Abstract
I have just read Elizabeth Rohr’s (2021) response to my two-part article on ‘The Mexican social unconscious’ (Hernández-Tubert, 2021a, b). This generated mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, she has obviously spent much time and effort in writing it, and this is to be appreciated; she clearly knows Mexico and her account of recent events in my country is mostly accurate, although I cannot share her interpretation of such data. On the other, her account of what she deems to be my main argument is so alien to the meaning I intended to convey that it made me wonder if she had actually read my article, or what had she read in it, perhaps only her interpretation in her own terms, without trying to understand my argument, before expressing her disagreement with it.
This type of reasoning is well-known in logic as the ‘straw-man fallacy’ (in this case a ‘straw-woman fallacy’), which occurs when someone takes another person’s argument and distorts or exaggerates it, turning it into an absurdity, and then attacks the first party and disqualifies her for having said what she never said. Such argumentative strategy may be summarised in the motto, ‘Turn your opponent into a straw man and then criticize him for being a dummy.’
Another factor in the misunderstanding between Rohr and I is to be found in her adherence to the not uncommon practice of reviewers of reproaching the author for not having written the article he or she (the reviewer) wishes to read and would be willing to write. In this case, Rohr ends up by writing her own article on Mexico’s present social and political reality, with a focus, interest, and theoretical frame of reference quite different from my own, claiming that her point of view is the only true interpretation of the ‘Mexican social unconscious’. I am certainly willing to comment on and criticize her contribution, and shall do so, after clarifying the discrepancies and divergencies between us.
When commenting on the first part of my article, Rohr claims that Even though Reyna [Dr Hernández-Tubert, Md, PhD to you] does not use this term and she does not say this explicitly, I understand her saying that the trauma of the conquest prevails, because the Mexican of today is undoubtedly the product of this violent conquest. (Rohr, 2021)
Unfortunately, her understanding has failed. This is her interpretation, based on a linear concept of causality that I do not share. I clearly stated in the article that I consider that, although the roots of a nation stem from its origins and inception, they are not a straightforward cause of its present. The idea that ‘infancy is destiny’, as claimed by orthodox psychoanalysis is untenable, a remnant of Freud’s misguided attempt to turn the discipline he created into a natural science, ‘just like chemistry’, which looks for causal explanation of the present as a direct consequence of the past (Tubert-Oklander and Hernández-Tubert, 2022), ignoring the hypercomplex pattern of human and social existence. In the same vein a community’s present status and dynamics must necessarily take into account not only its origins, but also its evolution, its relationship with other human groups, its inner organization and dynamics, and its present status in social, cultural, economic, ideological and political terms. This is what Foulkes and group analysis have taught us (Anthony, 2010).
Perhaps, this misunderstanding derives from the fact that Rohr’s concept of the social unconscious differs greatly from mine, something she does not recognize. She refers explicitly to a concept of the social unconscious that emphasizes the repression of past and present traumas, much in a psychoanalytic vein. My own view of it includes much more than repressed traumatic history, and focuses on political and ideological strife, and incorporates the concept of conscious and unconscious Weltanschaungen or Conceptions of the World, an approach that has been developed by Juan Tubert-Oklander and myself in a conjoint effort during almost three decades (Hernández Hernández, 2010; Tubert-Oklander, 2014; Tubert-Oklander and Hernández de Tubert, 2004; Tubert-Oklander and Hernández-Tubert, 2022). By contrast, Rohr’s understanding of the social unconscious is linear, shallow, and concretistic, focusing on ‘specific [and visible] traumatizing incidents’ and ignoring the symbolic violence exerted by phenomena such as racism, classism, sexism, exploitation, and colonialism.
Hence, Rohr’s critique utterly ignores the theoretical bases of my argument, starting with the ideological repression of those aspects of the community’s life and history that have been repudiated—i.e., split off, denied, forgotten, or replaced by a more palatable version, including two things: i) any reference to past traumatic events that have shaped the present culture; and ii) any recognition of present social facts that contradicts an official and highly valued version of what that society is supposed to be—in other words, ideology. She also leaves out the concept of cultural mestization and the two myths derived from it—the Myth of Mestization and the Myth of the Conquest—and the ambivalence derived from their coexistence, as well as the noxious effects on Mexican identity and self-esteem of the mendacious and self-serving narrative of the savagery of the Aztecs, invented by Hernán Cortés and his cronies in order to conceal and justify their criminal behaviour, since they had even violated Spanish law, a version that has been almost universally accepted in the western world as the ‘historical truth’.
