, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1990), 56.

20. Ibid., 96.

21. Freud recalls his “revolutionary” youth in the Count Thun dream and also in a letter
to the widow of his childhood friend Heinrich Braun. See Martin Grotjahn, “A Letter by

notes 373
Sigmund Freud with Recollections of His Adolescence,” Journal of the American Psychoana-
lytic Association 4 (1952): 644–652.

22. Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis, 316.

23. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 209–211.

24. Ibid., 216–217.

25. Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis, 346.

26. Alexander Grinstein, On Sigmund Freud’s Dreams (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1968), 160.

27. Carl E. Schorske, “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” Annual of
Psychoanalysis 2 (1974): 40–60. Reprinted in Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Cul-
ture (New York: Knopf, 1981), 181–207.

28. Ibid., 197.

29. Peter Gay, “The Jewish Freud,” New York Review of Books 33 (January 15, 1987): 21–22.

30. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 209.

31. These examples of individuals demanding preferential treatment spark Freud’s revolution-
ary protest. After seeing Count Thun, Freud writes: “I had passed the time in keeping a look-
out to see if anyone came along and tried to get a reserved compartment by exercising some
sort of ‘pull.’ I had intended in that case to make a loud protest: that is to say to claim equal
rights” (ibid., 208).

32. Freud’s remark about the Spanish couplet provoked a certain degree of confusion among
his translators. Die Traumdeutung gives the passage as follows: “Dazwischen schieben sich in
der Analyse zwei Verslen in, eines deutsch, das andere Spanish: Rosen, Tulpen, Nelken, alle
Blumen welken.—Isabelita, no llores, que se marchitan las flores. Das Spanische vom ‘Figaro’
her.) Strachey translates the last phrase as “The appearance of a Spanish couplet led back to Fi-
garo” (ibid., 212). Joyce Crick’s more recent translation restores the original meaning of Freud’s
remark: “The Spanish comes from Figaro” (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,
trans. Joyce Crick [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 164).

33. Brockhaus published the following works by Fernán Caballero, all part of the “Biblio-
teca de Autores Españoles”: La familia de Alvareda. Novela original de costumbres populares—
Lágrimas. Novela de costumbres contemporáneas (1871); La Gaviota (1873); Élia o la España
treinta años ha (c/ El ultimo Consuelo, la noche de navidad, Callar en vida y perdonar en muerte)
(1873); Cuadros de costumbres (1873); Un verano en Bornos—Cosa cumplida . . . solo en la otra
vida—Lady Virginia (1873); Clemencia (1874); Cuentos y poesías populares andaluces (1874);
Cuatro novelas (1874); Relaciones (1876); Cuentos Oraciones, Adivinanzas y Refranes populares
e infantiles recogidos por Fernán Caballero (1878); La farisea las dos Gracias y otras novellas es-
cogidas (1881). Brockhaus also published an edition of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (1883),

374
as well as Grammatik der spanischen Sprache (1884) by Julius Wiggers, which Freud could have
consulted during his Spanish-speaking days.

34. Fernán Caballero, Lágrimas: Novela de costumbres españolas (Madrid: Librería y Editorial
Rubiños, 1929), 62.

35. Ibid., 57.

36. Ibid., 41.

37. Ibid., 22.

38. Ibid., 94.

39. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 196.

40. Arnold Blumberg, The Diplomacy of the Mexican Empire, 1863–1867 (Philadelphia: Amer-
ican Philosophical Society, 1971), 31–32, 59–60, 92.

41. Ibid.

42. Gustav Kolmer, Das neue Parlament, Session 1897/1898, Parlamentarisches Jahrbuch 5 (Vi-
enna, 1897); Siegmund Hahn, Reichsraths-Almanach für die Session 1891–1892 (Vienna, 1892);
Jahrbuch des KuK Auswärtigen Dienstes (Vienna, 1904). An obituary of Guido Thun appeared
in the Neue Freie Presse (September 9, 1904).

43. Blumberg, The Diplomacy of the Mexican Empire, 31.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., 34.

46. Ibid., 92.

47. Die Votivkirche: Gegründet durch Weil Kaiser Maximilian im Jahre 1856 (Vienna: E. Cza-
ki’s Buchandlung, 1879), 6.

48. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 217.

49. Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis, 346.

50. The dream’s content is revolutionary indeed, since Freud’s associations stage a reversal of
the social order: at first a series of scatological images relating to urine and feces appear linked
to the lower classes portrayed in the naturalist novels of Zola; by the end of the dream, how-
ever, it is the character of Count Thun—and not French peasants—who is linked to urine.
This last image of the dream reverses the popular isomorphism between lower classes and
lower body functions.

51. Freud includes this last phrase as a footnote in his text.

52. Strachey incorrectly translates Freud’s “Indianer” as “Red Indians”; Crick repeats this
error.

notes 375
53. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 452–453.

54. Ibid., 454–455.

55. Grinstein, On Sigmund Freud’s Dreams, 421.

56. Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis, 422.

57. Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works (New York: Bollingen Series, 1959), 7: 187–189; 9.1:
28–30, 71, 200.

58. Henry Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life: An Autobiography (London: Longmans,
Green, 1926), 57–58.

59. Ibid., 64.

60. Henry Rider Haggard, Heart of the World (London: Longmans, Green, 1896), 2.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., 9.

63. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 454.

64. Grinstein was the first to remark that there are no wooden houses in Heart of the World.

65. Haggard, Heart of the World, 33.

66. Freud to Fliess, November 12, 1889. In The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1985), 385.
67. Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” SE 23: 261.

