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The six essays in this book aim at providing an alternative framework for the study of Spanish America's conflicted history. The author, a historian who has spent three years as a special student at the Psychoanalytic Center in New York City, applies a psychohistorical viewpoint to several aspects of Spanish American culture and political history: militarism, caudillism, machismo, middle-class mentality etc.
'Psychohistory' in Goldwert's book is basically the assumption that psychic conflict plays a special role in socio-political developments. In order to be able to think in terms of psychic conflict in history, the author had to resort to the usual analogy individual/society in which the former is taken as the model for the latter. But, as I shall briefly indicate, the use of this analogy and the ensuing determining power psychic conflict is made to have are not consistent throughout the book, there being two different ways in which this analogy operates.
In the first, more radical way, society as a whole is taken as an individual. As in ontogenetic development, a society's history cannot be understood in terms of Chronos ('mathematical time in which each unit is qualitatively identical') but it has to be thought of as the result of Karios, i.e. 'trauma time and the pregnant moment, those early crucial happenings in a civilization's history which overtake all ensuing developments'. Just as early trauma shapes the individual's destiny, Kairos is the crucial force determining a society's development and its future pathological characteristics. 'History-as-neurosis' is Goldwert's conception of historical development, according to which a society goes through the phases of 'childhood neurosis', 'latency' and 'return of the repressed'.
This psychohistorical model is deployed in the first two chapters where the 'pathology of Spanish America' is traced back to two kairotic events: the Conquest of Mexico in the sixteenth century and the overthrow of Spanish kingship