Brazil and other Latin-American countries are mainly concerned with their own problems of economic and social development. They also worry about their political stability. However, they are but obscurely aware of the present world clash between Totalitarianism and Democracy, better known as the East-West conflict. In Brazil, for instance, few people outside the military are aware of the danger to the Middle American Shatterbelt arising from communist domination of Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada and Surinam. Through a long historical tradition of dependence, confrontation and collaboration, most Latin American countries have a strong ambivalent attitude towards their big Northern neighbor, the United States. In some extreme cases of projection as it is wont to occur among leftist intellectuals — the yankee appears as a scapegoat for their own troubles, miseries and shortcomings. The purpose of this article is to examine some possible psychological explanations for this vexatious phenomenon.
We must begin with an exception. For relevant historical reasons, Brazil, until recent years, had maintained a different, more relaxed posture in its dealings with the USA. One author has correctly remarked that, whereas Spanish America was formed by a process of disintegration of the Spanish colonial empire, Brazil as heir to the Portuguese dominion in America, found its identity through a process of segregation. At the time of Brazil’s independence (1822), we became conscious of being alone in a Spanish-speaking continent. We felt the necessity of emphasizing our own particular identity against the majority — hence to protect this singularity from the dangers of being over-powered by Spanish culture. The memories of a centuries-old struggle of the Portuguese in facing the unifying impetus of Castille were so-to-speak transferred to the Western hemisphere, in the guise of a feeling of splendid isolation vis-a-vis the multitude of our politically inferior neighbors. The adoption of the monarchical system of government (1822-1889) was part of the answer to that particular challenge.
Likewise, Brazil inherited from Portugal the traditional policy of alliance with the Anglo-Saxons: for the same long-term motives that prompted Lisbon to seek the protection of the Court of St. James against the integrative attraction of Castille, Brazil looked for support in Washington to secure its geopolitical objective. Thus we prevented a return of European colonial domination and we counterbalanced our isolation in the Southern part of the continent.
In the long run, this ambiguous posture among the “Latinos turned Brazil into a useful intermediary and mediator between the often conflicting ideals and interests of the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking nations of this continent. In the process of adopting the Republic form of government (1889), the United States became what we may describe as an “exemplary society.” It was a glorious paradigm in the image of which we wanted to build our country, an example of order and progress which we tried to imitate: among other things the nation even chose for its name the title of United States of Brazil.
Since 1930 however, and particularly since the fifties, with a short interlude from 1964-67, this privileged mediating position has seriously eroded. We have tended to join not only our Latin American neighbors, but countries from across the ocean into the supposedly non-aligned grouping known as the Third World. An atmosphere of rancor, resentment and recrimination has arisen whereby we begrudge the wealth and power of the United States and believe the Americans partly responsible for our relative poverty and backwardness. What could be the unconscious motivation of this ominous trend? Why should we seek in political psychology an explanation that could be relevant in transcending so much misunderstanding, misinformation and quite often sheer hostility? Why must we look for the Unconscious underground that disturbs the relationship between the USA and Latin America as a whole?
Our endeavor in this paper was prompted by the reading of an article in the Winter 1981-82 issue of Foreign Policy which bore the title of “Foreign Policy according to Freud.” The authors were William D. Davidson, President of the Institute for Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs, and Joseph Montville, a Foreign Service Officer. My interest was sharpened by the fact that I am an enthusiast of Jung’s depth psychology and believe his concept of the archetypes of the Collective Unconscious to be more useful than the epochal discoveries of Freud, for an understanding of the “collective mind,” of “national character” and hence of problems of disagreement in foreign policy that arise from emotional clashes between nations. Foreign policy, I submit, is strongly affected by psychological attitudes, by submission to fantasies and myths, and by ideological preconceptions and misconstructions which themselves are but pale reflections of deep unconscious disturbances in the collective mind. In several books published in Brazil, I have tried to apply the archetypal categories of Jung to an interpretation of the Brazilian national character and attitudes. In one of these, a work of 1967 on Foreign Policy, I also investigated some “psycho-social” aspects of Brazil’s unsettled posture in international relations.
To my knowledge, the best Latin American incursion in recent years into this perilous situation has been that of a Venezuelan, Carlos Rangel, whose brilliant analysis “From the Good Savage to the Good Revolutionary” has been translated into French and Portuguese.