68. Ibid., 259.

69. Ibid., 263.

70. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 622‒629.

71. Letter from Vicente García and Ángel Urrutia to President Lázaro Cárdenas, Archivo
Histórico Genaro Estrada, III-425-11; III-423-3.

72. This episode has been discussed by Thomas F. Glick in “Huellas de Einstein y Freud en
México,” unpublished paper. I thank Professor Glick for graciously sharing his research on the
campaign to bring Freud to Mexico.

73. Letter from Eduardo Hay to Vicente García, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, III-425-
11; III-423-3.

74. Friedrich Katz, “México y Austria en 1938,” Nuevos ensayos mexicanos (Mexico City: Era,
2006), 397–407.

376
75. Letter from Marie Bonaparte to Freud, September 30, 1938; Letter from Freud to Marie
Bonaparte, November 23, 1938. Bonaparte’s proposal is discussed by Celia Bertin in her
Marie Bonaparte: A Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 204.

76. Kevin Davies, The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Washington: Edge Books, 2008), 52.

epilogue

1. Among the Latin American doctors who mailed their publications to Freud, there were
two Chileans, Fernando Allende Navarro and Juan Marin; an Ecuadorian, Humberto Salva-
dor; an Uruguayan, Gerardo Nebel; and a Colombian, Eduardo Weinfeld, who also published
Influencias del judaísmo (1935). There were also several Spaniards—Ángel Garma, Santiago
Ramón y Cajal, Quintiliano Saldaña—and, not surprisingly, several Argentinians, including
Juan Ramón Beltrán, Gregorio Bermann, Pedro Coscia, Fernando Gorriti, and Jorge Thénon.
The publications they sent to Freud are kept at Columbia University’s Health Sciences Library.

2. Lynn Gamwell, “The Origins of Freud’s Antiquities Collection,” in Sigmund Freud and
Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 24.

3. “‘Der Federschmuck im Hofmuseum,’ von Professor Dr. Seeler (Berlin),” Neue Freie Presse
(September 13, 1908): 12.

4. I thank Christian Feest, director of the Museum für Völkerkunde, for providing this
information.

notes 377
 INDEX

Abraham, Karl, 91 AMPAG (Mexican Association for Analytic

Academia Española, 158–160, 162–167, 171, Group Therapy), 4
177–178, 190 AMPP (Mexican Association for Psychoana-
Ackermann Pilári, Ángela, 162, 177 lytic Psychotherapy), 4
Acosta, José de, 250 André Emmerich Gallery, 281–282
Adams, Leslie, 287 Ankori, Gannit, 85, 90, 92
Adler, Alfred, 63–70, 72–73, 76, 110, 148 Anschluss, 82, 190, 325, 328
Adorno, Theodor W., 94 Antena, 46
Aegyptischen Denkmaeler in Miramar “Anthropomorphic idol from Mezcala,” 1,
(Reinisch), 298–302 239, 242, 244
Africa, 135, 238, 262–263, 266–267, 316, 322 Anzieu, Didier, 41, 285, 287–288, 302, 305,
Ajuste de cuentas (Ramírez), 4 314, 316
Akhenaton, 81, 85–86, 90–91, 95–97, 194, APM (Mexican Psychoanalytic Association),
234 3–4, 112
Albañiles, Los (Leñero), 123, 129 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 23, 45
Alessio Robles, Ricardo, 39, 40 Argentina, 4, 117, 230, 331
Alfaro Siqueiros, David, 216 Aristotle, 105, 182, 184–185
Allen, Woody, 324 Arnheim, Rudolf, 49
Allende Navarro, Fernando, 200 Artaud, Antonin, 49
Álvarez Bravo, Lola, 109 Asch, Jaime, 114
Álvarez Bravo, Manuel, 109 Astralmythen (Stucken), 335
Álvarez Felix, Enrique, 132 Aubert, François, 291
Ambras Collection, 270 Auenbrugger, Josef, 232

