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This book is about the deep interior of the Latin American psyche and about the powerful emotional reactions elicited by the frequently constellated complexes of entire cultures that are clamouring to be heard. The book is written by a multiplicity of local authors, each one a practitioner in the front line of the field of mental health care in their respective countries. The authors are Jungian analysts or in analytic training. Each writer demonstrates an educated sense of geography, history, sociology and anthropology. This is another successful book that belongs to the Analytical Psychology and Contemporary Culture series edited by Jungian analyst, Thomas Singer.
The articles in this book are grouped according to each of the Latin American countries listed in the title. In spite of the implied complexities and multiplicities, this work manages to have a solid cohesiveness, not only of style but of content. The themes within each culture are linked with each other in what appears as a remarkably organized sequence. In addition, the addressed cultural complexes of every country link with each other in a variety of ways ultimately to form a long cultural chain of complexes that imprison vast areas of the Latin American psyche.
There is a common thread in these cultural complexes that emerged as a result of the brutal imposition of the culture by the conquerors and colonizers, mostly Spanish and Portuguese, but also others. Conquerors and colonizers, as noted by the authors, saw the natives as barbarians, denied their humanity and declared them uncivilized. In addition, the shadows of the ‘civilizers’ were projected on to the ‘natives’ who accepted and carried them with passivity, resignation, docility, and even at times with misplaced pride. There was no energy left to reject the projections or to enforce their withdrawal. This continues into contemporary times. From these attitudes, and the imposition of foreign cultural mores, a number of complexes have arisen with