Mexico: In Psychoanalysis…

No one ignores the disrespect and justified suspicion of racism behind statements that presume to establish national psychologies and differential national characterologies. Anyone who has seriously pondered social and cultural phenomena knows that, from Wundt's Völkerpsychologie up to the present time, this field is beset with land mines, a slippery and dangerous terrain. Psychoanalysis has branded such attempts as generalizations without any value. Freud never committed such sins. Moreover, the Freudian idea of a universal unconscious, different from the Jungian collective unconscious, gives a purely epiphenomenal place to that which many hailed and raised as a culturalist banner. The term culturalist psychoanalysis borders on being an oxymoron, and the inconsequential statements it has generated are of as little interest to sociology as to the so-called Freudian science. If our purpose were to be indulgent, it would pertain to applied psychoanalysis—applied to a culture or to cultures—with a healthy dose of scepticism for anything going under that label. We know it, and we have argued the point elsewhere. It implies pulling out of the hat the rabbits we had previously put in it, or surprising ourselves with our own image after having surreptitiously introduced a mirror together with the object under study. These are the tricks of an unimaginative juggler. Psychoanalysis functions only within the discourse of the individual subject and its cognizance always falls on the differential traits of desire.

All the above was no hindrance for Lacan, who from time to time proffered loose sarcastic phrases, generally innuendos, sometimes funny but more often in bad taste, about the nature of Englishmen, Japanese, and Americans.

Everything that can be advanced in this disputable field is mere speculation, subject to revision and confirmation, to corrections coming from every single individual. Having said this, the fact remains that we approach the subject in analysis only by