I believe that what Jung has called the Archetype of the Shadow to be an appropriate instrument for the psychological approach to our problem. In short, we may indicate that the Scapegoat figure is a Shadow projection. Davidson and Montville in their article refer to the same phenomenon as “narcissistic rage.” This rage is supposed to be a reaction to offenses to the Self, also called “narcissistic wounds” which cause feelings of humiliation, envy, abandonment and alienation. The Shadow, as described by Jung, is our Double, our “dark Brother,” our “alter Ego,” a storehouse and dustbin of all repressed material, secret inferiorities and archaic contents of the psyche. It personifies those contents that have not been lived out, that have been excluded, rejected, despised, or repressed by the conscious Ego during our life. In its collective aspect the Shadow generally stands for the dark side of our personality, or for the inferiorities immanent in our group or society. Nobody finds it easy to confront the Shadow. Nobody wants to become critically conscious of one’s own inferior nature, or realize one’s shortcomings as measured against an ideal, heroic or exemplary image that has been taken as a model. Consequently, we have a natural tendency to project the Shadow onto a person, a group, a race or a collective entity of the environment, which for structural reasons becomes the bearer of this projection. Good examples of such Shadow-bearers were the Jews in Nazi Germany, the capitalists in communist countries, or the negroes in the South after the Civil War. The bearer of the projection is endowed with positive or negative properties and values, or more generally acquires an ambivalent significance. My contention in this respect is that the United States at the present time bears the full load of Shadow projections from Latin American frustrations in its development.
Projections may cover the full range from primitive hatred, such as that which has arisen among guerrillas in the politically torn Central American Republics, to the more sophisticated ressentiment of the Argentines, as witnessed by their hysterical reaction to the Falkland Islands debacle. Consider that the Argentines have often been sarcastically described by their neighbors as “Spanish-speaking Italians who believe themselves to be British.” They have also for a long time proudly considered themselves to be the only Europeans of South America, and the only power capable of challenging the USA on equal terms for a position of wealth, culture and progress. It is quite natural therefore for them to project onto the British and onto their American allies all the fury of their frustration and alienation at the disaster which fittingly describes the last thirty years of Argentine history.
Projection, as Freud well advised, is a means of inner defense. Yet it is also a rather dangerous weapon when poisoned by political ideology. Tribal feelings, in their present “national socialist” avatar, feed the great nefarious “myth of the XXth century. Two hundred million dead is the price it has exacted in the last seventy years, through two World Wars and innumerable Revolutions. In the article by Davidson and Montville, they quote Herbert C. Kelman, a Harvard social psychologist who contends that psychological factors contribute to escalation of conflict by creating barriers to mutual understanding in international relations. I submit that political and ideological differences themselves have to be explained by psychic factors finding their source of energy in the deep layers of the Collective Unconscious.
Temperamental “national-socialism” needs always a Judas to beat and to flail — as we know from the unfortunate experience of this century. One of the elementary forms of Shadow projection finds an expression in the so-called Conspiratorial View of the World. The world becomes a stage for the action of dark, secret forces or entities, the more evil they are the less is known about them and their nefarious deeds. Currently, this conspiratorial Weltanschauung in Latin America concentrates upon such easy surrogates of the devil as the CIA, the Pentagon, Wall Street, the “military-industrial complex” or any American multinational corporation which fits the case. On particular occasions, definite institutions or personalities may become bearers of projections. In Brazil the Hudson Institute, Mr. Herman Kahn, Mr. Daniel Ludwig and General Vernon Walters have occasionally suffered from such concoctions.
The North is also a universal archetype of evil. The North is dangerous, hostile, malicious, a source of destructive influences, as can be proved along 3,000 years of history, from the Bible to Taoist philosophy. “Out of the South cometh the whirlwind; economic acumen of the yankee is easily interpreted as an obnoxious auri sacra fames. No doubt other deep religious and cultural foundations could be argued for the lack of trust and understanding between the two types of Americans. John Adams described the South Americans as “the most ignorant and superstitious of all Papists” and believed that the possibility of free government in our part of the world was as absurd as trying to establish democracy among animals, birds and fishes. John Quincy Adams, while Secretary of State under Monroe, confessed having little hope that any beneficial profit could come to the United States from future contacts with the Catholic Latins whose lack of democratic vocation he never ceased to emphasize.