379
Augustine, Saint, 285 Bohl de Faber, Cecilia. See Caballero, Fernán
Austria, 4, 8, 153, 190, 238, 247, 271–272, 274, Bolívar, Simón, 194, 231
281, 288, 302, 310–312, 322, 325–326 Bombshell, 279
Austrian National Library, 266, 272–273, Bonaparte, Marie, 190, 238, 245, 325, 328–329
299, 311, 333–334, 336 Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 144, 146
Auto-da-fé (Canetti), 248 Bonilla, Héctor, 132
Avant-garde, 5, 14, 23, 28, 37, 45, 49, 112, 114, Book of Good Love (Juan Ruiz), 176
148 Borges, Jorge Luis, 83
Avión (Quintanilla), 29 Borgia, Lucrezia, 313
Aztecs, 8, 85–86, 95, 103, 193–194, 239, 243– Brăila, 160, 178
244, 246–259, 261–262, 266, 270–272, Brancusi, Constantin, 244
274–276, 283, 286, 290, 317–320, 332 Braunstein, Néstor, 4
Brazil, 3, 230, 293, 331
Banko, Julius, 270, 332 Breasted, James H., 247
Barcelona, 222 Breton, André, 5, 13, 92, 102, 109
Barthes, Roland, 10, 49, 263 Brisbane, Arthur, 281
Bassols, Narciso, 75 Brockhaus, F. A., 308
Bataille, Georges, 5, 247–249 Buenos Aires, 120, 123
Bazaine, François Achille, 290, 310 Bullitt, William, 325, 328
Beá, Joseph, 171 Buñuel, Luis, 74, 114
Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de,
307 Caballero, Fernán (pseudonym of Cecilia
Beckett, Samuel, 49 Bohl de Faber), 187, 308–313
Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 27 Cadiz, 160
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 63 California, 76, 108
Belgium, 118, 124, 216, 271, 291–292, 322 Campeche, 201
Benjamin, Walter, 46, 247, 249 Canetti, Elias, 248
Berggasse (Vienna), 8, 178, 245, 263, 265, Cannibalism, 251–252, 255, 258–261, 274
269, 275, 279, 283, 325, 332, 335, 337 Capetillo, Manuel, 132, 134–136, 141
Berlin, 160, 165, 225 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 325–328
Bermann, Gregorio, 200 Carpenter, Edward, 16, 20
Bernays, Martha, 158, 178, 289 Carrancá y Trujillo, Raúl, 5, 8, 199–211,
Bertin, Léon, 186 214–217, 220–222, 225–227, 229, 230, 326,
Biblioteca Breve Prize, 123 331–332, 335, 337
Biblioteca Nueva, 6, 15, 18–19, 21–22 Carrington, Leonora, 109
Biblioteca Salvador Novo, 15 Casa del Poeta, 9, 15, 18–19, 21–22
Bilimek, Dominik, 274 “Casamiento engañoso, El” (Cervantes),
Blanco (Paz), 193 174–176
Boas, Franz, 335 Cascando (Beckett), 49
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 41 Caso, Antonio, 57, 93
Boehlich, Walter, 159, 162–164, 168 Castellanos Quinto, 20

380
Catholicism, 7, 9, 73–74, 76, 117, 119–120, Covisart, Jean-Nicholas, 232
122–129, 134, 136, 141, 144–146, 148–151, Coyoacán, 215, 326, 328
190, 193–194, 202, 299 Criminalia, 201–202, 204, 206–209, 214,
Cernuda, Luis, 51 220, 222
Cervantes, Miguel de, 8, 158–159, 162, 167, Criminology, 201, 205, 210–215, 220–222, 230
169–171, 173–177, 188, 190–192, 308 Crítica, 99–103, 105
Chafirete, El, 23–35, 39, 45 Cuba, 220, 222, 308–309
Chaplin, Charlie, 231 Cuentos, poesías populares andaluzas (Caba-
Chapultepec, 290 llero), 308
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 7, 187, 267 Cuernavaca, 3, 119–120, 122–124, 128–129,
Charles V (emperor), 8, 271–272, 274, 337 134, 151
Charlotte of Belgium, 290–294, 303, 313 Cuernavaca ante el Vaticano (Suárez),
Charnay, Désiré, 250 128–129
Chávez, Hugo, 194 Cuesta, Jorge, 51, 72, 326, 328
Chávez de la Mora, Gabriel, 136–138
Chihuahua, 75 Dalí, Salvador, 5, 13, 43, 245
Children of Sanchez, The (Lewis), 127 Dante Alighieri, 39
China, 263, 276–277 Darwin, Charles, 114, 120, 232, 258, 329
Christianity, 85–86, 100, 122, 194, 250, 256– Davies, Kevin, 329
262. See also Catholicism Decameron (Boccaccio), 41
CIDOC (Intercultural Documentation Cen- “Deceitful Marriage, The.” See “Casamiento
ter), 119 engañoso, El”
Clavijero, Francisco, 250 Delgado, Honorio, 108, 188, 200, 245–246
Coeuroy, André, 49–50 Dell’Acqua, Cesare, 293–294, 296, 302–303,
Colima, 243 321
“Coloquio de los perros, El” (Cervantes), Departure of Maximilian and Charlotte from
159, 162, 169–176, 187, 192 Miramare to Mexico, The (Dell’Acqua),
Columbia University Health Sciences Li- 293–294, 303
brary, 200–201, 230 Derecho penal mexicano (Carrancá), 199–
Commission Scientifique du Mexique, 297 202, 214–215, 230, 331–332
Confessions (Augustine), 285 Derrida, Jacques, 83
Conquest, Robert, 224 Detroit, 24, 231
Conquest of Mexico, 86, 93–94, 96–97, 104, Detroit Industry (Rivera), 231
247, 252, 255, 270–271, 274, 319–320, 335 Deutscher, Isaac, 227, 229
Constructions, 7, 10, 130, 234, 323–324 Dialogues avec le Christ (Lemercier), 123,
Contemporáneos, 14, 75, 326 127, 142
Cortés, Hernán, 95–98, 253, 271, 274, 297, Diary of Frida Kahlo, The, 87–89
319–320, 322, 332 Díaz, Porfirio, 22, 101
Cosío Villegas, Daniel, 105–106 Diego Rivera (Wolfe), 232
Covarrubias, Miguel, 114, 244, 280–281, Don Quixote (Cervantes), 167–171, 188–189
283, 332 Dos Passos, John, 14