In this, Rohr clearly adheres to the Dark Legend that affirms that the conquistadores, and the clergy that came after them, brought civilization, culture, and religion to a lawless land, inhabited by heathen savages who worshiped demon-gods and were prey to all sorts of aberrations and sins, such as sexual promiscuity, idolatry, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. For instance, she writes that, ‘Newer studies confirm ritualized mass sacrifices in pre-Colombian times in Mesoamerica.’ This statement she justifies by a reference to Charles C. Mann’s (2005) book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. This is a journalistic endeavour, hardly a reliable historical source. However, it is a good book that focuses on the advanced and positive aspects of the indigenous cultures that existed in Latin America before the arrival of the Spaniards, and barely mentions human sacrifice. But let us see what he says on the matter, Human sacrifice is such a charged subject that its practice by the Triple Alliance has inevitably become shrouded in myths. Two are important here. The first is that human sacrifice was never practised—the many post-conquest accounts of public death-spectacles are all racist lies. It was indeed in the Spanish interest to exaggerate the extent of human sacrifice, because ending what Cortés called this ‘most horrid and abominable custom’ became a post hoc rationale for conquest. But the many vividly depicted ceremonies in Mexican art and writing leave little doubt that it occurred—and on a large scale. (Cortés may well have been correct when he estimated that sacrifice claimed ‘three or four thousand souls’ a year.)
The second myth is that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe. (p. 188–189)
He then goes on to enumerate the long list of all the brutal, savage, and murderous practices that prevailed in Europe at the time. So, not only does Rohr rely on a journalistic account, instead of going to reliable historical sources, but she also quotes it as affirming something quite different from what it actually says. Not only Mann does not claim to have made any original historical research, but his report and interpretation of the available literature amounts to a refutation of the Dark Legend of the Conquest. His appraisal of the number of sacrifices is just his personal opinion.
Now, Cortés’s version had been discredited by and questioned in the 16th-century by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1552) in the following terms: This question of sacrificing men and eating them, as told by Gomara, I do not believe to be true, because I always heard that in that kingdom of Yucatán there were no human sacrifices and eating human flesh was unknown, and the fact that Gomara said so, as he neither saw nor heard it from anyone but Cortés, who was his master who fed him, has no authority whatsoever, except in their own favour and as an excuse of their evildoings, since it is in the language of the Spaniards and of those who write about their infamous allegedly heroic deeds, to slander all these nations in order to excuse the violence, cruelty, thefts, and killings that they have imposed on them, and still do on a daily basis. [quoted by Moctezuma Barragán, 1996: 47–48, my translation]
Quite a few Mexican historians have refuted the Dark Legend on a sound basis and in no uncertain terms. Here I shall only mention Pablo Moctezuma Barragán’s (1996) serious and well documented study on the life of Moctezuma and the life in the Anahuac at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards, and the murderous deeds and subsequent lies of Hernán Cortés. I highly recommend its reading to anyone interested in attaining a different view of the Aztecs and the Conquest.
Now, the way in which Rohr dealt with Mann’s book is a prime example of an unacceptable lack of scholarship, and calls into question her other sources. Indeed, as we shall later see, her main references for her accounts and contentions on the present-day violence in Mexico, which are the main subject of her own contribution in her text, are journalistic articles by the BBC and The Guardian.
To be fair, not all her references are journalistic. Ernst Halbmayer is a serious anthropologist, who has done much work in Venezuela and Colombia, but I have found no evidence that he has worked in Mexico. And, since the book she refers to (Halbmayer and Kar, 2012) is in German, a language I do not have access to, I have not been able to check the accuracy of her quotation; besides, the referenced document is not a public source. In any case, the reported expressions by Doña María need a clarification if she is indeed Mexican and in what part of the country she lives. I am certain that, in certain areas, it would be easy to find some people who share such feeling, but this is far from demonstrating that this is widespread among the country’s population. Such individual quotations are quite frequent in journalism, but they can be misleading.