We may add to this unfortunate picture of mutual disparagement an historical trauma: the American continent never forgot the effects of the long, bloody struggle which, through the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, opposed Protestant England to Catholic Spain. The danger of invasion raised by the Invincible Armada caused a fright in Elizabethan England which Anglos were late in overcoming. On the other hand, most capital cities of Latin America suffered, at one time or another, attacks from British pirates, corsairs or regular Admirals. The last to experience such violence was Buenos Aires, at the beginning of the XIXth century.
Racial differences complicate matters. One has to consider that American dealings with people “South of the Rio Grande” were for a long time confined to “Chicanos,” “Newyorkians” and “Cubaches,” a lesser breed. Very little is still known of those South Americans from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Southern Brazil who are mostly descended from white European stock. Racial prejudices are linked to a complex sociological situation, whereby the Puritans of New England were strongly monogamic, hence discriminatory against color. Iberian conquerors on the other hand were color-blind and had few qualms about procreating countless mestizos with Indian and African women. Religious customs and beliefs in this field had long drawn out effects upon the racial constitutions of the countries affected. Climate of course is also an indirect component of the whole social equation. In his study on “The Masters and the Slaves,” the great Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre explains the complex interrelationship of natural, racial, religious, cultural and social phenomena which led to the formation of the great patriarchal family of colonial Brazil, the psychic constitution of which is so diametrically opposed to that of the small North-American nuclear family.
The stereotype was thus created in the United States, among sophisticated New Englanders, Virginians and Californians, of a small and ugly, big-mustachioed mestizo, wearing a white sombrero, his kinky hair flattened by a sticky hair cream, speaking nonsense in a loud voice, and playing a guitar to woo the senorita incarcerated in her room. This folkloric “native” hates any kind of work; he answers manana to any invitation to action, and if bothered, caramba: he will make another bloody revolution and raise to power another ridiculous bemedaled general, carrying an enormous sword to tyrannize his subjects….
A little story will help understand the “inferiority complex” that such a mortifying image of snobbish yankees is likely to inspire among self-conscious Latinos. Some years ago I served in a small Central American Republic, a quite civilized democratic State where, nevertheless, an expression is used which raises profound psychoanalytical issues: the word macho indicates a blond person, and by extension an American. Even a quite pneumatic and sex-appealing blond girl is called a machita. This is indeed an aberrant confession of inferiority by a politically effeminate and socially traumatized brown citizen of a Banana-Republic. I had a good friend, a red-haired Spaniard who with justification detested such an obnoxious colloquialism. Thus it happened that whenever someone noticed his gringo-like appearance and asked him if he was a “macho,” he answered with a great, indignant flourish, machine- gunning his words in a strong Castillian outburst: “que lo soy, pero de Espana . . .” (I am indeed a macho, but from Spain . . . ). The whole frustrated Latin-American machismo is kindled when a man such as Fidel Castro appears upon the stage — a real macho indeed, a tall, bearded dark-skinned hero who dares challenge the gringo and shouts “Cuba si, ianqui no,” and is ready to expropriate his belongings, to hijack his planes, to shoot his friends, to ally himself with his enemies and prefers the sovietskoi obraz zhyzni to the American way of life.
The basic conflict of opposites could tentatively be reduced to a polarity between psychological types in accordance with Jung’s schemes of the functions of consciousness. Jung proposes two pairs of functions set in a dual polarity: thinking X feeling, intuition X sensation. Together with the two attitudes of introversion and extroversion, these functions produce different corresponding psychological “types.” The typical yankee could thus be described as an active sensation-thinking type, a pragmatic doer, always concerned with the immediate surrounding reality, very efficient in the handling of the instruments of power, but repressing the externalization of his feelings and emotions as a result of a severe Calvinistic education. This pragmatic man has prospered in the realm of business, he is a master of the economy, a genius in technology and science, and is known as well for his capacity in democratic self-government, the regime of which, according to Weber’s concept of legitimate authority, is a rational-legal one.
