PT Journal
AU Vrbata, A
TI Ancestral soul and contemporary Brazil: conscious and unconscious imagery in the interpretation of Brazil in Roberto Gambini
SO Romanica Olomucensia
PY 2016
BP 237
EP 254
VL 28
IS 2
DI 10.5507/ro.2016.022
DE Gambini; Brazil; psyche; unconscious; cultural complex.
AB The paper deals with Roberto Gambini's Jungian analysis of contemporary Brazilian society as it was developed during the 1980s and 1990s. Focusing on the complex and not completely transparent conditions of the very beginning of the Portuguese colonization project in Brazil, Gambini studies early 16th-century Jesuit correspondence, identifies cross-cultural (erotic and demonic) transference between the European/Catholic and indigenous psyches and infers the psychological conditioning of today's Brazilians. Both Gambini's multidisciplinary approach and the complex issue he is dealing with make his research compatible with the Jungian project of Eranos Tagung (conferences), whose aim was to move beyond the narrow limits of specialized knowledge (history, sociology, anthropology, etc.) and thinking on the "edge" or "borderland" of the scientific and the extra-scientific. Such a shift to a Husserlian Lebenswelt seems also to be confirmed by Gambini's anticipation of the concept of "cultural complex" that was developed later (Henderson, Adams, Singer, Kimbles).
ER