The Naked Science: Psychoanalysis in Spain, 1914-1948 Thomas F. Glick Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.

24, No. 4. (Oct., 1982), pp. 533-571.

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The Naked Science: Psychoanalysis in Spain, 1914-1948

THOMAS F. G L I C K
Boston University
Science is nakedness and nakedness is forbidden among us. G r e g o r i o Maran6n (1929) 1 There are two phases in a person's life: before reading Freud and after. W e n c e s l a o Femhndez Flores (ca. 1925)?
I . S C I E N C E A N D C I V I L D I S C O U R S E IN R E S T O R A T I O N S P A I N

The effort to implant secular science in Spain was stymied throughout the nineteenth century by a ruling conservative elite which held that "science without religion is blind"' and viewed the practice of science divorced from an explicitly Catholic, Thomist philosophical framework as being the equivalent of civil subversion. Medical doctors, in particular, were held to be subversive; in the aftermath of the conservative overthrow of the liberal government in 1824 all professors of the Madrid Medical College were either imprisoned or removed from their chair^.^ The liberal revolution of 1868, which briefly overthrew the Bourbons and their conservative supporters and installed the short-lived First Republic, was universally regarded by Spanish scientists as having opened the door to new ideas. Chief among these was Darwinism, anathema to Catholic conservatives because of its challenge to Biblical dogma. There had been virtually no discussion of this heretical idea before the revolution, and it was freely discussed in its wake. The medical community was particularly active both in the reception of Darwinism and other new ideas and also in the liberal political arena itself, with numerous physicians elected to the Cortes of 1868 and 1873, where they argued vig-

Birth Control Re~'ietv, 13:6 (1929), 159. This anecdote was related to me by Jose Ruiz-Castillo Basala. Madrid. 2 April 1981. Attributed to the pretender Don Carlos, in an interview in The New York Herald, reprinted in Punch, 22 August 1874. J . M. L6pez Pinero, Medicina y sociedad en la Espana del siglo XIX (Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1964). 61. Lopez Piiiem stresses the "rare unanimity" in the liberalism of Spanish physicians of the first third of the nineteenth century.

' Gregorio Marancin, "Sex and Religion in Spain,"

0010-4175/82/4166-1307 $2.50 0 1982 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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THOMAS F . CLICK

orously for reform. The republican period proved to be an anomalous interlude. With the Bourbon restoration and, in particular, the university crisis of 1876, Darwinists lost their university chairs, and the medical community, generally speaking, was in opposition again. Political polarization was a structural component of scientific activity in nineteenth-century Spain, with scientists (particularly medical scientists and natural historians) typically in opposition to traditional conservative governments and, as a group, conspicuously active in republican politics. Conservatives, on the other hand, tended to equate science with unbelief and to suspect that its practice challenged authoritarian values. (Although such polarization was extreme in the context of contemporary Western societies, there are other examples as extreme, such as Argentina in the past decade.) Although Spaniards over the past hundred years or more have tended to legitimate pro- and antiscience positions in terms of specific value systems, it appears that such statements are posterior justifications for political positions which in themselves are unrelated to the practice of science. Although conservatives were firmly entrenched in power throughout the last three decades of the nineteenth century, they were unable to forestall completely the advance of secularization, and conditions for the establishment of civil discourse in science slowly emerged, probably in consequence of increasing contacts between conservative Spanish men of science and their European counterparts. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, as the result of an emerging consensus among all factions of the elite that science had to be depoliticized in order for modernization to take place, a climate favorable to civil discourse on scientific issues evolved.' In the 1920s the Spanish scientific community and intellectuals generally were parties to an open and free discussion of the two great revolutionary
Thomas F. Glick, "Science and the Revolution of 1868." in La Revolucirin de 1868. Clara Lida and Iris Zavala, eds. (New York: Las Americas, 1970), 267-72; idem, "Spain," in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, T . F. Glick, cd. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974). 307-45. On medical deputies, see J . Alvarez-Sierra, "Los diputados midicos de la primera Rcpublica," El Sixlo MPdico, 92:4165 (1933), 400-401. Spanish intellectual historians have long recognized the polarization of the elite into "two Spains" (sometimes with a progressive conservative "tcrcera Espana" in the middle). According to some students of elites, there is no basis for dispassionate civil discourse when an elite is sharply divided into conservative and progressive sectors. In such cases, all factions are heavily ideologized, and all ideas, whether they bear an overtly political message or not, are used automatically for ideological purposes. When the elite is not in agreement over the necessity of dispassionate civil discourse, then ideas will disseminate only partially, following lines of factional division. When an elite is more unified, at least on the issue of assigning a positive value to civil discourse, then there is a much diminished tendency for ideas, including scientific ones, to become ideologized. See G. Lowell Field and John Higley, Elitism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). See, for example, the observation of Ataulfo Huertas, a moderate but not extremist clerical critic of Einstein, that "we have not made [relativity] the object of political philias or phobias,"in "La Rclatividad de Einstein," Revista Calasancia, 1 1 (1923), 241.

'

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scientific ideas of the epoch, the theory of relativity and Freudian psychology. Both of these, although seemingly loaded with potential ideological charges, enjoyed wide acceptance throughout the elite, with opposition, of the type offered to Darwinism by conservatives, limited to a tiny minority of diehard reactionaries. As hostility between the conservative and liberal sectors of the elite sharpened in the 1930s, the civil discourse in science which had yielded such rich results in the previous decade began to break down, and signs of a conservative flight from Freud and Einstein alike began to appear. The Francoist regime of the 1940s and 1950s, which explicitly decreed an end to postEnlightenment science and a return to the pristine "Catholic unity of the sciences," represented a reversion to the status quo ante: a deeply disunified elite with the conservative traditionalist sector in control. As a result, Darwinism, Freudianism, and the theory of relativity were ideologized, or reideologized, and virtually proscribed. The present essay seeks to examine civil discourse in science in Spain during the 1920s by examining the debate over psychoanalysis; the study is parallel to an investigation on the reception of relativity in the same period. The discussion is extended into the 1940s to compare the effects of radical political change.
11. T H E F R E U D I A N I S M O F N O N - F R E U D I A N S