The typical Latino on the other hand reveals a quite different “national character.” We are intuitive-feeling types, and our tradition is not pragmatic and rationalistic but romantic and artistic. If Faust may be taken as the heroic prototype of the Northern Protestant, a Promethean personality who challenges Nature through the Baconian power of knowledge, Don Juan would, to my mind, be the heroic prototype of the Catholic Southern Latino. The superiority of the latter does not lie in the exercise of the intellect for cold and abstract purposes of power over things, but on that of the mastery of erotic weapons in personal relationships. This is why I describe ours as an erotic type of society, taking the term of Eros in its widest possible meaning, having to do with feeling, emotions and generally speaking the affective side of the psyche. Consider that Faust challenges Nature, whereas Don Juan is constantly defying the sacred structure of the Family: Hence, Don Juan may also be described as a man who has not been able to process to a perfect solution his Oedipus complex. He still suffers from an Unconscious attachment to the Mother and therefore faces in a negative attitude the paternal principle of practical action, order and authority. The introjection of authority and order constitutes, from my point of view, the fundamental psychological condition of democratic self- government.
Another useful distinction we may submit is that of the Kierkegaardian Either-Or between ethical and aesthetic attitudes. Now, democracy is undoubtedly rooted in the moral structure built during that great upheaval of European conscience which is called the Reformation. Likewise the scientific and industrial Revolutions are connected with the blossoming of empirical thought and the flowering of inventive mechanical genius as witnessed first in Britain, and subsequently in the United States. The Church of the Counter-Reformation certainly did not stimulate and perhaps even restrained the development of free intellectual speculation in the field of philosophy, science and technology among the Iberian nations. It never allowed for the creation of a real business and work ethic. The Portuguese word for profit, (lucro [lucre]), always conveyed a negative meaning. The contribution of the Catholic people of the South to these Revolutions was practically nihil, which explains their relative backwardness as the twentieth century came into its own. The concept of a free-thinking, economically active and responsible citizenship was late in maturing among Latin-Americans, whenever new political or economic situations were to be faced.
Politically, the sources of power and Herrschaft are still linked, in Latin America, to the old legitimating forms of authority which Weber called “traditional.” From this conservative background charismatic leaders may emerge and a myth of Revolution may be concocted, but no authentic rational-legal level of legitimation has been reached yet. Family and personal ties still play an enormous role. Indeed, personalism has been widely blamed by Brazilian sociologists for many of our political shortcomings. The strength of such concrete family and personal ties are of course to be explained psychologically, by the power of affective relationships over abstract, intellectual ones, as it is to be expected in a Feeling type.
At present, the peculiar growth of bureaucracy can be explained as a sort of extension to the State structure of feudal ties between political bosses and their clientele. This structure is presided over by family ties and rules of friendship, with no consideration whatever to requirements of efficiency. One of our most powerful political bosses during the period of the First Republic (1889-1930) offered a final definition of the principle of clientelism when he declared: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, nothing: for those indifferent, the Law . . .” No democracy can possibly prosper under such a personalistic social approach.
The State as such is considered not as a tax-gatherer and administrator, but mainly as a provider of security, welfare and jobs for those who control it and their clientele. The point at stake is the psychological paramountcy of feelings and emotions, in relations among persons, over abstract, cold and rational considerations concerning things, facts and ideas. The presiding criteria are those of sympathy or antipathy, not those of efficient performance. No concept of an abstract Law, to be enforced equally against any and everybody, or any private interest, has ever arisen. No concept of a categorical imperative. Concrete personal relations remain the fundamental texture of the political and social cosmos. One Brazilian sociologist has quite amusingly explained the difference between the American democratic spirit and the Brazilian personalistic one by contrasting two possible behaviors in a given situation: when someone in America tries to circumvent the Law, regulation or postulate of collective discipline, those around him will immediately raise an objection: “Mister, who do you think you are?” The presumption is that the law is equal for everybody. No exception allowed. The presumptuous offender will be sent back to his place . . . In Brazil, on the other hand, the search for the special privilege, for the personal alibi and for the aristocratic exception to the rule will prompt a man who is faced with similar strictures, to claim immunity to the officer of the Law with a familiar gambit: “Sir, do you know with whom you are talking?” . . . The presumption is that the officer will be subdued and retreat under the impact of the offender’s high rank.
A well known Brazilian historian and social thinker, Sergio B. de Rolanda ( + 1981), grasped well the problem when he remarked that the predominance of feeling-relationships in the world of universal clientele such as obtains in this country, will work against the blossoming of democratic institutions. Indeed, on behalf of a friend or a member of one’s own family, one always demands a privilege, a special favor, an exception to the rule. Feeling relationships are always strictly and concretely personal, they are individual and exclusive. No room is left for the famous impersonal democratic principle of Bentham: “the greatest good for the greatest number.”