index 381
Durán, Diego, 250 Felix, María, 132
Dürer, Albrecht, 271 Fell, Claude, 92
Dziak, John, 224 Ferdinand of Tyrol (archduke), 270
Fesquet, Henri, 122
Echolalias (Heller-Roazen), 188 Figueroa, Gabriel, 132
Editorial Mundo Nuevo, 83 Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Schorske), 10, 153, 306
Education of Children, The (Adler), 68 Fliess, Wilhelm, 95, 189, 191, 237, 285, 319, 322
Eels, 179–187, 289, 297 Fluss, Gisela, 161–162, 164, 166–167, 177
Eels (Bertin), 186 Forcione, Alban, 170, 173
Egypt, 82–83, 86, 91, 95, 108, 193, 268, 277, Ford, Corey, 281
283, 293, 297–299, 321, 335 Ford, Henry, 24–26, 231
Eissler, Kurt, 162, 171, 179, 187 France, 5, 7, 38, 117, 149, 193, 195, 247, 288,
Eitingon, Leonid, 222, 224–227, 230 290, 310, 322, 325
Eitingon, Max, 224–226 Franz Josef (emperor), 263, 272, 288, 290,
Eitingons, The (Wilmers), 225 301, 310–312, 332
Eliot, T. S., 51 Frazer, James, 8, 249–253, 255–260, 262, 268,
Ellis, Havelock, 16, 20, 37 272, 274, 318
Emaús Psychoanalytic Center, 125, 128, 139, Freiberg, 160–161, 292
145–147, 150 French language, 14–15, 17, 32–34, 83, 158–
Embers (Beckett), 49 159, 163, 187–188, 216, 218, 250, 288
Emmerich, André, 244, 282 Freud, Anna, 131, 279, 325, 328
Engelman, Edmund, 263, 265, 268–269 Freud, Ernst, 279
England, 7, 160, 184, 288, 292 Freud, Martin, 279
English language, 14–15, 17, 83, 158–160, Freud, Sigmund
187–188, 194, 250, 313 “Beobachtung über Gestaltung und fei-
Enneads (Plotinus), 58 neren Bau der als Hoden beschriebenen
Eros of the Impossible (Etkind), 227 Lappenorgane des Aals,” 182
Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, 20, 57, 75 “breakfast-ship” or “castle by the sea”
“Española inglesa, La” (Cervantes), 170 dream, 8, 286–287, 289, 293, 296–297,
Essays (Montaigne), 285 299, 302–303, 306, 313–314, 321
Estatua de sal, La (Novo), 16, 39–41, 44–45, Civilization and Its Discontents, 49, 67, 106,
50 108, 261, 267
Estridentista movement, 14, 28–31 “Count Thun” or “revolutionary” dream,
Etkind, Alexander (Aleksandr), 5, 224–225, 286, 302–304, 306–307, 309, 312–314,
227–228 321–322
Examen, 58, 61, 72, 75 “The Expert Opinion in the Halsmann
Exemplary Novels. See Novelas ejemplares Case,” 210, 212
Exterminating Angel, The (dir. Buñuel), 114 The Future of an Illusion, 38, 130, 142, 146
Historiales clínicos II , 15
Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, The (Wolfe), The Interpretation of Dreams, 2, 6, 13, 17,
233 41–42, 50, 82, 95, 109, 188, 238, 285–288,
Federn, Paul, 64–65 296, 303–304, 306, 315, 320–321, 324

382
 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 16, Gide, André, 14, 51, 76
19–22 “Gitanilla, La” (Cervantes), 170
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Glick, Thomas F., 4, 5
249 Goeritz, Mathias, 136
Ma vie et la psychanalyse, 38 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 58, 169
Moses and Monotheism, 15, 73, 81–83, 85– Golden Age of Paraphernalia, The (Davies),
86, 90–98, 101–104, 106–108, 130, 188, 329
190, 193–196, 215, 232, 267, 277, 298, 331 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 249–253, 255,
“Mourning and Melancholia,” 104, 107 257, 258, 262
“On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Goldwyn, Samuel, 279
Movement,” 66, 200, 245 Gómez Robleda, José, 216, 218, 219, 221
“Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of González de la Garza, Mauricio, 129–130,
Fact in Legal Proceedings,” 210, 218 134, 141
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 15, 82, Gordon, R. G., 37
188, 322 Gorriti, Fernando, 200
“self-dissection” dream, 8, 286, 314–322 Götter im Exil, Die (Heine), 257
“Some Character-Types Met with in Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de, 291
Psycho-Analytic Work,” 210–211 GPU, 222, 224
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 6, 9, Greece, 7, 69, 237, 238, 263
16, 18, 35–37, 144, 148, 188, 203–204, 238 Greek language, 158, 160–161, 187
Totem and Taboo, 67, 73, 95, 108, 222, 249, Grinberg, León, 170–171
252, 258–263, 267, 274 Grinstein, Alexander, 179, 306–307, 312,
Über Coca, 246 316
“The Uncanny,” 257 Grosskurth, Phyllis, 164
“Wild Psychoanalysis,” 137, 141, 226, 281 Guerrero, 244
Freud and the Non-European (Said), 108
Freud at His Desk (Pollak), 264 Haggard, Henry Rider, 315–322
Freud Museum, London, 1, 9, 199, 240–242, Halieutia, 184
245, 264, 279, 299–301 Halsmann case, 210, 212–214, 220
Freud’s Self-Analysis (Anzieu), 287 Hamilton, James, 179
Fromm, Erich, 3–4, 112 Hannibal, 297
Hapsburgs, 6, 8, 153, 190, 270–272, 274, 288,
Gable, Clark, 281 290–292, 297, 299, 301–303, 307, 310, 313,
Gamwell, Lynn, 238 321, 332
García Huerta, José, 145–146 Harlow, Jean, 279–281
Garro, Elena, 326, 328 Hasenauer, Carl, 270
Gay, Peter, 285, 306, 310 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 247, 249, 335
Geistigkeit, 9, 82, 90, 98–103, 107, 193, 195 Havana, 308
German language, 6, 14, 17, 81, 83, 93, 158– Hay, Eduardo, 326
162, 166–169, 177, 189–190, 208, 250, 256, Heart of the World (Haggard), 316–321
308, 335 Heine, Heinrich, 8, 249–252, 253–261, 268,
Germany, 100, 160, 247, 283, 325, 328 272, 274, 318, 335