For the reasons previously outlined, Freudian psychology was officially proscribed after 1940, with the result that an entire generation of Spaniards reached maturity without any knowledge of Spain's past interaction with Freudian thought. When, beginning in the late 1950s, psychoanalysis was reintroduced from the United States, South America, or France, Spanish practitioners were able to relate to the international past of the discipline, but not to the indigenous history of Freudian psychology which they assumed not to have existed at all. Only in the past several years has there been a begrudging admission that a Freudian discussion took place in Spain before the civil war, not in the form of a psychoanalytic movement per se, but at least in that of a "discourse around p s y c h ~ a n a l y s i s " .The essence of the Spanish recep~ tion of Freudianism, as I will document, was its assimilation by a psychiatric community which prided itself on its critical faculties and on its eclectic tradition. Since the orthodox Freudian historiographical tradition rejects the validity of eclecticism, there is no way to assess the impact of Freud in Spain
X . Thomas F. Click. "Einstein y los espafioles: Aspectos de la recepcibn de la relatividad," Llull: Boletin de la Sociedad Espatiola d e Historia de [as Ciencias, 2:4 (December 1979), 3-22; idem, "Einstein a Barcelona," CiPncia (Barcelona), no. 3 (October 1980), 10-18. " Valentin CorcCs Pando, in a 1978 lecture, cited by German L. Garcia, Oscar Masotta y el psicoanalisis del castellano (Barcelona: Biblioteca Freudiana, 1980). 130. It has been shown empirically that Spanish scientists today are disconnected from Spain's scientific past and feel no sense of continuity with pre-civil war scientists. Pedro Gonzalez Blanco, El investigador cientqico en Espatia (Madrid: Centro de lnvestigaciones Sociol6gicas. 1980), 116-17

through the approaches typically found in internal histories of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic movements, in which eclecticism is viewed as a particularly pernicious form of rejection. Particularly revealing is the vaccination metaphor used by the Lacanian historian of psychoanalysis Germin L. Garcia to describe a reaction to Freud deemed typical of intellectual circles in Europe and America in the 1920s-a "homeopathic" reading of psychoanalysis in which "Freudian terms are invoked to conjure Freudian discourse, whereby the authors are vaccinated against their effect." l o Garcia himself provides a short history of Freudianism in Spain which mentions the major discussants in the Freudian discourse without caring, however, to assess Freud's impact upon the clinical or theoretical attitudes of such persons. The view presented in this essay is that in the course of 1920s and 1930s, the steady percolation of Freudian concepts into medical understanding caused a revolution in Spanish medical thought and, even more markedly, in clinical practice. But in using an examination of the procedures in place at the outbreak of the civil war to uncover and evaluate the impact of Freud's ideas in Spain, it is necessary to abandon the practice of regarding orthodox psychoanalysis as a standard against which any eclectic assimilation of Freudian ideas must be adjudged unsuccessful, incomplete, or deviant. l 2

The reception of Freudian psychology in Spain was marked by ease and rapidity of permeation, among physicians before Spanish translations were available and in the educated public afterwards, and by rapid integration of Freudian psychology within the general body of medical and psychological theory. In spite of a general fit with previous patterns of polarization along sociopolitical lines (with liberals tending to favor, conservatives to question, Freudian ideas), Catholic opposition was relatively mild. The "Preliminary Communication" ( 1 893) of Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria had been published in two Spanish medical journals (in Granada and Barcelona) virtually contemporaneously with its appearance in German. In spite of this precocity, the impact of Freud's concept of hysteria was delayed,

'

Garcia, Oscar Musorm, 40. Ibid., 130-36. Garcia's interesting history of psychoanalysis in Argentina betrays a similar foreshortening of vision in assigning scant importance to the appearance of Freudian ideas prior to the institutionalization of psychoanalysis there in 1943. German L. Garcia, La entrada del psicoanalisis en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Altazor, 1978). l 2 This is not a purely orthodox stance. At a symposium on psychiatry and psychoanalysis in early twentieth-century Spain, held in Madrid on 3 April 1981, many speakers (none of them Freudian) seemed to apologize for the absence of an orthodox Freudian period in Spanish medical history. My position was that the eclectic Spanish reception of Freud in the 1920s was an ideal object of study, because of its intellectual richness and social complexity. l 3 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, "Mecanismo psiquico de los fendmenos histericos," Gacera Mgdica de Granada, 11 (1893). 105- 11, 129-35; and Ret,istu de Ciencius Mkdicas de Barcelona, 19 (1893), 54-59, 85-89.
l0

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and the theory was reintroduced by Enrique Fernandez Sanz (1872-1950) in a chapter on psychoanalysis in his 1914 book on hysteria. l 4 That discussion was the first exposition of Freud's theories that many Spanish physicians read and, although it presented a full and objective summary of Freudian theory, it reached decidedly unfavorable conclusions. According to Fernandez Sanz, the geographical acceptance of Freudianism to 1914 had been extremely uneven, having found favor in Austria, Switzerland, and North America; been opposed in Germany; and regarded in Latin countries as "a strange scientific aberration." In the Hispanic countries there were but few proselytes. Fernandez Sanz praised Freud's studies of the basic processes of psychic life and stressed the importance of the unconscious, but he concluded that although certain elements of psychoanalytic technique were clinically useful (as diagnostic tools), as a psychological system Freudianism was dangerous. He summarized his criticisms under twelve rubrics which included lack of originality (e.g., Freud's originality in positing the sexual origin of neurosis lay only in overgeneralizing the point, which had been made by others); lack of rigorous logic in the demonstration of concepts; the arbitrariness of symbols adopted to explain dreams, and so forth; Freud's "nominalism" and abuse of artificial systematization which had the effect of oversimplifying reality (an example cited by Fernandez Sanz is the artificial separation of sexual and ego complexes); the exclusivity assigned to sexuality in the psychic process; the ineffectiveness and even harmfulness of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method; and, finally, the doleful moral consequences of the Freudian approach to sexuality. And yet, some years later, JosC SBnchis Banus (1890-1932), one of the most "Freudian" of Spanish psychiatrists during the 1920s, could say that he had learned his first notions of psychoanalysis from Fernandez Sanz's artic1e'"whose value as popularization can be appreciated from the long list of German and English titles whose contents it synthesized). In this way, anti- or non-Freudian expositions of Freud's works were a powerful force for the promotion of the ideas they attacked-a process not envisioned in canonical histories of psychoanalysis. A decade later, Fernandez Sanz modified his stance somewhat when he acknowledged that psychoanalytic therapy could be effective if a number of conditions were
' 4 E. Femindez Sanz, Histerismo, teoria y clinica (Madrid: Francisco Beltran, 1914), 189-239; also published as "El psicoanilisis." Los Progresos de / ( I Clinicu, 3 (1914). 257-83, which is the version cited here. Although this article was much cited, it was not the first detailed account available to Spanish physicians. The year before, Rafael del Valle y Aldabalde (1863- 1937) had published an article on Freud and his followers which provided a fairly balanced account, although it was opposed to Freud's "exaggerated" emphasis on \exual factors. Valle thought that psychoanalytic therapy applied to women and children could be dangerous if it awakened sexual desires which the subject could not handle. "El psicoanilisis de Freud," Revistu de Medicinu y Cirugia Prdclica.~. 1265 (1913), 169-79, 2 0 9 16. 37: ' 5 Jose Sinchis Banus, "La cuestidn del psicoanilisis." Archivu.~ de Medicinu. Cirugia y E.specialidades. 15:3 (1924), 137.

