The quality of a book's production can often be an ambiguous clue to its content. On the one hand, high production values can be a sign of the publisher's faith in the book's quality (and the advertisement thereof). On the other, there can be a mismatch between exchange value and
use value: the surface offsets the worth of the interior, or at the least displaces the object of enjoyment. The idea of the coffee table book, an object of conspicuous display rather than intellectual worth is the locus classicus of the latter. Rubén Gallo's sumptuous volume, handsomely produced by MIT Press seems to instance both possibilities. The very luxuriousness of its paper, images and design proclaim an importance for it that perhaps it only intermittently achieves, even as it provides incidental pleasures along the way, notably in its reproduction of classic examples of Mexican art. The book is a wonderful thing, shimmering and beautiful to behold and handle.
Subtitled ‘Freud in Mexico/Freud's Mexico’ in its first part, the book traces connections between a certain cultural production in Mexico in the middle decades of the twentieth century and the circulation of psychoanalysis, and, in the second part, examines the influence of Mexico (or ideas and objects of and from Mexico) on Freud. Claiming an importance for this traffic between psychoanalysis and Mexico that has been overlooked, Gallo's book offers to shift our received opinions of doctrine and country. This serious endeavour—or series of efforts, since the objects of investigation are so varied—must be assessed as variably successful. Its problem is that the quality of thought or reflection invested in these objects is itself variable, and the methods the author utilises are of differing calibre.
A first question must be: what makes the thesis of an important set of connections between Freud and Mexico plausible? After all, Mexico is not known for being a stronghold of psychoanalytic thought, unlike, say, Argentina, where the claim that Buenos Aires has more Lacanian analysts than Paris is now a stock trope, or Brazil, whose growing influence in Latin American analysis has yet to find its chronicler. The answer is two-fold and this marks the division of the book into its two halves. Gallo examines how Freud's ideas arrived in Mexico in mid-20th century, not amongst what we might nowadays call mental health practitioners or doctors, but amongst cultural figures, both marginal and mainstream, who used Freud for their own ends and with differing degrees of fidelity. The ‘wilds’ of psychoanalysis of the subtitle are these regions of cultural critique and production that are fertilised or perhaps ordered and cultivated by Freud's ideas. The reverse influence—Mexico in Freud—offers a rather different form of interpretative work. Whilst
in his discussion of the Mexicans, Gallo offers us an often innovative and revelatory cultural history, in his discussion of Freud he sets out to give us a novel view of Freud himself, by reading Freud's own texts, or various paratexts, which he submits to a process of free and constrained association. What we hardly get in either part is a sense of innovation within psychoanalysis, or theoretical development within a theory of cultural exchange. Though the whole is in some sense an exercise in transculturation, the theoretical displacement such an engagement might work is avoided.
So, what exactly does this following of threads of connection do to our understanding of Freud and the various figures yoked into collocation? On the one hand there seems to be a straightforward discussion of Freud as a critical resource for reflection in Mexico. Here the names Santiago Novo (the gay writer), Samuel Ramos (the cultural critic) and Grégoire Lemercier (the French monk domiciled in Mexico and director of an innovative therapeutic community in the 1960s) are undoubtedly unfamiliar to Anglophone readers and the outline of the impact of versions of psychoanalysis on their thought and practice is a useful recovery of influence. The impact of Freudian ideas on Octavio Paz and Frida Kahlo is much better known, though it is interesting to see Moses and Monotheism given pride of place, and here perhaps we can see how Gallo's method moulds influence even as it discovers it.
Octavio Paz's classic critique of the Mexican psyche The Labyrinth of Solitude and even more so its revisiting in The Critique of the Pyramid written after the massacre of student demonstrators in Tlatelolco in Mexico City, does bear a kinship to Freud's final cultural history, but not quite the seemingly trivial analogies of date of composition and ‘exile’: Paz was a cultural bureaucrat on secondment abroad rather than an exile from political tyranny. As Gallo points out it is the mode of cultural transfer characterising Mexican history that leans on Freud: the perpetuation of trauma inaugurated by the Conquest. This is rewritten by Gallo to coincide with Freud's ‘memory traces’ described in Moses; surely what Paz produces is a strange Catholic translation of Freud, where historical violation becomes a version of original sin. Oedipus is depsychoanalysed in Paz's rewriting, not merely by shifting the ‘emphasis from father to mother’ but by removing the individual recapitulation of the struggle of the child over the mother. Rather a
fatal inscription of primal transgression is inherited regardless of any ontogenetic conflict. So, whilst Paz uses Freud, the differences produced by the movement are more profound than Gallo allows, even as he marks out the ways in which Paz transforms his borrowed ideas from Moses. One can see this well as the idea of cultural inheritance is deepened and made even more of a fatality in Critique of the Pyramid. By this stage it is no longer the trauma of conquest which is repeated, producing the Mexican as orphan (necessarily illegitimate) but the violence of sacrifice: the Aztec ritual of blood-letting that maintained the power of sun, god and state is translated into the murder of the students by an authoritarian state. The pathologising of the Mexican, which finds legitimacy in a version of psychoanalysis become theology (and here Freud becomes the European arbiter of civilisation, the last in a long line of normative figures transported to Latin America) is further compounded by an invocation of a mythic version of cultural destiny.