If such “erotic” conditions contaminate the political field, similar ones have so far restrained Latinos in general from developing a full prosperous system of democratic capitalism, where money relationships require an abstract and impersonal attitude. We should emphasize that economic activity is basically associated with the functions of (extraverted) thinking and sensation. So are science and technology. An intuitive-feeling type will have but a slight penchant for the pragmatic intellectual work routine that is entailed by commercial and industrial activity, by methodic scientific research or by technological improvement. In a nutshell, Latin American under-development can be reduced to such an analytical scenario.
ln conclusion, we may submit that all the repressed, archaic contents of the Shadow were precipitated onto the collective unconscious where they have given birth to myths, preconceptions and ideological catchwords which, taken together, contribute to the formation of a phantasmagoric spirit. I like to call this an ideological incubus. Of course, the archaic thought, the repressed idea, the Kafkian logic, the under-developed intellect do not cease to act just because they are unconscious: they keep on influencing the psyche under the stress of collective emotions or of normal daily affects. But they do so at the lower level of the Unconscious, and this is precisely the danger.
The Shadow, activated by the contents of the Unconscious, concocts a poisonous and epidemic psychopathology — which is ideological in nature. The ideology is always simplistic and carries a heavy dose of emotional stress. During the period of the First Republic in Brazil, the dominant ideology was Comtian Positivism. In the period between 1930 and World War II, Brazil was torn by the conflicting movement of fascistic Nationalism (the so-called Integralismo) and Marxist Socialism. The conflict allowed for the emergence of the first real Brazilian charismatic leader, Getulio Vargas, who managed to fuse Nationalism and Socialism. Since the war, National-Socialism has been fed by the Vulgata of Marxist ideology in a crude and folkloric Third-World sort of Populism. It created a nosos, a spiritual disease, the corrupting influence of which reaches to every level of the Brazilian intellectual elite, not the least to mention the powerful “progressive” wing of the Catholic Church.
As the Shadow carries those contents and traits of character and those psychological functions of which we are lacking — that is, the so-called “inferior function” made up of virtues of pragmatic labor and rational activity which account for efficiency in the acquisition of wealth and power — they are bound to be projected onto adequate bearers of Shadow projections, namely North-Americans. The feelings of humiliation, envy, alienation and resentment are projected through a process of displacing a subjective content into an object. These psychic contents not only assume the nature of reality (a pseudo reality), but they reflect the internal conflict through a mythological image, the coarsened, archaic and primitive figure of the scapegoat. This is the process whereby the image of the ugly American imperialist has been created.
Presently, the whole Brazilian, and generally Latin American intellectual attitude towards international relations and foreign policy stems from the concept evolved from Marxism-Leninism, that the poverty and under-development of Latin America is to be accounted for by its “dependence” on the “central” imperialistic core of the Capitalist world, the United States. In order to eradicate our countries from poverty and dependence, one has to follow an “independent” or “non-aligned” foreign policy. The gist of this world-wide conception is that “East-West conflict” and Russian-Communist danger are nothing but phantasms that have been artificially concocted by the Americans for their own selfish purposes. They are of no concern to Latin America. Ideological disputes are on the wane. The only thing that matters in world politics is the economic opposition and hostility between the capitalist North and the underdeveloped South.
To exorcize the ideological incubus and overcome the process of Shadow projection is no easy job. A confrontation with the Shadow is needed, through conscious introjection of our own shortcomings. Consciousness is something that is not acquired cheaply. While visiting Brazil at the beginning of the century, Lord James Bryce remarked that no other nation seemed to him to depend as much as ours on statesmanship for its future development. To exorcize the incubus, great courageous statesmanship is certainly needed.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
So warns Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
We may therefore fully support the contention that political psychology has most to contribute to foreign affairs, in the area of conflict resolution and Shadow projection. At the present moment, the most important psychological problem in Latin America is to withdraw from such projections of the archetype of the scapegoat upon the United States.
It is a serious matter. Something for Latin Americans themselves to undertake. Of course, it is not up to me to give advice on what steps American diplomacy should take to help in the process. As a first requirement, however, it is important that everybody understands the implications of the problem. Americans are very often naive in questions of foreign policy (or is it perhaps the syndrome of what Malcolm Muggeridge calls “death-wish liberalism?”). They are also ignorant of South America with some difficulty in distinguishing say between Bolivia and Brazil, a difficulty that reaches all the way to the President himself. However, to solve the problem one has to start by understanding perfectly the psychological differences at issue.