index 383
Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 188 Jelliffe, Smith Ely, 16
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 39–40, 75 Jones, Ernest, 162, 168, 190, 325
Henry VI (king of England), 312–313 Journal psychanalytique d’une petite fille
Henry VI (Shakespeare), 312 (anonymous), 38
Hernández, Víctor, 171 Joven, El (Novo), 16, 37
Herodotus, 298 Juana Inés de la Cruz, 26, 98, 105–106, 151
Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio de, 250 Juárez, Benito, 291, 310, 312
Hidalgo, Miguel, 97, 231 Juarros, César, 38
Hinterberger, Heinrich, 200 Judaism, 81, 83, 85, 94–95, 99–100, 106–108,
Hipótesis (Ramos), 61, 69 262, 277
Histeria, La (Kretschmer), 38 Jung, Carl, 110, 316
History of Animals (Aristotle), 182 Junker, Carl, 290
Hitler, Adolf, 86, 184, 231
Hochstetter, Ferdinand von, 270 Kahlo, Frida, 5, 9, 83–92, 94, 98, 102–103,
Homer, 105, 206, 256 107, 109, 114, 148, 215, 223, 231, 233–234,
Horizontes de la psicoanálisis, Los (Juarros), 38 326, 328
Hugo, Victor, 291 Kahlo, Guillermo, 90
Huitzilopochtli, 234, 250, 252–257, 268, 270, Kama Sutra, 195
272, 274, 335 Kaplan, Janet A., 114
Human sacrifice, 2, 177, 243, 246, 248–252, Kaufmann, Walter, 68
254–263, 268, 274, 319–320, 332, 335 King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 316
Kircher, Athanasius, 275–276, 297
Ichthyosaurus, 162–164, 187 “Kneeling figure from West Mexico,” 1, 239,
Illich, Ivan, 119, 128–129 241, 243
Incas, 239, 244, 246, 266, 275–276 Krauze, Enrique, 194
India, 151, 193–195 Kretschmer, Ernst, 38
Indian Art of Mexico and Central America Kristeva, Julia, 38, 49, 220
(Covarrubias), 281 Kunsthistorisches Museum. See Museum of
Indología (Vasconcelos), 58 Art History, Vienna
Inferno (Dante), 39 Kupka, Josef, 212
In Light of India. See Vislumbres de la India Kutepov, Alexander, 224
International Psycho-Analytical Association
(IPA), 3, 224–225 Labyrinth of Solitude, The (Paz), 7, 70, 72,
In the Beginning Was Love (Kristeva), 38 92–105, 107–108, 148–150, 193–194
Irwin, Robert McKee, 9 Lacroma, 290, 332
Islam, 85, 194, 262 Laeken, 292
Italian language, 159–160, 180, 188 Lágrimas (Caballero), 308–313
Italy, 7, 179–180, 190, 237, 288, 310, 316, 322 Langer, Marie, 4
Latin, 145, 158, 160, 187
Jacson, Frank. See Mercader, Ramón Latin America, 4, 15, 157, 188, 199, 200–201,
Jalisco, 243 245, 309, 313, 322, 331
Jefferson, Thomas, 231 Laurentin, René, 122

