National Psychology: Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Nationhood in Early 20th-Century Brazil

Turn-of-the-century social sciences left a clear mark on Brazilian scholars and political reformers. While scholars have examined the influence of criminology, scientific racism, and tropical determinism on Brazilian thought, the influence of psychoanalysis has been little acknowledged and even less explored. But in the 1920s-30s, a community of scholars, ethnographers, writers, and political reformers took social psychology and psychoanalysis quite seriously. And they articulated a new theory: Brazil's body politic was endowed with a collective, national psyche. But this national psychology came with all the corresponding weight: unconscious desires, an oedipal complex, pathologies, and hidden meanings within national dreams. Intellectuals and reformers proceeded to psychoanalyze the nation. They published their findings and even incorporated them into government reform projects. This paper pulls from primary-source essays, historic monographs, and archival sources to examine a fascinating, yet forgotten, chapter in Brazilian intellectual history. In doing so, the work challenges historiographic notions of nationhood and what it meant to Brazilian intellectuals.