In her demand for me to write the paper that she wants to read, and that she herself wrote in the final part of her commentary, Rohr claims that it is ‘unexplainable’ why I have left out all the ‘newer’ violence that we have been suffering in Mexico since 2006, when Felipe Calderón started his ill-fated ‘war against drug trafficking’. She also blames me for not including clinical material on the effect of this social situation on my patients. The first argument is simply not true, I have indeed mentioned the present situation of violence, which is real, and I have written extensively on the matter in the past (Hernandez-Hernández, 2010; Hernández-Tubert, 2017; Tubert-Oklander and Hernández-Tubert, 2018, among others). And neither is this a clinical paper. It is rather a serious attempt to understand, in psychoanalytic and group-analytic terms, the deep effects on the identity and self-esteem on the Mexican people of the events of the past 500 years. And this includes not only the Conquest and the Colony, but also the Independence, the long-lasting strife between liberals and conservatives and between the originary peoples and mestizos, on the one hand, and the European-minded, on the other; the French intervention, the wars with the US, the subjection to the present-day forms of economic imperialism, and the nefarious effects of 36 years of neo-liberal governments. But none of this has been taken into account by Rohr.
It is indeed surprising, when reading Rohr’s article, that she has nothing to say about the psychoanalytic and group-analytic bases of my argument. She has nothing to say about the analogy between the social and historical phenomena I am describing and Ferenczi’s (1929) description of the ‘unwelcome child’, or his contention that the violence suffered becomes even more traumatic when it is denied and disavowed (Ferenczi, 1933). In her superficial and naïve understanding of the unconscious, it seems that the fact that some things have been written about or artistically represented is enough to exclude them as part of the social unconscious, when what is repressed and denied are not only the memories of actual events, but their impact, presence, and effects on subjective, intersubjective, and social experiences and mental processes.
I do not intend to repeat here all the ideas I actually put forward in my lengthy two-part article, so I shall turn to my view of Rohr’s personal contribution, which focuses exclusively on the possible effect of present-day violence and insecurity on the Mexican social unconscious. I want to be absolutely clear about this: the violence and the specific events she reports are true and there has been, during the past several presidencies, characterized by a neo-liberal ideology and practice, not only a dramatic increase in violent crime, but also a flagrant corruption and complicity of the authorities with criminal cartels. This certainly generates major anxieties in the population. But Rohr’s appreciation of the emotional situation of the people is unfortunate and extreme, as in the following expression: ‘It is simply not possible, not to know, not to perceive, not to observe and not to be afraid, if you live in Mexico’. This is indeed a risky assertion, for someone who does not live in Mexico, who has not done any investigative work here, and whose main sources on what is actually happening are journalistic articles.
Of course, when writing about contemporary events, one frequently needs to rely on journalistic research, but it is essential to evaluate the credibility of one’s sources, since there is much improvisation, bias, and vested interests in this field. I would suggest to Rohr that, if she is truly interested in the matter of present-day crime and violence in Mexico, she should study the writings of some major Mexican independent journalists (not the commercial media, which tend to serve political and economic interests) who have carried out deep investigations of such phenomena and the connivance of the authorities with organized crime, sometimes putting their lives at risk. One of them is an extraordinary and courageous woman, and a fine writer, called Anabel Hernández, who has written several books on these matters (Hernández, 2010, 2012, 2019), and then had to leave the country for the USA, when she started to receive death threats from the drug cartels and from corrupt government officials of the previous administrations. And, if she is interested in reading my yet unpublished papers on these matters, which were presented in international congresses (Hernández-Tubert, 2017; Tubert-Oklander and Hernández-Tubert, 2018), I would be happy to let her have them.
Once again, I do not question the validity of the specific instances of violence she recounts, but I do take absolute exception at her depiction of Mexico as a lawless land filled with terrified citizens, which evokes the Dark Legend concocted by Cortés and others to conceal and justify their own crimes. There is indeed criminal violence, and the present government has done and is doing much to deal with it. It has dissolved the corrupt Federal Police and replaced with a National Guard that strives for the highest ethical and professional standards; it has carried out a wholesale combat against corruption, starting at the highest levels of government, aimed not only at organized crime, but also at white-collar crime, exerted by major business enterprises, both national and foreign or transnational, in cahoots with government officials. But, most of all, it has aimed to correct the deep causes of violence.