384
Lear, Jonathan, 60 Marín, Juan, 200
Lectures on the Religions of the Semites Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 13, 23, 31, 45
(Smith), 249, 254 Marriage of Figaro, The (Beaumarchais),
Lehmann, Walter, 247 307, 322
Leipzig, 159, 167–168, 176, 308 Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel, 108
Lemercier, Gregorio, 7, 108, 117–120, 122– Marx, Karl, 3, 5, 14, 86, 105, 120, 148, 150–151,
130, 132, 134–136, 139–151, 153 219, 226–230, 231–234, 326, 328
Leñero, Vicente, 123, 125, 127–129, 132, 141 Marx Brothers, 24
Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), 86, 227, 231 Masculine protest, 64–66
Leonardo da Vinci, 37 Masséna, André, 297
Leopold of Belgium, 290–291 Masterpieces of Primitive Art (Newton), 283
Levine, Isaac Don, 218, 221, 227 Maximilian von Hapsburg (archduke), 8, 20,
Lewis, Oscar, 127 153, 270, 272, 274, 288, 290–299, 301–303,
Libido, 15–16, 37, 40, 59–60, 64–65, 73, 124, 307, 310–314, 317, 319–323, 332, 335, 337
184, 230 Maya, 85, 95, 239, 243, 272
Library of Congress, 9, 158, 166, 180–181, McGrath, William J., 169, 171, 179
183, 185, 210, 280 Médioni, Gilbert, 243
Lincoln, Abraham, 231 Melancholia, 7, 62, 103–107, 308
Literature and Revolution (Trotsky), 228 Memoirs (David Rockefeller), 283
Lizalde, Enrique, 132 Memories That Smell Like Gasoline
Löffler, Dr., 210–211 (Wojnarowicz), 43
Lombardy, 288 Méndez Arceo, Sergio, 119–120, 124,
Lombroso, Cesare, 201 128–130
Lomnitz, Claudio, 69 Mercader, Ramón, 8, 215–227, 230
London, 1–2, 8–9, 14, 23, 40, 82, 93, 131, Merton, Thomas, 122
199–200, 215, 232, 238, 240–241, 245, 247, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
264, 281, 299–301, 328 85, 281, 283
López y Ballesteros, Luis, 15, 83, 188 Mexican Masculinities (Irwin), 9
Louvain, 118 Mexicanness, 3, 4, 6–7, 57–58, 61, 66–67,
Lumholtz, Carl, 250 73–74, 76, 93, 96, 112
Mexicano, El (Ramírez), 3
Maccoby, Michael, 3 Mexican Revolution, 2, 6, 14, 20, 51, 57–58,
Madero, Francisco, 44, 231 75, 101, 127, 199, 243
Madrid, 6, 15, 18–19, 21–22, 160, 201, 221 Mexico City, 1–4, 9, 14, 15, 20, 23, 28, 31,
Malaise, 95, 103, 106–107 34–37, 39–41, 43–46, 51, 53–55, 57, 75–
Malinche, La (Doña Marina), 96–98 78, 103, 109, 111, 113, 114, 119–120, 125, 127,
Man at the Crossroads (Rivera), 231 130, 133, 136, 140, 145, 199, 201, 215–216,
Manet, Édouard, 291 219–220, 223, 230, 232, 239, 272, 283, 291,
“Manifesto of Surrealism” (Breton), 5, 13, 109 298, 310, 312, 325, 326–328
Maples Arce, Manuel, 29, 45 México profundo (Bonfil Batalla), 144
Mariátegui, José Carlos, 14, 108 Mezcala, 1, 8, 239, 242, 244, 247, 270, 281–
Marie, A., 37 283, 332

index 385
Michelangelo Buonarroti, 37 Museum of Natural History, Vienna, 247,
Michoacán, 57 263, 266–267, 270–271, 274–275, 297
Miller, Evgeny Karlovich, 224–225 Museum of Primitive Art, New York, 283
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Mussolini, Benito, 231
63 My Grandparents, My Parents and I (Kahlo),
Miramare, 288–290, 293–299, 302–303, 91
320–322, 332
Mistral, Gabriela, 28 Nachträge zu den Xenien (Schiller), 293
Moche, 239, 243, 245–246, 268–269, 275 Nahuatl, 250
Moctezuma, 247, 253, 270–272, 274, 332, Napoleon III (emperor), 272, 290–292, 298,
335, 337 311, 328
Modotti, Tina, 231 National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico
Molnar, Michael, 199–200 City, 103
Monasterio de los buitres, El (dir. Villar), Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 184
132–133 Naturhistorisches Museum. See Museum of
Monkey Grammarian, The (Paz), 193, 195 Natural History, Vienna
Monólogo de Santa María (Capetillo), 134 Nayarit, 8, 243
Monsiváis, Carlos, 9, 39–40 Nervo, Amado, 26
Montaigne, Michel de, 285 Neue Freie Presse, 63, 287, 292, 335
Mont César Abbey, Louvain, 118 Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 178
Monterrey, 134 Neuroses, 3, 6–7, 15–17, 35–36, 48–49, 51, 57,
Montezuma. See Moctezuma 62–66, 68–71, 73, 78, 98, 125, 139, 142, 153,
Montezuma (Spengler), 247 202–203, 207, 230
Montezuma’s Daughter (Haggard), 317 Neurotic Constitution, The (Adler), 65
Moody, Helen Wills, 232 Neurotic Personality, The (Gordon), 37
Moore, Henry, 244 New Delhi, 151, 193
Morelos, José María, 231 New York City, 14, 23, 150, 200, 244, 265,
Mornard, Jacques. See Mercader, Ramón 269, 281–283, 287, 303
Morse, Samuel, 232 New York State Psychiatric Institute, 200
Moscow, 67–68, 220, 224 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 67, 120, 189–190
Moses, 81–83, 85, 90–91, 95–97, 106, 108, Novelas ejemplares (Cervantes), 159, 169, 175,
274, 277, 297 177, 191, 308
Moses (Kahlo), 83–86, 90, 92, 98, 102–103, Novo, Salvador, 5–7, 9, 13–51, 53, 55, 57–60,
233–234 75–76, 78, 112, 114, 117, 148, 151, 326
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 63, 307 Nozze di Figaro, Le (Mozart), 307
Munich State Library, 247 Nuttall, Zelia, 271
Museum für Völkerkunde. See Museum of
Ethnography, Vienna Ocampo, Victoria, 83
Museum of Art History, Vienna, 263, 266, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Kircher), 275–276
270, 275, 332 Oedipus complex, 9, 15, 40, 59, 65, 73, 95–
Museum of Ethnography, Vienna, 266, 271, 96, 98, 103, 107, 212–214, 220, 222, 238,
332, 337 258, 262, 306

