In Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis, Rubén Gallo details the story of his voyage of discovery to trace the thin lines that connect the great Viennese thinker and founder of psychoanalysis to Mexico, itself represented by artifacts, paintings, publications, and a range of intellectuals affected by a psychoanalysis they variously translated (imaginatively rather than literally) into ways of thinking about modern Mexico. The book is also a substantial work of cultural analysis that both defies the regionalization of culture and area studies by criss-crossing the Atlantic, and it brings into a new perspective aspects of the particularity of Mexican appropriations of, and deviations from, Freud’s psychoanalytical project. It contributes to a complex mapping of the dissemination and reconfiguration of psychoanalytical thought in the colonial and postcolonial world.

In two parts, Freud’s Mexico addresses the reception of Sigmund Freud in Mexico followed by Freud’s references to Mexico. These include Gallo’s discovery of several Mexican antiquities in Freud’s collection and of a book from a Mexican admirer in his library as well as Freud’s knowledge of Spanish and references to Mexico in his famous dream book. Gallo analyzes Mexican readings of Freudian theory by the queer poet Salvador Novo, the conservative philosopher Samuel Ramos, the writer and diplomat Octavio Paz, the Benedictine monk Gregorio Lermercier, and the judge and jurist Raúl Carrancia y Trujillo. Novo adopted Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality (1905) to articulate his own sexual identity and erotic practice, while Ramos used Freud’s ideas to elevate a metaphysical and purified concept of Mexican national identity while drawing on the ideas of Alfred Adler, a one-time disciple of Freud expelled from Freud’s inner circle for his theoretical deviations that focused on the ego’s neuroses of inferiority and aggressivity. Like Ramos, Paz drew on Freud’s last text, Moses and Monotheism (1939)—Freud’s theory of the formation of the Jewish people as a result of trauma and guilt—to elaborate another definition of Mexican national identity that elevates critical intellectuality to overcome the traumatic inheritance of solitude. Interspersed between these main chapters are short sections titled “free associations” composed of anecdotes, images, and works by Remedios Varo, Diego Rivera, Miguel Corrubias, and Frida Kahlo. The book’s final chapter moves from these fragmentary reflections to create a fictional portrait of Mexico in Vienna. Gallo plots an imaginary walk by Freud through his home city, which was tragically linked to Mexico in the person of the Archduke Maximilian who briefly was Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico during the Second Mexican Empire.

Freud’s Mexico is an examination of reception studies in psychoanalysis, a cultural and intellectual history of modern Mexico and its intellectuals, an experiment in academic writing to bridge historical-literary research and daring Benjaminian montage, and it is interspersed with the engaging personality of a fascinated researcher on the trail of a secret that remains just out of reach. As a result, it is as exciting as it is troubling.

There are enormous risks in this undertaking that Gallo admits is psychoanalytical in its own methodology. If the first half offers readings of major intellectual and artistic engagements in Mexico with Freud, its complement discovers and explores the place of Mexico in Freud’s “affective geography” alongside Greece, Rome, Troy, and Egypt. But this can be done only by making much from a “handful of fragments” (7). Defending this method, Gallo suggests that like psychoanalysis itself, which works with constructions that are “imaginative efforts to reconstitute a fragment of inner experience that would otherwise be forgotten” (7), his book builds on a smattering of facts to project an ultimately speculative and not altogether convincing picture of the place of Mexico in Freud’s personal imagination prior to and during the articulation of his new theories of psychoanalysis.

A Spanish-speaking Freud extends Freud’s imagination linguistically and culturally to a non-classical Mediterranean culture and to the entire continent affected by the Spanish conquest that in turn opens up to the Pre-Columbian ancient civilizations of the Aztecs and the Mayans and beyond. Gallo was amazed to discover, even so indirectly, Freud’s ownership of Mexican antiquities. Unlike many modernists from Paul Gauguin to Pablo Picasso, Freud did not turn to Africa or Oceania, but to Mediterranean and Asian cultures. Gallo’s discovery makes us ask if Aztec antiquities appear in the Freudian collection as a result of his interest in cultures performing (acting out) or transcending (rendering symbolic) human sacrifice. Their presence thus can be linked to Freud’s continuing studies in the origins of religion and the psychic impulses they transform. The risk in Gallo’s book, therefore, is that these sparse elements, potentially significant psychoanalytically in their fragmentary dislocatedness, are used to buttress a hypothesis about Freud and Mexico that might otherwise be explained by a more conventional understanding of Freud’s research into ancient cultures, boyhood interest in Europe literatures and languages not untypical of his generation, and his international fame.

Countering dominant critiques of psychoanalysis for being allied to conservative and normative ideologies, Gallo argues that there was a distinctive, creative, and radical counter-trend earlier in the twentieth century that “devised some of the most original, elaborate and influential applications of psychoanalytical theory anywhere in the world.” But Gallo adds, “Had Freud lived to see these experiments he might have concluded that in this country [Mexico], psychoanalysis had gone completely wild” (7).

