Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels
a true ‘shift’ in Marx’s thinking, which opens up a whole new perspective for the analysis of the conflicted problem of the relations between the class struggle and the national liberation struggle, that genuine punctum dolens in the entire history of the socialist movement.”9 Henceforth, Marx not only explicitly rejects the interpretation that would turn his analysis of capitalist development into a universal philosophy of history, applicable to any and all national situations; he also acknowledges the possibility that in so-called backward, dependent or colonial countries socialism may come about through a retrieval of pre-capitalist forms of communitarian production in superior conditions. If, in spite of this paradigm shift, provoked by his reflection on the supposed backwardness of cases such as Ireland or Russia, Marx is still unable to settle his accounts with Latin America by critically re-evaluating the revolutionary role of peripheral countries, this continued inability would be due, according to Aricó, to the stubborn persistence of Marx’s anti-Bonapartist bias and his unwitting fidelity to the legacy of Hegel’s theory of civil society and the state.
In his painstaking study of Marx’s complete oeuvre from the point of view of the national question in peripheral countries, On Hidden Demons and Revolutionary Moments: Marx and Social Revolution in the Extremities of the Capitalist Body, García Linera nevertheless raises two objections to Aricó’s interpretation. First, the Bolivian theorist accuses his Argentine comrade, exiled in Mexico, of proceeding too hastily to accept the absence of a massive or even national-popular capacity for rebellion in Latin America. According to García Linera, Marx himself never ceases to insist, against his allegedly regressive Hegelian baggage, on the importance of mass action, whereas Aricó would somehow be seduced by the autonomy of the political and the direct revolutionary potential of the state. The “blindness” or “incomprehension” of Marx toward Latin America, then, would be due to the lack of historical sources and reliable studies on the indigenous rebellions that had shaken the region since at least the end of the eighteenth century. “This is the decisive factor. In the characteristics of the masses in movement and as a force, their vitality, their national spirit, and so on, there lay the other components that Aricó does not take into account but that for Marx are the decisive ones for the national formation of the people,” affirms Linera. “There exists no known text from Marx in which he tackles this matter, but it is not difficult to suppose that this is because he did not find any at the time of his setting his eyes on America.”10 The missed encounter between Marx and Latin America, therefore, would be due not to the lingering presence of Hegelianisms so much as to the fact that “this energy of the masses did not come into being as a generalized movement (at least not in South America); it was for the most part absent in the years considered by Marx’s reflections.”11 In other words, it would be Aricó, not Marx, who misjudges the Latin American reality due to a blinding adherence to Hegel.
In fact, García Linera goes so far as to suggest that the supposed “not-seeing” on the part of Marx is the result of a “wanting-to-see” on the part of his most famous and prolific interpreter from Argentina: “The terrain on which Aricó places us is not that of the reality or that of Marx’s tools for understanding this reality, but rather the reality that Aricó believes it to be and the tools that Aricó believes to be those of Marx.”12 In the final analysis, however, even for García Linera it cannot be a matter of denying the unfortunate missed encounter, or desencuentro, between Marx and Latin America. To the contrary, in a recent lecture titled “Marxismo e indianismo” (“Marxism and Indigenism”), García Linera in turn speaks himself of a desencuentro between two revolutionary logics—the Marxist and the indigenist—before providing an overview of the different factors that hampered their finding a middle ground throughout most of the twentieth century, all the way to the tentative promise of a possible re-encounter among a small fraction of indigenous intellectuals in the last decade, especially in the Andean region: “Curiously, these small groups of critical Marxists with the utmost reflective care have come to accompany, register, and disseminate the new cycle of the indigenist horizon, inaugurating the possibility of a space of communication and mutual enrichment between indigenisms and Marxisms that will probably be the most important emancipatory concepts of society in twenty-first-century Bolivia.”13
Following Aricó’s example in the case of Marx, we could elaborate a similar critique of the missed encounter between Freud and Latin America. Georges Politzer, in his 1928 Critique of the Foundations of Psychology—a work that would take three-quarters of a century to be translated into English but that was widely read and discussed in Spanish-speaking countries—already tried to unmask some of these prejudices. Politzer thus criticizes Freud’s “fixism,” which tends to give his thought an idealist-metaphysical rather than a concrete-historical bent. As the Argentine psychoanalyst José Bleger concludes after giving an overview of Politzer’s writings on Freud,
We can observe two fundamental limitations: the first is that the key in the development of normal and pathological behavior turns out to be libidinal fixations and in this way the emphasis is put on the repetitive element, so that evolution becomes an epigenesis; the second limitation is a consequence of abstraction: to the extent that psychoanalytic theory becomes more abstract and replaces human realities with forces, entities, instances, the criterion of evolution becomes lost, in favor of a “fixism” of metaphysical allure.14
This might begin to account for some of Freud’s more glaring blindnesses with regard to the world outside of Western Europe, particularly the New World.
In fact, even if he saw himself as the Columbus of the unconscious, the founder of psychoanalysis never refers specifically to the realities of Latin America—at least not beyond his personal and anthropological interest in pre-Hispanic artifacts, and especially his fascination with the culture of the Bolivian coca leaf. There are, to be sure, a number of eyebrow-raising assertions similar to what Marx or Engels have to say early on about Mexicans, as when Freud refers metaphorically to the unconscious, in his paper of the same title from 1915, by speaking of the mind’s “aboriginal population”—or again, elsewhere, of the “dark continents.”15 And in Freud’s case, too, we could try to systematize the underlying prejudices, aside from a certain metaphysical fixity of concepts, which lead to such affirmations: the universalist trend of his interpretation of evolution, with identical stages for all of humanity; the correspondence between the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic aspects of development, which leads to the utilization of metaphors of primitivism above all with reference to neurosis and the early stages of infanthood, as in his 1913 text Totem and Taboo, significantly subtitled Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics; and the Lamarckian faith in the possibility of the hereditary transmission of acquired traits, which likewise renders superfluous the study of other or earlier cultures beyond the confines of modern Western Europe. “These assumptions,” as Celia Brickman notes, “did not invalidate the potential of psychoanalysis, but their presence lent credence to readings of psychoanalysis that could perpetuate and seemingly legitimate colonialist representations of primitivity with their associated racist implications, in much the same way that psychoanalytic representations of femininity were able to be enlisted for some time as an ally in the subordination of women.”16
And yet, we might as well invert the conclusion to be drawn from Freud’s prejudices. The fixed, timeless, and phylogenetically inherited nature of the unconscious, even while being modeled upon evolutionary schemes of development from, and regression to, primitivism, could thus be read as a radical subversion of the superiority of the West: “Supposedly primitive behaviors were seen to lurk not only in the pathological and in the past, but in the everyday customs and in the great cultural institutions of modern European civilized public and private life,” Brickman is quick to add. “In the end, we are all more or less neurotic; we are all more or less primitive; we are all saurians among the horsetails.”17 Or, to make the same point in the words of Ana, the sickly artist-character from José Martí’s novel Lucía Jerez: “Of wild beasts I know two kinds: one dresses in skins, devours animals, and walks on claws; the other dresses in elegant suits, eats animals and souls, and walks with a walking stick or umbrella. We are nothing more than reformed beasts.”18 Similarly, Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams; “What once dominated waking life, when the mind was still young and incompetent, seems now to have been banished into the night—just as the primitive weapons, the bows and arrows, that have been abandoned by adult