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Gustavo Barcellos is a prominent Brazilian Jungian psychotherapist and analyst and an ardent admirer of the United States practitioner James Hillman, one of the great figures of archetypal psychology—to whom Barcellos renders homage throughout this collection of a dozen recent conference papers and essays. For the author the common thread is a notion of the soul: for the reader the main interest will lie in the author's exploration of culture, especially of his home country Brazil.
In a brief preface Barcellos explains that his essays are a sideline to more than twenty years of clinical work with patients—the writing is ‘an activity of the left hand’. He grants that the main, or sole, merit is his interest in the South of his country—the best metaphor he asserts for the Latin-American character of Brazil. The essays are thereby ‘niche writing’, not innovation in the mainstream of the discipline.
Since Barcellos writes in Portuguese he is accessible largely to those who may already have some knowledge of the context. An opening essay exalting bossa nova makes rather more of this musical form than is warranted. Some material on broader culture is of secondary value. In a discussion on Jung's own essays on literature, poetry and psychology, Barcellos canters through such familiar sources as Maurice Bowra, T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read and Virginia Woolf—with a leavening of references to Hillman and to Anthony Storr.
The pace and interest quicken in papers looking at specifically Brazilian experience. He has a provocative attempt at defining feminism through the paradoxical life of a legendary drag queen and criminal (reminiscent of France's Jean Genet), Joao Francisco dos Santos, known as Madame Satã (Satan)—from a 1930s film of Cecil B. De Mille. Dos Santos was born in 1900 in a family of 17 children and was in his time a transvestite, homosexual, murderer, and star of carnival, spending much of his life in prison and dying in 1976. But he also married and brought up six or s