observed: the physician, who was assumed to practice a variety of psychotherapies, should only accept a few, carefully selected cases for analysis; he should respect the spontaneity of the patient, intervening as little as possible; and he should use free association as the most effective diagnostic technique. Fernindez Sanz's 1914 article initiated a phase of discussion of psychoanalysis within the medical community by psychiatrists who had studied in Germany or who read German. There was, for example, also in 1914, a discussion of Freud in the Academic MCdico-Quirurgica of Madrid whose protagonist appears to have been Fernandez Sanz, criticism of Freudian "paneroticism" having been his keynote. l 7 Towards the end of the decade, however, there was a marked shift in the tenor of the popular medical discussion of Freudianism as leading disciples of Santiago Ram6n y Cajal were able to promote the message that a serious revolution in psychological thought had taken place. Among Cajal's disciples, two in particular played important roles in the reception of Freudian ideas, Gonzalo Lafora (1 886- 1971) and JosC M. Sacristan (1887-1957). In 1918 and 1919, both wrote articles on Freudian themes on the medical page of El Sol, the influential Madrid daily run by JosC Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). l 8 In a 1919 article on hysteria, Lafora summed up the selectively pro-Freudian stance then common among Cajal's disciples:
Modern criticism has accepted many of Freud's viewpoints, such as the importance of the subconscious, the intervention of childhood reminiscences in psychic life, the reality of repressed complexes and their symbolic exteriorization in dreams, impulsive acts, jokes, distractions, and in psychoneurotic symptoms, but it does not admit the affirmation that sexuality invades as a unique causal factor all these psychological mechanisms; that is, it opposes the pansexual theory of Freud and his school.lg

Later, we will see how Lafora's critical stance towards Freud worked out in practice. However, the prominence of disciples of Cajal in the discussion of Freud in Spain is, in itself, noteworthy. Cajal himself was rigorously somaticist and opposed to Freudian psychology. In his later years, he partially
'6 E. Femindez Sanz, "La tecnica del paicoanlilisia como instrumento terapeutico," El Siglu MPdico, 71 :3628 (1923), 597-601. l 7 The session is referred to by Abddn Sanche7-Herrero, "Neuropatias post-blenorragicas." El Siglo MPdico, 62:3187 (1915). 37. Sanchez-Herrero was a psychiatrist of the old school, stridently anti-Freudian. In a review of FemLndez Sanz's book on hysteria, he had asserted that Freud was "erapier than a goat." "Una obra eapafiola," El Siglo MPdico, 61:3184 (1914), 803-05. For example. Jose M. Sacristan, "La interpretacicin de loa auenoa aegun S. Freud," El Sol, 3 March 1918; Gonzalo Lafora, "Es curable la locura?" El Sul, 16 April 1918. Other articles on paychoanalysia appearing in El Sol during this period were Santos Rubiano, "La interpretacicin psicobiolcigica de las psicosis. Sobre las nuevas orientaciones paiquiatricas," I I and 18 November 1919; and Lorenzo Luzuriaga. "El paicoanilisis y la coeducaci6n," 10 June 1920. I y Gonzalo Lafora. "Las concepciones sobre el hiaterismo." El Sol, 29 July 1919.

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN SPAIN

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completed a manuscript entitled "The Hallucinations of Sleep," which analyzed the content and significance of thousands of dreams, "carefully registered," in a sense contrary to that of Freud whose approach he found "impregnated with mysticism." He also believed that most mental lapses were of purely physiological origin and could not be explained by repression."' Given the neurological orientation of Cajal's disciples, how can one explain their generally open attitude towards Freud? Carlos Castillo del Pino suggests that Cajal's staunchly positivist (and Darwinist, I might add) approach to the study of the nervous system was not so much different from that proposed by Freud (indeed, Cajal himself cited Freud's histological work approvingly). The Freudian theory of the libido has, in particular, a strong positivist component, insofar as Freud cast it in a developmental, phylogenetic context. If the students of Cajal, who believed that the functioning of the nervous system could be understood only phylogentically, had given a similar reading to Freud, their ease in coming to grips with the new concepts is fully understandable. As we will note below, psychoanalysis was perceived as a biological, not purely psychological, doctrine in Madrid medical circles in the 1920s. Around 1920, discussion of Freud was still confined mainly to medical or psychiatric circles. However, in 191 1 Ortega y Gasset, while still studying in Marburg, had written a popularizing article entitled "Psychoanalysis: A Problematic Science," which was intended to reach a wider a ~ d i e n c e . ~The ' article, although ambivalent, is a defense of Freud and its title was designed to counter the canard that psychoanalysis is not a science. In Ortega's view, psychoanalysis constituted a series of doctrines which "rather than false, [were] not true, but scientifically suggestive." Ortega, interestingly, read Freud as a physiological reductionist: "The reduction to the physiological of all medical questions, the imperative of the new psychology which declares it illicit to seek outside of the body the principle of psychic variations, whether normal or heraclitic, neither constitute caprices of a materialist ideology nor unfounded limitations on the field of reality, as happens with other positivist principles." At the end of the same article he states that biology, as it seeks to transform itself from a passive descriptive discipline into an explanatory one, strives to convert itself into mechanics. But mechanics is a physical concept, and any mechanical explanation which is not physical is only a

*"

Santiago Ramcin y Cajal. Ohrus literurias rompletus (Madrid: Aguilar. 1961). 314.

316-17. The rnanuacript of Cajal's dream book does not survive.