The point is that all Mexicans discussed are much more cavalier with Freud than the solemn tracings of influence might suggest. Novo, again pace Gallo's claims for his anticipating Kristeva, reads Freud in the manner of an intellectual magpie; Ramos barely uses Freud but is much more impressed by Adler, whose inferiority complex fits better with Ramos's own pathologising cultural critique of mexicanidad (Mexicanness) and which is of course the more proximate template for Paz's Labyrinth. Kahlo's eclecticism and oneiric homogenising of represented influence owes more to a surrealist redaction of Freud and Kahlo's own self-mythification than to classic psychoanalysis. But this is surely to the Mexicans' credit: the ‘wilds’ of analysis are here the mountains and selvas of an imaginary geography marked by spectacular and specular difference. A figure who Gallo doesn't mention is Rufino Tamayo, a painter from the same generation as Kahlo and Rivera, whose imagery is in part worked through a productive engagement with psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious and reflections on the primitive, as well as the technical advances of European modernisms. Here we can see a complex and self-conscious transculturation at work which bears investigation.
In ‘Freud's Mexico’ the book shifts gear, though Gallo's preferred mode of digressive capture is still in evidence. There is a chapter on Freud's use of Spanish in the correspondence with his adolescent
friend, Eduard Silberstein, which adds another link to Freud's homosocial history. There is an investigation into the Mexican books in Freud's library, which has a thriller-like element of surprise in the—uncanny is the only word here—connections between Freud, a Mexican judge and Trotsky's killer Ramón Mercader. This is great entertainment, though perhaps too delighted in its own perversity. An examination of the few Mesoamerican objects in Freud's collection of antiquities provides the occasion for another collocation of facts and speculations. But perhaps the most Freudian—and potentially the most interestingly revisionist—section is the re-reading of three of the dreams in the Interpretation to unveil what might be termed their colonial unconscious.
Here Gallo reads the ‘castle by the sea’, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘self dissection’ dreams in terms of the imperial link between Vienna and Mexico organised through the figure of Maximlian, the unfortunate Hapsburg who in 1864 was placed on the throne of a Mexico reconfigured as a French satrapy by Napoleon III and whose brutal end in front of a firing squad inaugurates a certain modernism in Manet's painting. In the first dream, for example, the castle by the sea is interpreted as Miramare, the place whence Maximilian left for Mexico: Maximilian's death ‘would certainly have left an impression’ on Freud and during his visit to Miramare he ‘would have seen a number of paintings depicting Maximilian's life’. These hypotheses allow Gallo to extend the identification that Freud makes in the dream between himself and Herr P, to include Maximilan himself. So Freud, on Gallo's reading, now identifies with Maximilian (and here we have a series of accidental resemblances, each of which might be a trait unaire, though it is the Hapsburg's scientific and antiquarian features that most capture Gallo) but also contradictorily wishes him dead (Herr P dies in the dream). So Gallo's question is: why should Freud want Maximilian dead? In Gallo's ‘comprehensive interpretation’, that is, critical speculation, since he must disagree with Freud and with later commentary, Maximilian is for Freud both a figure of positive identification in his Enlightenment moment and a figure of rejection in his political role as imperial relay. Gallo's reading of the two further ‘Mexican’ dreams follows a similar pattern.
But rather than disagreement, we may have here an interesting supplement of colonial power adding to Herr P as representative of domestic
domination: the imperial adventure overseas might be an element of over-determination within Freud's complex ambivalence towards his position as Jewish, marginal and liberal. What Gallo frustratingly fails to examine is Freud's persistent image of himself as a conquistador, which surely lies at the foundation of his Mexican connection. In this image, the ambivalences of Enlightenment itself are themselves encoded: knowledge as power, the unconscious as a primitive terrain to be civilised or at least illumined. Though Gallo returns to the theme of the Conquest (and of course its farcical repetition under Maximilan/Napoleon) in the reading of the third dream, Freud's ambivalence is about failure to be a conquistador, rather than failure through being one, a premonitory vision of which might be enacted in the Miramare dream of 1898, right at the beginning of his career.
Gallo's book ends with two day-dreams: the first wonders about what would have happened had Freud successfully emigrated to Mexico in 1938, an offer of refuge having been made by Mexico's progressive president Lázaro Cárdenas. A jeu d'esprit is darkened by the mention of Marie Bonaparte's extraordinary project of a Jewish state in Baja California. Gallo laughs this off with the idea that his book might thus have been called Freud in Baja. But isn't there a more disquieting echo and mélange of projects of Jewish reservations (Madagascar under the Nazis, the Russian Far East under Stalin), dispossession (US colonialism, settler cleansing in Palestine) and a repetition of the territorial seizure that founds Mexico itself? Gallo sees some darkness in his objects but prefers the light of surfaces and linkages, a potential failing that he names in a classic disavowal of criticism of his method of textual weaving with its articulation—‘perhaps some will find these interpretations over-speculative’—and the invocation of Freud himself: these are rather constructions, hard won from nearly absent evidence. For this reviewer, the problem is rather that Gallo doesn't go far—or deep—enough, always seeking the next new connection rather than pausing and reflecting. Perhaps it is this anxiety about shallowness and inadequacy that produces the will to accumulate, leading in turn to the very cornucopia of the book as object that makes it in the end so disappointing.