386
O’Gorman, Juan, 76–77 Pound, Ezra, 51
Ollin, Nahui, 26 Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (Ar-
Olmec, 244, 283 taud), 49
Open Minded (Lear), 60 PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional),
Oppian of Corycus, 184 103
Organ inferiority, 63–64, 66 Proust, Marcel, 13, 14, 26, 76
Ortega y Gasset, José, 6, 14, 15 Psicoanálisis, La (Delgado), 245
Orvieto, 316, 318 Psychanalyse et les nouvelles méthodes
Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de, 250 d’investigation de l’inconscient, La
(Marie), 37
Paalen, Wolfgang, 109 Puebla, 145–146, 310
Pabst, G. W., 13, 91 Pueblo Rechazado (Leñero), 125, 127, 129, 132
Padre Prior (González de la Garza), 129–130,
132, 134–135 Querétaro, 153, 291–292, 317
Pankejeff, Sergei, 245 Quevedo, Gustavo, 4, 120–121, 129–130, 147
Parapraxes, 307, 321–323 Quintanilla, Luis, 26, 28–31
Paris, 14, 20, 23, 93, 100, 109, 123, 221, 224, Quiroz Cuarón, Alfonso, 216, 218–219,
252 221–224, 226–227
Parres, Ramón, 3
Pastiches et mélanges (Proust), 26 Radek, Karl, 228
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 228–229 Radio, 23, 45–51
Paz, Octavio, 5–7, 9, 37, 58, 70, 72, 74, 83, Radó, Sándor, 224
92–108, 112, 114, 117, 148–151, 193–195, Ramírez, Santiago, 3–4, 112, 134
276, 326, 328 Ramírez Vázquez, Pedro, 136
Perfil del hombre y la cultura en México Ramón Beltrán, Juan, 200
(Ramos), 58, 69, 72, 76, 149 Ramos, Samuel, 5–7, 57–63, 65–74, 75–78,
Peru, 188, 239–240, 246, 262, 277, 331 93, 96, 108, 117, 149, 151, 328
Perversions, 16–17, 35–36, 112, 131 Rawson, Claude, 256
Pinto, Marie-Thérèse, 243 Raza cósmica, La (Vasconcelos), 58
Platinum Blonde, 279 Règle du jeu, La (dir. Renoir), 248
Plato, 37, 58–60, 69, 105 Reinisch, Simon Leo, 298–302
Plevitskaya, Nadezhda Vasilievna, 225 Renoir, Jean, 248
Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), Return of Maximilian to Miramare, The
184 (anonymous), 293, 295, 303
Plotinus, 58 Revista de Occidente, 6, 15
Plotkin, Mariano Ben, 5 Rey de Castro, Álvaro, 245
Pollak, Max, 263–264 Reyes, Alfonso, 14, 93, 100
Portrait of Caridad Mercader (Rivera), 223 Riley, E. C., 171
Portrait of Neferúnico (Kahlo), 86, 88, 90–91 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 67
Portrait of Samuel Ramos (O’Gorman), 77 Rimbaud, Arthur, 277
Posada Freud, 153 Río, Caridad del, 222–224
Posdata (Paz), 194 Rivas Mercado, Antonieta, 57, 326

index 387
Rivera, Diego, 9, 14, 58, 76, 215, 222–223, She (Haggard), 315–317
231–234, 243, 328 Sieber, Harry, 175
Rivera Vázquez, Manuel, 220 Sigmund Freud (Delgado), 245
Rockefeller, David, 283 Sigmund Freud and Art (Gamwell), 238
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 281 Sigmund Freud and Jean Harlow (Covarru-
Rockefeller, Nelson, 281, 283 bias), 280
Rodríguez, Juan Francisco, 170–171 “Sigmund Freud coleccionista,” 1
Rodríguez Lozano, Manuel, 53–55, 76 Silberstein, Eduard, 158–160, 162, 164–172,
Rolland, Romain, 189 175–183, 185–189, 190–192, 301–302,
Romania, 160, 178 307–309
Romanzero (Heine), 249, 252, 257–258 Silberstein, Pauline, 178–179
Romerovargas Yturbe, Ignacio, 118, 130 Silent Life, The (Merton), 122
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 325, 328 Sinnlichkeit, 98, 101–102, 195
Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 5 Smith, Robertson, 8, 249, 254, 274, 318
Royal Zoological Station, Trieste, 180, 182, 297 Social Character in a Mexican Village
Russia, 2, 5, 68, 228 (Fromm and Maccoby), 3
Russian Revolution, 68, 225, 228 Society for Free Psychoanalytic Investiga-
tion, 65
Sahagún, Bernardino de, 250 Solferino, 310
Said, Edward, 10, 83, 85, 93–94, 108, 277, 317 Solitude, 94, 98–99, 101–107, 149–150
Salomé, Lou Andreas, 67 Sonora, 118
Salvador, Humberto, 200 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la
San Ildefonso (Antiguo Colegio), 1, 8, 10 fe (Paz), 151
Santa María Ahuacatitlán, 119 Soviet Union, 3, 220, 222, 224
Santa María de la Resurrección (monastery), Spain, 13, 15, 37, 62, 74, 83, 192, 199–201, 262,
119, 121, 124, 127, 129–130, 132, 134, 136, 271, 287, 292, 308–309, 314, 325
141–142, 145, 147–148, 151 Spanish American War, 287, 303, 306
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 101 Spanish Civil War, 83, 109, 222
Scheffel, Joseph Victor von, 162 Spanish language, 2, 6, 8, 15, 17, 65, 72, 83, 90,
Schiller, Friedrich von, 293 123, 157–163, 165–167, 169–170, 176–177,
Schliemann, Heinrich, 247 187–192, 199–200, 208, 245–246, 271,
Schorske, Carl, 10, 95, 102, 306, 310, 312 307–309, 313–314, 331, 337
Schumann, Robert, 63 Spengler, Oswald, 247
Schwartz, Stephen, 224 Stalin, Joseph, 86, 216, 222, 224–227, 230,
Second Vatican Council, 120, 122, 141 231, 281
Secrets of a Soul (dir. Pabst), 13 Steiner, Maxim, 65
Sedova, Natalia, 328 Stekel, Wilhelm, 65
Seeler, Eduard, 250, 335 Stucken, Eduard, 247, 249, 335
Self-Portrait with Monkey (Kahlo), 90 Suárez, Luis, 128, 129, 141
Serrano, Irma, 132 Su hermano Neferdós (Kahlo), 89
Serrou, Robert, 118, 119, 121 Surrealism, 5, 13, 109
Shakespeare, William, 312 Suzuki, D. T., 3