Blas Matamoro, "Freud en Andalucia. Carlos Castillo del Pino y el psicoanilisis en Espana," Norre: Revisla Hispanu-Americana, 3d epoch, no. 278 (August 19771, 55. 22 Jose Ortega y Gasset, "Psicoanilisis, ciencia prohlemitica," Ohras completas (Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1946) 1, 216-38. The article had originally been published in three parts, two in La Lec.tura (Madrid) and the third. entitled "El secreto de los suenos." in La Prerrsa (Buenos Aires), 3 October 191 1

''

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THOMAS F . C L I C K

metaphor. "At heart, Freud is trying to make psychophysiology lead into biology, and 1 find nothing to oppose in this tendency." 2 3 Ortega, therefore, found Freudian ideas interesting and challenging. In 1917 he convinced Jose Ruiz-Castillo, director of the Madrid publishing house Biblioteca Nueva, to seek the Spanish rights to Freud's complete works-a negotiation carried on through the diplomatic pouch of the Spanish embassy in Vienna, while World War I was still in progress.24 The series began publication in 1922 with The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, preceded by a short prologue by Ortega, and was the first collected works of Freud in any language. 25 The immediate commercial success of the collected works signaled the start not only of a phase of intense popularization of Freudian ideas in Spain but also of a revolution in Spanish publishing. According to Ruiz-Castillo's son, collections of essays were rarely published and were almost always financial failures. The success of the Freud series, whose second title was Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, convinced publishers that such volumes had commercial possibilities. This was the direct antecedent of the influential volumes of essays published in the middle and late 1920s by members of the Spanish intellectual elite, including Ortega.26 Before the civil war, each of the Freud volumes went through three printings, for a total run numbering approximately 15,000, of which The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and The Interpretation of Dreams sold the most copiesa pattern similar to the experience of other European countries. The wide diffusion of these volumes among Spanish intellectuals and professionals cannot be stressed too much. According to one account, "there is no person held to be even moderately intelligent or intellectual in whose library the books of Freud do not figure in a preeminent place." In the process of interviewing Spanish engineers on the reception of relativity in the 1920s, I became aware of the exposure of this group to Freud.27 Engineers, physi2 Ortega, "Psicoanilisis, ciencia problemitica," 222. Ortega had become interested in Freud ' as early as 1910, when in an article on Pio Baroja he expounded Freud's notions of unsatisfied desires. Ortega, Obras cotnpletu.~,11, 109-10. On Ortega's youthful interest in biomechanics, see Ciriaco Mor6n Arroyo, El sistema de Ortegu y Gusset (Madrid: Alcali, 1968). 197. 24 Jose Ruiz-Castillo Basala, El apasionante mundo del libro: Memorias de un editor (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1979). 108. 2s Volume I, Lupsicopatologia de la vida cotidiana, appeared in April 1922. Ortega's short introduction to volume I was also printed in El Sol, "Sobre un libro de Freud," 12 April 1922. The series was first advertised, at 10 pesetas the volume, on April 19, and volume I was reviewed by Lorenzo Luzuriaga on May 22. Subsequent volumes reviewed in El Sol were Una teori'a sexual y otros ensuyos (vol. 11). 29 March 1923; El chiste y su relacidn con lo inconsciente (vol. 111). 18 August 1923; Totem y tabu (vol. VIII, reviewed by Ernesto Gimenez Caballero), 12 January 1925; Psicologi'a de lus masas y analisis del yo (vol. IX, reviewed by Gimenez Caballero), 21 July 1925; Inhibicidn. sintoma y angusria (vol. XI), 3 August 1927; Psicologia de la vida erotica (vol. XIII), 18 July 1929; El porvenir de las religiones (vol. XIV, reviewed by Jose M. Ruiz Manent), 7 October 1930. 26 Jose Ruiz-Castillo Basala, personal communication, Madrid, 2 April 1981. 27 Antonio Abaunza, "Ensayo a modo de prcilogo," in Augusto [sic] Marie, La crisis del psicoanalisis (Madrid: n.p., 1930), viii. The mathematician Tomas Rodriguez Bachiller (person-

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cians, writers, and artists belonged to overlapping circles of affinity (e.g., the Residencia de Estudiantes, tertulias or discussion groups of intellectual leaders such as Ortega, and so forth) which played an important role in the rapid diffusion of scientific ideas beyond disciplinary boundaries. The Obras completas were translated by Luis Lopez Ballesteros, a journalist who had been a correspondent in Germany.28 The high literary quality of L6pez Ballesteros's translation was widely recognized at the time. Freud himself wrote a congratulatory letter to Lopez Ballesteros in May of 1923, in which he noted that he was able to certify the correctness of the translation because of his youthful readings of Don Quixote in Spanish. He complimented the translator "for the most correct interpretation of my thought and the elegance of style. I admire, above all, how you have been able to achieve so absolute and precise a mastery over such complex and, at times, obscure material, even though you are neither a physician nor a psychiatrist by profes~ i o n . "With the professionalization of psychoanalysis in the Spanish~~ speaking world in the 1940s however, the Lopez Ballesteros text was found increasingly wanting in technical precision. By this time, however, the Biblioteca Nueva text had become virtually canonical and many of Lopez Ballesteros's renditions of Freudian terms had already entered the language, making the task of future translators extremely difficult. For example, Lopez Ballesteros always rendered the German Verdrangung as represidn; but subsequent commentators and translators have preferred to translate the term, at least in some contexts, as desalojo (displacement). Meanwhile, as a result of the popularity of the Lopez Ballesteros version, represion had acquired the meaning intended by desalojo. 3" Such semantic problems impelled many Argentinian analysts to abandon the Lopez Ballesteros text and to read Freud in English. Several of the first volumes of the series were reviewed in Ortega's journal, the Revista de Occidente, established in 1923. In that year, Manuel Garcia Morente reviewed Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and Sacristan, The Ego and the Id; the following year, the Interpretation of Dreams
al communication, Madrid, 10 April 1980) recalled buying the Obras completas "as they appeared," and discussing their contents with a schoolfellow at the Escuela de Caminos. Pedro Lucia Ordoi~ez, was an engineer in the circle of Ortega; his library, whose contents I examined by permission of his family, also contained the works of Freud, as well as other foreign authors on psychoanalysis. 2X According to Jose Ruiz-Castillo Basala. Freud's royalties were 500 pesetas per volume, outright. Lopez Ballesteros was also paid 500 pesetas per volume, because his translation was good and he worked fast. 29 The Spanish version of the letter is given by Ruiz-Castillo Basala, El apasionanle mundo del libro. 109. 30 Jose Luis Etcheveny, Sohre la version castellana, Vol. I of Sigmund Freud, Obras completas, J. L. Etcheveny, ed. (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1978). 59-61. The solution here was to translate Verdrangung as represicin, but to further specify in brackets desalojo or esfuerzo de desalojo where required.

