Mexico: A Linguistic Symptom

Can a psychoanalytic perspective shed light on Mexico's recent Indian revolt? Are psychoanalytic concepts useful tools for understanding the conflict in Chiapas, which has shaken the entire country to a degree far beyond the scope of the events themselves?

We must recognize the dangers attendant upon transferring psychoanalytic understanding of the human subject (the subject of the transference and the unconscious) to another object of understanding. When analysts write of social phenomena, they must recognize that analogies are useful only when differences are acknowledged, and an analyst's hypotheses about such phenomena must be checked against the findings of other social scientists. With this caveat, however, we can venture some hypotheses regarding the possible causes of the Chiapas events.

One way in which psychoanalysis might be able to offer some insight into these events is through its understanding of the human subject's self-division. No psychoanalyst can be surprised by the self-divisions and self-contradictions of any phenomena. This is the result not of some Hegelian reflex but rather of a practice that has as its object the human subject. Everyone is the subject of a splitting that is difficult to tolerate and even to admit.

The immediate defense against this splitting is to deny it and to act as if the division were not where it is—i.e., to act as though the split were not constitutive of the human subject as such but rather were capable of being surmounted by a unified agency of synthesis and control. From this denial results a discourse full of gaps, which both conceal the split and at the same time offer the possibility for recognizing it. This is the discourse of the ego, official discourse, which can be sustained for long periods, until something unexpected passes through it and attains the light of day. Such an event is experienced as a trauma; it is the return of the repressed, the sudden eruption of symptoms.

The traumatic events of the Chiapas c