You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This inspired and inspiring book traces the range of cultural effects Freud's writing has had on Mexico, a dynamic society, rapidly modernizing and attempting to shed the psychic effects of four centuries of colonial rule and a century of political and military intervention by the United States.
Freud's Mexican readers included the poets Salvador Novo and Octavio Paz, the philosopher Samuel Ramos, the jurist Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, and the Benedictine monk Gregorio Lemercier. Beautifully produced and illustrated with photographs of Novo's annotations to his copy of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Spanish-language books in Freud's library, Gallo has also included reproductions of works by Frida Kahlo, who portrayed Freud in her painting “Moses,” and Remedios Varo, whose analytic experience influenced portraits such as “Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst.”
Rubén Gallo is Director of the Program in Latin American Studies and Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. A previous work, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution was an equally well documented account of the way in which new forms of mass communication (particularly radio) and transportation (the automobile) were adopted by artists and poets as symbols of a cultural change emerging from the Mexican Revolution and an attempt to form an identity liberated from their colonial past.
Gallo's two books are linked both through their interest in how Mexican artists and writers addressed the question of cultural inheritance and transmission and also through the significance given to the Futurist poet Salvador Novo, whose reading of Freud Gallo characterizes as a self-analysis. The more recent work also attempts, as it's equivocal title suggests, to investigate the place of Mexico in Freud's life and thinking.
Gallo's introduction to Freud occurred via the seminar of Julia Joyaux, to whom the book is dedicated, and he also acknowledges the influenc