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T H O M A S F. G L l C K

(volumes 6 and 7 of the Obras) was reviewed by Lafora. 3 ' Sacristan also reported, with scant commentary, on the Revue Juive article in which Freud answered his critics. The same period-1924 in particular+onstituted the high-water mark of Ortega's interest in Freud, which ended with his adopting a stance philosophically distant from both Freud and his earlier position favorable to mechanicism:

"

I believe that thcre are somc uscful and clcar idcas in Frcud's systcm; but 1 havc littlc affinity for it as a wholc. Not to go into spccific questions, I will only indicatc that Freudian psychology tends to make psychic life into a mechanical process, although according to a mcntal, not a physical, mcchanicism. 1 believe that mechanicist propensity to havc bcen surpassed, in principlc, by prcscnt-day scicncc, and a psychological theory which docs not atomizc consciousness, explaining it as thc mere result of associations and dissociations betwccn single elcments,'is morc fccund. In psychology as in gcncral biology, wc are going to try anothcr tack: to address the whole psyche in ordcr to cxplain its parts. It is not sensations-psychic atoms-which clarify thc structurc of thc pcrsona, but vice vcrsa: cach sensation is a specification of the psychic whole. My distancc from Frcud, thereforc, is radical and prior to the alrcady more concrete question of the importance of sexuality in the architecture of the mind. One could almost say that I am anti-Freudian except for two reasons: the first, becausc that would situatc mc among mean-looking pcoplc; thc sccond, a dccisivc rcason, is that in this cpoch when cveryonc is "anti," I aspire to be and not to he ~ g u i n s r . ~ ~

1 believe the spirit of this passage is the key to Ortega's central role in the promotion of Freudian ideas in Spain, in spite of his own broad philosophical opposition to Freudian views. In his biological thought, Ortega was antiDarwinian and very close to the German neovitalists. His philosophical perspective on Freud is related to this body of thought and to his philosophy of science, rather than to scruples on sexuality or other particular elements of Freudian doctrine. It is clear from his statement that he believed that there was a positive social gain to be had from creating an atmosphere in which Freudian ideas were considered openly and objectively. Indeed, this he could well have perceived as a mandate, since virtually every declared anti-Freudian was a political conservative opposed as well to all social values that Ortega held dear. These were the mean-looking people-"genres de mala catadura"3 1 Manucl Garcia Morente, "El chistc y su teoria," Revista de Occidenre, I:.? (1923), 356-68; Jose M. Sacristrian, "Das Ich und das Es," Revista de Occidente. 2:s (1923), 263-66; Gonzalo Lafora, "La intcrprctacicin de 10s suciios," Revista de occidente. 6:16 (1924), 161-65. Scc also Evclync Lcipez Campillo, La Revista de Occidenre y la formacirin de minorias (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1972), 95-98. 32 Jose M. Sacristan, "Frcud antc sus contradictorcs," Revista de Occidente. 8:22 (19251, 134-39. This was a rcsurne of Freud's article, "The Resistance of Psychoanalysis," Collected Papers. 5 vols., Jamcs Strachey, cd. (New York: Basic Books, 1959), V: 163-74. 3 3 Ortega, "Vitalidad, a h a , espiritu," Obras completas. 11, 452-53 (1924). In "El origen dcportivo dcl estado," written thc same ycar, Ortega comrncnted on social ramifications of ocdipal relationships and the instinct of sociability, bascd on a reading of thc Biblioteca Nucva version of Freud's Totem m d Taboo, Ortcga's own copy of which was hcavily annotated. scc Nelson R. Orringcr, Orregay sus fuentes germanicas (Madrid: Grcdos, 1979), 224-25, csp. n. I . (Omnger's information on Freud's Obras compleras. howcver, is garbled.)

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the habitually strident antis whom Ortega associated with the discredited policies and values of traditional Spain. Their opposition was reason enough to favor Freud. Ortega continued to foment Freudian discussion into the 1930s. There were discussions of psychoanalysis in his famous tertulia held on the premises of the Revista de Occidente. Angel Garma (b. 1904), who had been introduced by Sacristan, was one of those frequently in attendance; Garma had returned from Germany in 1931 and was Spain's orily analyst before the civil war. Garma recalls both positive and negative discussions, in particular, one on the role of sexuality in psychoanalysis in which the parasitologist Gustavo Pittaluga expressed opposition.

'"

IV. FREUD AND SPANISH MEDICINE

Reception in the Psychiatric Community

The launching of the Obras completas in 1922 initiated a new phase in the reception of psychoanalysis in Spain which lasted until the civil war, with perhaps a secondary milestone in 193 1, the advent of the Second Republic. In the period 1922-31, we can observe a three-tiered process: ( I ) the intensification of the medical debate; a decisive therapeutic shift, under the influence of Freud, in Spanish clinical psychiatry; the codification of Freudian ideas in manuals and courses; and the impact of Freudian ideas on nonpsychiatric medicine; (2) the development of a social debate over Freudian notions of sexuality, associated with the sexual reform movement; and (3) the creative integration of Freudian psychology in literature, theatre, and art. Of the many psychiatrists who debated the merits of psychoanalysis in the 1920s, we will discuss only two leaders, the pro-Freudian Jose Sanchis Banus and the anti-freudian JosC Maria de Villaverde (1888-1936). Sanchis Banus, although he claimed to belong to no particular psychological school," was one of the most outspoken Freudians in the Spanish medical community. In a brief prepared for an ecclesiastical divorce proceeding in 1923, which Sanchis Banus entered on behalf of a woman suing for separation on the grounds of the harmful psychological effects of coitus interruptus, he argued wholly within a Freudian framework. Psychoanalysis was not the capricious invention of a man of genius, he told the clerics, but "a rigorous and systematic body of doctrine in which inductions are heavily mixed with observed facts"
3Qngel Garrna, pcrsonal communication, Buenos Aircs, 13 Novcmber 1979. Garma rccallcd in 1972, "Thc attitudc of my collcagucs [in Madrid1 with rcspcct to my psychoanalytic practice was predominantly onc of indiffercncc. 1 communicatcd prcfcrentially [on psychoanalysis] with Sacristin, Maranbn, Ortega y Gassct and Migucl Prados" (pcrsonal communication, 18 Scptembcr 1972). Sce an allusion to Frcud in Gustavo Pittaluga's lecture, "La cscncia del qucrer," as reportcd in El Sol, 3 Fcbruary 1926. j5 Report of Sinchis Banus's lecture, "El problcma penal dcsdc cl punto de vista psiquiatrico." El Sol. 19 May 1926. Bands statcs that he could havc entitled his lecturc "Watson, Kretschrncr, Frcud and the Penal Problcm," but he bclonged to no onc school.

