The Psychology of History

The Psychology of History
Few statesmen have been as prescient as Winston Churchill. During World Wart II he said someone is going to write this history and it’s going to be me. The Prime Minister had a sense of destiny from a very early age and always kept an eye on the historical archetype.

Naturally, most leaders want history to be kind to them. During the infamous Watergate episode thirty years ago, President Richard Nixon revealed in the taped White House conversations that he was more interested in the big sweep of history than a petty robbery at his opponent’s headquarters. Indeed, he saw himself as the new Marco Polo opening up China and the only credible American political figure who could establish an uneasy détente with the old Soviet Union. Nixon’s dark, Jansenist, vengeful streak would do him in. He spent the last twenty years of his life trying to salvage a reputation. He knew the game. When you don’t like history, rewrite it or re-envision it.

As historians know, history is always being rewritten and-envisioned. This activity is imperative, of course, as new information becomes available. Sigmund Freud suggested, without consciousness, we will always fall victims to our personal and collective histories. Japan, for example, has never really embraced its role in World Wart II. But all nations have their fictions, often opting for sophomoric histories that reinforce a national innocence. In its relationship to American Indians the Unites States has long been in denial. As psychologist C.G Jung notes, what we suppress will become public in other forms, such as how the culture treats non-white ethnic groups. From a psychological perspective, this is called “shadow work.” If our history casts a shadow, we are obliged to consider the consequences. This is not easy work.

In Indian Mirror: The Making of the Brazilian Soul, Roberto Gambini has attempted such shadow work, examining the historical and cultural elements that contribute to Brazilian soul. More specifically, he has tried to resurrect the idea of an ancestral soul rooted in Indian tribal consciousness.

A note of clarification. Though I have been to Brazil many times, I am hardly a student of the culture. But I am a student of Jungian psychology, which is the lens through which Gambini looks at the making of the Brazilian soul. Jungian psychology is archetypal psychology. That is, Jung postulated that all cultures share certain common archetypes such as the Wise Old Man, the Primitive, the Senex, the Crone, the Warrior King and the like. These are pre-conscious cultural traits that humans have in common.

Gambini builds his argument around the Jungian notion of projection, perhaps the most common psychological phenomenon. In short, everything that is unconscious in ourselves, we will discover in our neighbors. Gambini notes “projection is not a pathology of a disturbed personality, but a real fact through which everything unknown in the psyche may be expressed.” This is the tool the author will use to examine Brazilian history.

Gambini writes “One day, wandering around downtown Sao Paulo, I suddenly found myself in front of the restored façade of the primitive Jesuit chapel and of the school for Indian boys, which, in 1554, was the birthplace of what today is one of the greatest urban conglomerates in the world.” At this place he found three volumes of Jesuit letters, reproduced in the Portuguese of five centuries ago. Since the missionaries had already told their version of their arrival in Brazil, Gambini would talk on behalf of the Indians.

The author’s psychological analysis begins in fact, using 200 letters written by the Jesuits between 1549 and 1563, “in which they portray the new land and its native inhabitants.” The letters were published in 1954 and are considered important documents, especially for the study of the Jesuits. However, as the author remarks, “they have never been examined from a psychological point of view, as if such an approach would have nothing relevant to offer to the understanding of a highly complex human interaction that is at the very root of Brazilian society. Gambini postulates that, if a psychological theory is valid for the individual, it should also apply to collective situations. This is a bold enterprise with numerous risks.

Nonetheless, it is very difficult to argue with the writer’s basic premise. The letters to and from the first Brazilian missionaries are filled with the language of projection. Brazil was to be the New World, the Second Eden, and a Paradise. But the shadow of Christendom, symbolized by the serpent of evil, found the ideal land in America for projection. The Indians would be converted, the land tamed, Catholic morality imposed. Gambini writes that the “Jesuits knew they would find less-than-human beings in Brazil and it was precisely to change or improve them that they went abroad. The first contact was a confirmation of the truthfulness of a specific image that had for the first time been presented to Europe in 1492 through Columbus’ letter describing the Caribs in the Antilles. But this first ‘journalistic’ report was already archetypal, for the image of primitive man is as old as mankind.”

In the religious pantheon, primitive man was dark, ape-like, and uncivilized. This idea was already in the European psyche. As the letters make clear, the Jesuits believed the catechization of the Indians was a re-enactment of the Creation, a recapitulation of an eternal myth. The majestic iconography of the invaders would soon appropriate and

overwhelm the culture of the Indians. The letters and maps show very clearly how Europeans projected their religion, morality and fantasies on the land and its inhabitants.

A central Jungian idea is to stay with the image, for this is the royal road to soul making. Gambini’s book is an appeal to modern Brazilian culture and consciousness to understand and learn from what has been repressed. “What happened in Brazil, the author writes, “was a psychic mingling and not a communion of souls, because the conquerors do not admit that those he vanquished had human qualities of some value. We are, in fact, a population of mixed races—mixed biologically, genetically; but the psychic mixture, the mutual fertilization among the souls has not taken place yet.

“The Porto Seguro landmark requires another interpretation. The first mass requires another reading. And so, in the same way, a whole gallery of images taken over by official history should be replaced by another one that tells the history of the soul. But we shall only reach this through empathy, imagination, recovery of silenced voices and the retrieval of bizarre images—some of which have been included in this book—that truly portray what in fact happened when these two segments of humanity encountered. To work with images may be the only way left to reconnect with the lost language of the soul.”

“Indian Mirror” represents a courageous attempt to re-envision history using some basic tenets of Jungian psychology. As Jung himself learned in his remarks about German cultural and psychological identity, there is danger in such prescriptions and descriptions. Finding certain Warrior Gods in the German psyche did not do much to help us understand Nazism or the average German.

I don’t think Gambini falls into this trap. Obviously, he is enamored of Jung and is sometimes too prescriptive is describing Jung’s psychology. Importantly, the author’s remarks are based on the very real content of the 200 letters, which represent the collective psychology of the age and the Catholic Church. In my opinion these letters beg for a psychological interpretation.

According to the author “Brazilian consciousness is unable to face the Indians. It does not know what they are. Indians have not room in it. Either one takes their land, creates a national park, invites them to an ethnic show or writes an academic thesis. And why? Because Indian consciousness has a different structure. Negroes are closer to the categories of ruling consciousness, even because they were forced to a closer togetherness. With the end of slavery, they were assimilated to the lowest level of the Brazilian society. A lot is said about contribution of both races to the make-up of the rich Brazilian culture, but much is silenced about what could not be assimilated.”

In Gambini’s opinion, for Brazil to fully mature, it must look at the unconscious elements, as they relate to the Indians, that have been repressed. This is a bold challenge and perhaps an impossible task. Jung himself had few fantasies about the ability of an individual to become conscious (withdraw projection). He didn’t necessary apply his psychology to nations. When he did, Jung was not convincing.

However, that does not invalidate Indian Mirror which argues there is another history of Brazil best amplified by the use of Jungian psychology. The book represents an important contribution to the Shadow Work that has been going on in Brazil for a long time. This is history inviting the artist in, one person at a time. Such is the nature of consciousness and conversion.