Two questions arise from this claim. To what extent is Gallo’s text a faithful study and dissemination of Freudian psychoanalytical concepts and practices, and to what extent does it force the conclusion that there can be no such thing, psychoanalysis itself being unable to keep its own book firmly closed against its creative, and sometimes wild, readers? Freud was notoriously anxious if not to police the boundaries of psychoanalysis, then to make clear that there were limits to psychoanalysis outside of which certain derivations constituted not merely interpretative elaborations, inevitable and sometimes creative, but transgressions of the defining discoveries and practices of psychoanalysis that fell, therefore, outside its theoretical ambit. The second question concerns the projection of what occurred in the creative dialogues between Mexican intellectuals and select elements of Freudian thought as “wild.” As Claude Lévi-Strauss taught in his La Pensée sauvage (1962), “wild thinking” is not savage, barbarous, eccentric, or extreme as in definitions of the word today in relation to “wild” parties or “wild” teenage behavior. ‘Wild’ operates in a distinction between the pre-social and the socialized in human thinking and imagination. Is there, in Gallo’s subtitling, an unconscious reappearance of the ghost of colonial thinking that identifies the creative, political, queer, feminist, and even Catholic responses to Freud’s majestic ideas as “wild” in the sense of being without order or responsibility and belonging to a beyond, a wilderness, that is hardly representative of the sophistication of Pre-Columbian civilizations, however challenging their practices may be to contemporary Western thinking and ethics? Impious infidelity can be respectful and productive. Incautious appropriation and reconfiguration can, however, lose the very foundational insights that Freud struggled hard, and with justification, to protect against misuse. In reading Gallo’s investigations into Mexican appropriations of Freud’s writings and ideas, I found myself fascinated by the ways in which Freud’s Mexican acolytes had refashioned Freudian ideas in ways that called for a cultural analysis of the cultural rather than professional dissemination of psychoanalysis in distinct sites in Mexico: art, religion, queer culture, criminology. I was at the same time uneasy about the manner in which Gallo subtitled these “readings” as “wild” rather than as indicating a culturally significant fusion of the Mexican and the Freudian imaginaries. Such fusions might well have been troubling to Freud, the anxious father of his fragile discipline defending its boundaries against those who thought it was altogether non-scientific and outrageous, while being of interest to Freud the fascinated analyst of cultural imaginaries that could be evaluated through psychoanalysis—not as clinical practice—but as site of dramatic new insights into sexuality, subjectivity, and group psychology.

Freud’s final work, Moses and Monotheism, immediately translated into Spanish in Chile, is at the core of several of Gallo’s readings: by Ramos, Paz, and Kahlo, who, on reading the text, dedicated a painting titled Moses (1945) to its key theme of the hero. I quibble, therefore, with Gallo’s simplified reading of Kahlo’s painting as supplementing Freud’s Eurocentric monotheism with Pre-Columbian polytheism. While placing the Biblical legend of the baby Moses found in the bulrushes and illuminated by the sun-eye associated with the version of Egyptian religion invented by Akhenaton and of which Freud claims Moses was the faithful emissary, Kahlo explores the idea of the hero down the ages, juxtaposing revolutionaries and religious messiahs to draw out the relentless aspirations for ethical and social justice that traverse the mythical, the theological, and the political. Gallo’s reading also misses the central image in Kahlo’s painting of a political dream of regeneration through birth—the coming of the new represented in many cultures through the image of the child (Baby Moses and Baby Jesus are the Western tropes)—enlightenment through the image of illumination. He also minimizes Kahlo’s political understanding of Freud’s text as psychoanalytically anti-fascist rather than a work in comparative religion. Kahlo’s painting grants to Freud’s work its immediate political charge, seemingly invisible to Gallo.

Another important example of creative reading and cultural transposition occurs in Octavio Paz’s appropriation of Freud’s concept of “Der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit” in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1969) to examine Mexico’s cultural individuality. This idea of intellectual/spiritual advance is difficult to translate. The German word Geist travels between psyche, spirituality, and thoughtfulness. It does not signify the mind or abstract thought as opposed to mere sensuality. In Freud’s usage, the Jewish sense of self-respect was traumatically instituted, when through guilt at the memory of the murder of Moses, the aggressive, infantile feelings of rebellion were overcome by the acceptance of the Mosaic code for ethical sociality. Paz takes from Freud the idea of civilization as the development of intellectuality and transfers his analysis to the development of Mexican philosophy and the resources with which to withstand the affliction he identifies in a Mexican psyche of solitude. Gallo too renders Geistigkeit as “intellectuality” (98), losing thereby the nuances of that which Freud thought sustained what we might today consider ethical humanism in opposition to drive-led politics that fostered fascism, while also making perplexing Paz’s own “misreading" of Freud by linking his concept back to religion (100). This example exposes the twin purposes of the book. Gallo identifies the creative uses of Mexican intellectuals’ encounters with Freud’s writings, raising issues of impious fidelity versus catachresis. Gallo also thereby offers a new chapter in a reception history of psychoanalysis while in fact delivering a cultural history of selected aspects of Mexican modernist culture.

I have hardly done justice to Gallo’s fascinating studies of a judge who applied psychoanalysis to criminology, including offering an Oedipal profiling of Leon Trotsky’s assassin or of the Benedictine monk who introduced psychoanalytical sessions to his monastery in order to assist those entering orders to uncover their motivations and either strengthen or abandon their chosen vocation demanding celibacy. These instances, taken together with those of queer poets, conservative philosophers, and Nobel Laureate writers, along with Marxist and Surrealist painters, both women and men, produce new insights into the cultural formations of twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals and into the impact of psychoanalysis on both individual self-constructions (Novo) and cultural analyses of cultural collectives such as nations or peoples (Ramos and Paz). Mexico’s complex position as the product of European conquest as well as of Pre-Columbian cultures and indigenous peoples offers a unique transatlantic, intercultural space of dialogue in and with modernism. Ending his book in Vienna, Gallo reminds his readers that while Freud left his mark in Mexican cultural history, Mexico was already a haunting trace in the European imperial imagination into which Freud himself acculturated because of the associations, visible through monuments in Vienna, with the tragic fate of Maximilian. Freud’s Mexico is a rich contribution to the geographies of thought and cultural memory despite what I found to be its sometimes tenuous connections and over-personalized narratives of the adventure Gallo tell us that he undertook—“my Freudian Odyssey” (2)—to weave together the hitherto invisible threads that linked modernist Mexico to Freud’s Vienna.