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It is not in contradiction with any facts o f proven reality known up to now, and it explains completely a certain order o f phenomena." These phenomena were the neurotic symptoms resultant from the repression o f the libido. He explicated the Freudian notion o f the sexual aetiology o f neurosis and how this was understood in terms o f infantile sexuality and the psychosexual stages. Beginning his exposition o f the physical mechanism o f normal coitus, Sanchis Banus stated that the notion that sexual pleasure o f women is less intense than that o f men is a "degrading declaration," providing the context for the assertion that coitus intemptus defrauds women and that an unsatisfied libido produces anxiety. In his discussion o f the subject's case history, he interpreted a dream in which she traversed an unending staircase, an allusion (he explained) to the hoped-for orgasm that never arrived. 36 His own clinical experience had given him evidence regarding sexual aetiology o f neurosis. He reported in 1924 that in 70 percent o f the psychoneurotic patients whom he had treated there was a profound gap between what they wanted and what they had achieved in sexual matters. No technique o f treatment, he asserted, had in his hands given results comparable to psychotherapy, practiced with the aim o f aligning the sexual desires and possibilities o f the patients.37 Sanchis Banus created a school o f psychiatry which was much more psychologically oriented than that practiced by the disciples o f Caja1.38 He was also a socialist and was able to mold his political ideology together with Freudian concepts into a coherent program for social reform. Villaverde was, in a certain sense, the conservative counterpart to Ortega in the social debate over psychoanalysis. For him, many o f Freud's supporters were "persons enamored o f everything new and who in no way wish to pass for reactionaries." Such people would systematically accept everything new, because they believed it to be better.3Villaverde, like most conservative critics, was unwilling to accept Freud's sexual theories. Specifically, he refused to admit either that sexual dissatisfaction led to neurosis or that sexual satisfaction prevented it. His argumentation, however, was wholly subjective and based on traditional values, e.g., abstinence has been proven the best remedy for excessive sexual appetite.40 He was the most prominent visceral
36 Jose Sanchis Banus, "Acerca de los trastomos nerviosos originados en la mujer por la prictica sistematica del 'coitus interruptus' y su patogenia," Los Progresos de la Clinica, 12 (1923), 196-230. " Sanchis Banus, "La cuesticin del psicoanalisis," 141-42. 38 Roman Alberca Lorente, "El maestro," Revista Espatiola de Oto-neuro-oftamologia y neurocirugia. 23: 133 (1 964), 2 12. This issue contains a number of articles forming an homage to Sanchis Banus. 39 Jose Maria de Villaverde, "Algo sobre el movimiento psicoanalitico de la actualidad," La Cronica Medica (Lima), 44 (1927), 183. 40 Jose Maria de Villaverde, "Algo a propcisito de la angustia," Lo Medicina Ibera, 24:604 (1929). 771-72. Among his other anti-Freudian writings, see "Las ultimas 'novedades' en materia de psicoanalisis," El Siglo Medico, 73:3659 (1924). 81-84 (in which he states that psychoanalysis is false theoretically and, in practice, leads to the corruption of youth); and "Sobre el psicoanalisis," El Siglo ML:dico, 73:3677 (1924), 536-41.

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anti-Freudian in the Spanish medical community before 1936, and an anticipation of the posture of Francoist psychiatry. But Villaverde was no lightweight. H e had studied with Constantin von Monakow and Eugen Bleuler in Zurich and, as Spanish translator of Bleuler's Lehrhuch, was responsible for the modeniization of Spanish psychiatric terminology. H e was in Switzerland when psychoanalytic interest was still high and the story of his turn away from Freud is illuminating. Villaverde returned from Switzerland in 1915 and began clinical practice in the Hospital del Buen Suceso in Madrid:
I must confcss that thcrc was a pcriod in my life whcn I was a dccidcd partisan of Freud and his theories. . . . In this period, dating to 1915, 1 workcd with truc enthusiasm, putting into practice thc psychoanalytic proccdurcs thcn in usc, and 1 gathered a grcat number of case histories in which 1 attempted to unravel psychopathic symptoms with the method of intcrpretation of drcams and that of Jungian associations. . . . In none of thc paticnts studied was there any isolated anxiety, like a floating anxiety, nor could onc attest to any anxicty neurosis. Thesc wcrc psychasthcnics with attenuatcd forms of manic-dcprcssivc psychosis, some neurasthenics with episodcs of anxiety, hysterics with various somatic cpisodes . . . and some psychopathic personalities who cpisodically presentcd symptoms from thc prcvious groups. Thc application of psychoanalysis was not, in principle, inappropriate to any onc of thcsc statcs, for cvcn in thc case of manic-dcprcssivc psychosis . . . Freud ultimatcly rccognizcd this procedure as Icgitimate, as [Karl] Abraham, [Alphonsc] Macdcr, [Erncst] Joncs and [Wilhclm] Stckcl had beforc. The result of drcam analysis, following Freud's methods and the symbolism of Freud and Jung, did not lead me to any great results. 1 bclicvc 1 applicd all thc timc necessary and thc care required, but I was ncvcr ablc to obtain clcar conclusions in the scnsc of specific complcxcs. Jung's method of controlled associations-for which 1 used a watch calibrated in fifths of seconds-shcd no grcat light. Clearly there was a dclay in association for ccrtain word stimuli; but in no casc could wc dcrivc a conclusion.41

H e concluded, with respect to anxiety, that it was too complex a phenomenon to be understood by unilateral Freudian explanations. Villaverde appears to have been the first Spanish psychiatrist to have used psychoanalytic techniques in his clinical practice. But he was not the only one to have attempted the new therapy. It is clear from Gonzalo Lafora's published case studies, as well as popularizing articles o n psychoanalysis, that he too had, in the early 1920s, made considerable adjustments, in a Freudian direction, in his own clinical practice. In a 1923 lecture series in Buenos Aires on the theory and methods of psychoanalysis, Lafora stated that although he accepted psychoanalysis as a new science, he did not, for that, accept Freudian dogma as an integral whole: "We believe that the true attitude which modern scientific sincerity imposes is that of being a psychoanalyst, but not a Freudian." This statement, I believe, can be taken as the attitude of the Spanish psychiatric community in
41

Villaverdc, "Algo a proposito de la angustia," 773.

f : ~ ( ; c r ~I t. Three participants in the Spanish discussions of Freudian psychology. Thcy arc (left to right) the psychiatrists JosC Maria de Villavcrde and Gonzalo R. Lafora, and the endocrinologist Gregorio Mara~icin. Reprinted from El Siglo MCdico. 89:4078 (I 932) 177.

