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The Psychology of Regeneration: Spain and America at the Turn of the Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Fredrick B. Pike
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Extract

In this essay, the investigation of United States images of Spain and Spanish images of North Americans serves as a point of departure in the search for larger patterns in intercultural relations — patterns that encompass far more of humanity than the two countries under consideration. My basic premise is that personal, psychic factors often lie at the heart of images that representative thinkers of a particular culture at a given moment form of other cultures. Personal, psychic factors lie also at the heart of an issue that has been central to history since the dawn of the modern age: the clash between modernity and traditionalism. The essential points of this article could have been made just as well by contrasting the mutual relationships between virtually any two national cultures, providing only that one was rather highly developed and modern, the other relatively backward economically and traditional or even primitive in social-political organization. I base my study on mutual images of North Americans and Spaniards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries simply because this is a subject about which I have thought at some length, even if not in much depth. Finally, if my conclusions have any validity, it derives not so much from historical methodology as from the analyses of Jungian psychology and the use of concepts such as individuation, archetypes, ego consciousness, and the personal and collective unconscious.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , April 1981 , pp. 218 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1981

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References

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3 On shifting attitudes of the Western world in general toward the New World Indian, a phenomenon which I have found highly suggestive in explaining changes in North American attitudes toward Spainards, see Berkhofer, Robert E. Jr., The White Man's Indian (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; and Keen, Benjamin, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, N.J., 1971)Google Scholar. See also Honour, Hugh, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; and Dudley, Edward and Novak, Maximilian E., The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh, 1972).Google Scholar

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22 Bates, Katherine Lee, Spanish Highways, p. 39Google Scholar, describes Spanish civilization as “streaked … with Oriental barbarism,” but at the same time expresses high regard for that civilization. Perhaps she, along with other Americans, was finding it possible to admire Oriental culture in which a person's worth is defined in terms of his or her relationship to other people and even to the cosmos, rather than in terms of the absolute worth of the atomistic individual.

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31 Torodash, Martin, “Columbus Historiography since 1939,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 41 (1966), 409CrossRefGoogle Scholar, draws attention to the enduring scholarly and popular fascination with the Columbus theme. Surely, no attempt to account for this fascination will be complete unless it takes into account the psychological dimensions.

32 Chicago Tribune, 12 07 1898.Google Scholar

33 Important evidence of a revised, favorable view toward Spain's New World imperialism is afforded by Bourne, Edward G.'s entry in the old American Nation Series, Spain in America, 1450–1580 (New York, 1904)Google Scholar, as well as by the pioneering works of Herbert E. Bolton and other scholars associated with him at the University of California.

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46 In his book On African Socialism (London, 1964), pp. 49, 109, 147Google Scholar, Senegal's Léopold Segar Senghor touches eloquently on these matters. “Negro-African society is collectivist, … more exactly, communal, because it is rather a communion of souls than an aggregate of individuals.…it is in the passage from individual to the collective that the individual becomes truly personalized and genuinely a human being.” The way in which the individual makes the passage from the limiting, earthbound individual ego to the transcending sense of membership in the organic community is described by Nkrumah, Ghana's Kwame in Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization and Development with a Particular Reference to the African Revolution (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. In a way, the concept of the loss of ego through identification with the group harks back to Rousseau's general will and has the potential for tyranny; for it allows the inevitably present leadership class to assert, regardless of how tyranically they govern, that their commands reflect perfectly the desires of the collectivity because they have been subsumed by the transcending group and their wills absorbed by the group's will. The few “deviants” who may object suffer, allegedly, from “false consciousness” of the collective will. An updating of this sort of political theorizing is provided by the Utopian Jamahiriya visions of Libya's Col. Quaddafi. (See “‘Iranians are our Brothers’: An Interview with Col. Muamar el-Quaddafi of Libya by Oriana Fallaci,” New York Times Magazine, 16 12 1979, pp. 116–28.)Google Scholar Furthermore, the Theology of Liberation's concept of Concientización strikes me as having its own potential for tyranny. Whether with Consciencism, Jamahiriya, Concientización, or the desire of cultists and rock concert enthusiasts to transcend ego consciousness, we are dealing with a projection of the psychic desire for a return to a state of paradisal wholeness and innocence. In such a state the ego is totally engulfed by the unconscious, and thus the psyche is at one with itself and altogether without conflict. But, in such a state, the ego is also the helpless puppet of the unchecked unconscious—even as the citizen who is fully absorbed by the group surrenders his autonomy to that group.

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50 See the treatment of Ortega in Wohl, Robert, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)Google Scholar. The desire to channel capitalism's awakened ego drives into the larger-thanself nation-state also characterizes the Opus Dei approach to Spanish regeneration in the post-Civil War era. See my “Capitalism and Consumerism in Spain of the 1960s: What Lessons for Latin American Development?” Inter-American Economic Affairs, 26 (1972), 34–36.Google Scholar

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