388
Swift, Graham, 184 283, 292–293, 297, 301–304, 306, 312, 325,
Symposium (Plato), 58, 60 328, 331, 335–337
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 63, 65, 66, 73
Taaffe, Eduard (count), 307, 312, 314 Villa, Francisco, 39, 231
Taxi, El (Rodríguez Lozano), 53–55 Villar, Francisco del, 132–133, 141
Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 324 Villaurrutia, Xavier, 16, 20, 22, 39, 326, 328
Teotihuacan, 243 Visit to the Plastic Surgeon (Varo), 112–114
Theiler, Pauline. See Silberstein, Pauline Vislumbres de la India (Paz), 193, 195
Theresa of Bavaria (princess), 335 “Vitzliputzli” (Heine), 252–257, 268, 272,
Thun-Hohenstein, Franz Anton von (count, 274, 335. See also Huitzilopochtli
prime minister), 304, 306–307, 310, 321 Votivkirche, Vienna, 312, 332–337
Thun-Hohenstein, Franz von (count, mili- Vranich, S. B., 165, 171
tary officer), 310–311, 314
Thun-Hohenstein, Guido von (count), Wandsbek, 178
311–312, 314 War of the Worlds, The (Welles), 49
Tlatelolco, 127 Wars of the Roses, 312
Toltec, 283 Washington, George, 231
Torquemada, Juan de, 250 Waterland (Swift), 184
Torreón, 32, 39 Weiße Heiland, Der (Hauptmann), 247, 335
Torres Bodet, Jaime, 39 Weißen Götter, Die (Stucken), 247, 335
Townsend, Richard, 243, 244 Welles, Orson, 49
Tramini, Marie-José, 193, 196 West Mexico, 1, 239, 241–244, 247, 250, 332
Trieste, 180–182, 185, 187, 288, 290, 297, 302 What Life Should Mean to You (Adler), 68
Trotsky, Leon, 5, 8, 14, 63, 215–222, 224–230, Wilde, Oscar, 6, 14
231, 234, 325–326, 328 Wilmers, Mary-Kay, 225
Wilson, Woodrow, 231
Uhle, Max, 239 Wojnarowicz, David, 43
Ulises, 57, 75 Wolfe, Bertram, 232–234
United States, 37, 38, 144, 276, 287, 290, 311, Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (Varo),
317, 328 110–112, 114, 150
Universal Ilustrado, El, 14, 15, 37, 51 World War I (Great War), 68, 224, 249, 261
World War II, 82, 100, 246
Valladolid, 169, 173–174 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 231
Varo, Remedios, 9, 109–114, 150–151
Vasconcelos, José, 28, 58, 206, 231 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 83
“Vase depicting a dignitary,” 239–240
Vatican, 119–120, 122, 124, 128, 150, 299 Zapata, Emiliano, 231
Vega, Garcilaso de la, 26 Zea, Leopoldo, 58
Veracruz, 290, 293, 310 Zitácuaro, 57, 75
Vienna, 2, 8, 10, 14, 41, 63, 65, 68, 153, 158– Zmud, Frida, 4, 120–121, 123, 130, 136,
159, 168, 178, 180, 200, 215, 225, 238, 245– 139–141, 147
246, 263, 265–267, 269, 271–272, 274, 281, Zweig, Arnold, 189

index 389
P L AT E 1
Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, El taxi (1924). Courtesy Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City.
P L AT E 2
Frida Kahlo, Moses, 1945. Oil on canvas, 60 × 75.6 cm. Private collection, Houston. © Banco
de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society
(ars).
P L AT E 3
Remedios Varo, Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (1960). Courtesy Alexandra Gruen,
Mexico City.
P L AT E 4
Remedios Varo, Visit to the Plastic Surgeon (1960). Courtesy Alexandra Gruen, Mexico City.
P L AT E 5
Freud’s drawing of an eel in a letter to Eduard Silberstein, April 5, 1876. © Sigmund Freud
Copyrights. Image courtesy Library of Congress.
P L AT E 6
Anthropomorphic idol. Mezcala, West Mexico, 12th–15th centuries ce. Green slate,
21.4 × 5.6 cm. Freud Museum, Vienna.
P L AT E 7
Miguel Covarrubias, “Sigmund Freud and Jean Harlow,” Vanity Fair (May 1935): 29. Courtesy
Library of Congress. © María Elena Rico Covarrubias.
P L AT E 8
Cesare Dell’Acqua, The Departure of Maximilian and Charlotte from Miramare to Mexico,
1866. Courtesy Castello di Miramare, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali—
Soprintendenza per i Beni Storici, Artistici ed Etnoantropologici del Friuli-Venezia Giulia.