general, betokening its traditional eclecticism. Psychoanalysis, Lafora continued, should not be confused with psychotherapy. Many physicians speak derogatorily of psychoanalysis because-and here he probably had Villaverde in mind-"in their first attempts at psychotherapy using psychoanalysis they reaped patent failures." But this is to confuse two questions: that of diagnosis and that of cure.42 Clearly, for Lafora, the main value of psychoanalysis lay in the former, although he did make some adjustment toward the latter as well. In an interesting case history published in 1920 regarding a case of "systemic paraphrenia" caused by a male patient's self-reproach about homosexuality, Lafora reported: "We initiated the psychoanalysis of infantile events, and the patient, after great resistance and repugnance, informed us that in his
42 Gonzalo R. Lafora, "La teoria y los rnetodos del psicoanrilisis," Rrri.ctu dc Criminologin, Psiqurutriu J Mrdrcinu Lrgul (Buenos Aircs), 10 (1923), 385. In the case histoncs that follow, he describes his usc of psychoanalysis. See especially page 395 where, after failing to determine the causes of a ncurosis by interviewing the subjcct's family, hc bcgins "psychoanalysis" by first asking the subject about his drcarns. In this case-the patient was a man who relnaincd In bcd becausc of a rcpressed fear of assassination-thc analysis provided the curc.

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school days he once practiced a passive homosexual act with a friend." To cover up his fears of homosexuality, the subject became a notorious womanizer; because of his obsession, any mention of homosexuality caused him fits of anxiety. "Up to this point," the report continues, "psychoanalytic theory seems in agreement with reality, but from here our interpretation of the facts can not follow that of the Freudian school," according to which the subject would suffer latent or subconscious homosexual desires. Lafora saw no evidence of this. Although he admitted that the exaggerated heterosexual behavior of the subject was an attempt to drown out homosexual tendencies, he believed that such activities were conducive to sexual satisfaction and not to psychosis. This latter he interpreted as resulting from self-reproach caused by the subject's fixed idea.43 In a continuation of the same article, Lafora considered the case of an impotent male subject who suffered the delusion that his brother and sister were carrying on an incestuous relationship. "In sessions of psychoanalysis, upon treating in detail the subconscious mechanism of all this and to clarify it in his consciousness, we told him that, not having braked his own incestuous desires (the cause of his present jealousy), he had no moral right to reproach his siblings since he had had similar thoughts for years." Lafora commented that the subject had passed through the normal stages of sexual development, noting that "one of the merits of the Freudian psychoanalytical school has been the study of the periods of sexual life in a manner unsuspected before. Psychoanalysis continues to convince us of its realism." In this case, Lafora opted for the Freudian solution: the subject was fixated in the "incestuous or parental period. " 4 V n a 1922 article on obsessions, he mentioned a "long psychoanalytic dialogue" with a neurotic woman which made clear the sexual origins of her obsession regarding her future infidelity to her fiance. In such a case, he noted, any neophyte in psychoanalysis could discover the cause of the obsession (in this case, the repressed memory of an earlier love), although he failed to find any sign of substitution as predicted by Freud. 4 5

4' Gonzalo R Lafora, "Consideraciones sobre el rnecanisrno genitico de las psicosis paranoides." El Siglo M6dic.o. 68:3547 (1921 ). 1 17 1. 44 Ihid.. 1202. See also the resurnc of 1.afora.s lecture of 16 April 1921 at the Ateneo of Madrid. "Anilisis psiquico en las neurosis. Fyactores sexuales y no sexuales." El Sol. 27 May and 3 June 1921. It 1s clear from the article that he has practiced psychoanalytic techniques in therapy He concludes that "sexual l ~ f e repressed by social organization is, in effect, the most abundant, although not the only, source of painful co~nplexesand ot d c s i r o repressed in the subconscious which later appear, sublimated, in neuroses." 4 i Gonzalo R Lafora. "Estudios psicoanaliticos sobre las ohsesiones," Archivo.7 de Medici6:6 tzu. Cirugiu y E.\pe~~iulidadr.s, (19221, 260-72. He assumed that there was no substitution because of the shortness of tlme elapsed in the development of the obsession and because of the nature of the subject matter. Substitution and disfigurement were more likely to occur in cases of metaphysical obsessions, such as one he then described of a woman obsessed by extraterrestrial life.

It is nowhere indicated that Lafora used orthodox psychoanalytic therapy extending over a long period, simply that he employed the techniques of analysis. In a 1928 comment on Ignacio SQnchez Mejias's psychoanalytic play, which is discussed below, Lafora noted that, in the majority of cases, psychoanalysis had become "only a means of acquaintance and revision (conocer y reformar), but not of the instant curing of the sick."46 Yet a 1931 article seems to indicate that he did, in fact, use a form of psychoanalytic therapy. The subject was suffering hysteroid epileptic attacks. "Psychoanalysis of the mechanism causing the attacks revealed that they had originated only recently, after some friends had taken him to a house of prostitution where he had failed totally." This case Lafora also explained in wholly Freudian terms as one of fixation in a pregenital stage. He then explained the recommended therapy for male impotence: psychoanalysis with intent to lead the subject back, through association, to the sources of his inhibitions. If the impotence could be traced to events of early childhood (before puberty), then "psychoanalysis is the decisive therapeutic factor." For impotence traceable to later events, the recommendation was for "a simple psychoanalysis and suggestive psychotherapy which directs a progressive sexual reeducation." He noted that in the case of latent homosexuals, Maximilian Steiner had used an "accelerated psychoanalytic method . . . which is very similar to that which we have been using for a number of years without acquaintance with his There are similar inferences of accommodation to Freudian therapy, although not in as much detail, in the writings of other psychiatrists. In his critique of logical defects of psychoanalysis, Fernandez Sanz, after noting that psychoanalytic manuals had a rather low practical value, continued:
. . . it strikes me as totally justified that we who have gone to the trouble to put into practice ourselves the procedures of psychoanalysis, consuming hours and hours in the patient psychoanalytic investigation of neurotic subjects and comparing the results obtained directly with the truth of the facts [sic], [having] acquired our own experimental opinion, derived from reality itself, . . . must insist on the exposition of the conclusions obtained from our work, for surely, however modest they may be, they must have greater significance than deductions only inferred from published information.4"

46 Gonzalo R. Lafora, "Una opinion sobre Sinrazrin, de Sanchez Mejias," El Sol. 29 March 1928. 47 Gonzalo R. Lafora, "La impotencia masculina y la neurastenia sexual," El Siglo Medico. 88:4068 (1931), 547, 551-52. About half of this article is devoted to organic causes of impotence. According to Lafora's disciple Luis Valenciano (personal communication, Murcia, 8 June 1980). "Lafora never integrated psychoanalys~s into his medical system." The anatomicalclinical approach of Villaverde, Lafora, and Sacristan could not accommodate psychoanalysis, according to Valenciano. The evidence, however, seems to indicate a greater accommodation to Freudian practice than Valenciano admits. 4X E. Fernandez Sanz, "Psicoanalisis y logica," El Siglo Medico, 73:3669 (1924). 337.