This is the most important point. When right-wing governments set out to eradicate crime and violence, they always resort to more violence, of the repressive kind. But this is tantamount to combating the effects, and not the causes, which are to be found in poverty and lack of opportunities, particularly for young people (Hernández-Tubert, 2011). In Mexico, during the past few decades, a large portion of our youth have become what are disdainfully known as ‘Ninis’ (Spanish for ‘neither nor’, meaning those youngsters that neither work nor study). This is not a consequence of ignorance, laziness, or stupidity, but of lack of opportunities, as a result of decades of neo-liberal policies that have increased enormously the incidence of dire poverty in the country. (In this, Rohr is quite right in her depiction of the brutal contrast between misery and offensive displays of ever-increasing wealth in Mexico, as in many Latin-American countries.) In many areas of the country, the only possible opening for these youths has been being incorporated by organized crime. As an alternative, the present government has offered them economic support, in order that they may either study or learn a trade and acquire the work experience that is required to get a job. There have also been economic allowances for the elderly, the sick, and the disadvantaged. The money for such social programmes and for large projects of infrastructure has come from the suspension of major corruption, the recovery of large amounts of money that had been embezzled by corrupt officials and large business, and the demand that large corporations pay their long-due taxes, which had been waved by previous governments. The enormity of the amount of all these is astonishing. And all these supports are delivered directly to the beneficiaries, by means of debit cards, instead of doing it through government agencies, in order to avoid their deviation. To many members of the opposition, this is communism, but to those of us who support such policies, it is a welfare state. Of course, there have been most violent attacks from those whose interests have been affected by these policies.
And what about the result? The incidence of delinquency and criminality has dropped significantly in most states. This applies to the various types of criminal activity, with the exception of wilful homicides, which have shown a meagre decrease, but a decrease, nonetheless. This means that criminality has decreased, but at a much slower rate than one would have wished. But this is what was to be expected. Deterrent measures, such as increased vigilance and enhanced intervention by the security forces, have a certain immediate effect, but the attack on causes takes time. When a significant number of people have developed a criminal lifestyle, they will continue to act that way, in spite of all threats of punishment. Criminality has become a cognitive style, a way to construe their experience, as Gregory Bateson (1972) has shown in the case of alcoholism. And our analytic experience has taught us what a difficult and lengthy task it is to change someone’s assumptions about existence. But the case is even tougher when we have to deal with a social pathology that took several decades to develop. Perhaps we will have to wait for a couple of new generations that have grown under more auspicious circumstances, before we can see the kind of change we wish for.
In this, Rohr is absolutely right when she says that ‘one president alone [or any given administration, which in Mexico lasts six years, I would add] is not able to change the reality of massive violence and the infiltration of drug cartels into society and politics just within a period of few years’ (Rohr, 2021). Social change takes time and consistent and prolonged effort, but it has to start at some point, and in Mexico it has already began, in spite of the virulent attacks by those that had benefitted from the previous corrupt government policies. This includes national and transnational groups, as well as the major media and journalists.
I want to clarify once again that the arguments posed in the last two pages are not related to my original article, but they are a commentary and a response to the quite different article Rohr has written as an alternative to mine, focused on a theme I had not intended to discuss in it, although I have done it in other contexts.
When reading Rohr’s critique, I was reminded of Jay Haley’s (1970) article on ‘How to criticize your fellow therapists’, in which he expounds, in his characteristic razor-sharp wit, an infallible technique to demolish any given presentation on therapy. It is a question of applying a series of polarities, such as ‘Professionalism vs. Benevolence’, ‘Overintellect vs. Overemotion’, ‘Inhumanity vs. Humanity’, and so on. Then, if a therapist presents a case focusing on the intrapsychic dimension, you can criticize him or her for not taking into account the patient’s personal relations and the family dimension, and if he works with the whole family, you can say that she is missing the internal unconscious. In the same vein, if the presented focuses on the past, you may say that she is ignoring the present, and if it centres on the present, you just decry the omission of the past. Haley’s argument focuses on therapeutic case presentations, but the very same principle can profitably be used when discussing a theoretical paper. This is how I felt when reading Rohr’s critique.
Any serious review of a paper, article, or book written by another author should start from an initial position of empathy and respect. This means that the reviewer should identify with the author, in a first phase, in order to understand her thought ‘from within’—i.e., in its own terms—and then, in a second phase, recover his individuality by exploring the similarities and differences between the two parties, and finally, in a third phase, discuss them and reach a conclusion. In this case, such empathy and respect were lacking.