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Sanchis Banus, according to Femandez Sanz, was "among the few in our country to have practiced psychoanalysis," an assertion consonant with the formeis declaration (cited above) on the value of psychotherapy in aligning sexual desires with reality. On the other hand, the notoriously large volume of his clinical practice made it unlikely that he had enough time to conduct orthodox analysis.49 Sacristan, while director of the women's asylum at Ciempozuelos in the early 1930s, gathered around him a group of young psychiatrists among whom psychoanalysis was a frequent topic of discussion and debate. According to Angel Garma, who was a participant, Sacristan adopted Freudian techniques in his own practice, beginning in 1932-33, with a couch, in order to treat patients psychoanalytically. Occasionally he discussed case histories with the analyst Garma, who approved of Sacristan's Freudian clinical stance, although it was not wholly orthodox.50 Cesar Juarros, a leading popularizer of psychoanalysis and perhaps the most insistently Freudian of Madrid psychiatrists in the 1920s, noted: "I am not a sectarian, not even a devotee of Freud's doctrines. I employ his standards in the treatment of my patients, because I possess no better instrument."51 Scheduled to lecture at a mental hygiene congress in Madrid in 1933, Juarros appeared late with the explanation, "1 was caught up in a psychoanalysis." Garma, who was in the audience, was observed to react with indignation in view of Juarros's known u n o r t h o d ~ x y . ~ ~ Emilio Mira y Lopez, a great diagnostician, at the very least used free association techniques on his patients; he also analyzed their dreams, as the published version of his course in psychoanalysis, which is discussed below, makes clear. Finally, the neurologist Miguel Prados, who practiced psychoanalysis in the latter part of his career as an exile in Canada, may have integrated psychoanalytic techniques into his clinical mode while still in Madrid. s 3 The foregoing evidence is sufficient to allow us to state that in the 1920s there was a detectable pattern in Spanish psychiatry which included a decisive shift towards Freud in the taking of clinical histories, and in the prognosis and diagnosis of mental patients, with some accommodation made to Freudian
4y E. Femindez Sanz, "Observaciones polCmicas sobre psicoanilisis," Archivos de Medicinu, Cirugiu ?; E.specialidudes. 15:7 (1924), 31 2. ") Angel Garma, personal communication, Buenos Aires, 13 November 1979. s' Cesar Juarros, Los horizontes de la psicounalisis, 2d ed. (Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1929). 60-61. To a Latin American commentator, Juarros "sin[ned] through an excess of Freudianism." Lorenzo Vives B., El educudor frente a1 psicounalrsis (San JosC, Costa Rica: Falco, 1938), 26. s2 Luis Valenciano Cayi, El doctor Lafora y su kpocc-a (Madrid: Morata, 1977). 86. Garma did not recall this incident when I asked him about it in 1979. 5 3 That is the guess of Luis Valenciano (personal communication, Murcia, 8 June 1980), but Antonio Linares Maza, a disciple of Prados in the early 1930s, claimed that although Prados accepted Freud completely at that time, he did not yet practice psychoanalysis (personal communication, Madrid, 3 April 1981). See Jose Rallo Romero, "Los ultimos anos de Prados como psicoanalista," Archrvos de Neurohiologia, 32 (1969). 469-71.

therapy. In addition, whatever the extent to which Freudian techniques may have been used in clinical practice, many Spanish psychiatrists had at least experimented with free association (whose value as a diagnostic tool was universally accepted) and with the analysis of dreams. Because of direct accessibility to the works of Freud in a supremely comprehensible translation, home-grown efforts at popularization were few, in contrast to the plethora of books on relativity in the same period or to the intense popularization of Darwin's ideas in the past century ." Among generdc. al introductory manuals were Juarros's Los horizont~s la psicoanulisis and Lu esenciu del psicounulisis by Cesar Camargo y Marin." The periodical press carried international psychoanalytic news. Thus El Sol reported the international congress held at The Hague in 1920 and later picked up an English news story about a lawyer who had killed himself after undergoing analysis. In this case, the newspaper editorialized, noting that "still many physicians . . . do not believe in the subconscious and . . . accuse psychoanalysts of being mere charlatans who are exploiting a confessional which differs from the old one only in its scientific apparatus."" But public lectures proved to be the most effective means of popularization aside from than the works of Freud himself. Sanchis Banus lectured frequently on hysteria, always in terms of Freudian notions of psychosexual development and sexual repression." Juarros gave a popular course on legal psychiatry, open to the public, which contained lectures under such titles as "Psychiatry of the LiIn 1928 bido" and "Psychoanalysis and Auxiliary Diagnostic Methods. he lectured to the Professional Association of Medical Students on "A Lance in Favor of Psychoanalysis" in which he "commented on the difficulties which oppose the rapid advance of Freudian theories in our country, confessional ideas being the most important. To the confessor, one tells everything which one would be ashamed to tell to a doctor. Moreover, Spanish life is objective, not individual; it disdains the subconscious and is filled with prudishne~s."~'

""

s4 One of the few foreign books on psychoanalysis to be translated into Spanish in the 1920s was Karl Haeberlin, Fundamentos do1 psicoanalisis. published by Ortega's Biblioteca de la Revista de Occidente. See review by E. Salazar y Chapela, El Sol, 4 March 1928. Biblioteca Nueva published Smith Ely Jelliffe's La tPcxic-a do1 psic.oanalisis in 1929. ' 5 Juarros, Los horizonres; Cesar Carnargo y Marin, La esencia del psicoandlisis (Madrid: Javier Morata, 1932). Camargo, one of a number of Spanish lawyers interested in the applications of psychoanalysis to criminology, had begun to popularize Freud in a series of articles entitled "Las teorias del profesor Freud ante la psicologia experimental y oninca," which appeared in the Revista do los Trihunales in 1927-28. These were the basis of his Psico-andlisis del suerio prc$kric,o (Madrid: Aguilar, 1929), an odd mixture of psychic research and psychoanalysis with three chapters summarizing Freudian theory. A popularizing volume, which I have not seen, is Gill Fagoaga, El psic,oancilisis ?. su signific,acidn (Madrid: n.p., (1925). 56 "Un congreso intemacional de psicoanilisis," El Sol, 7 October 1920; "Psicoanalisis," El Sol, 4 January 1926. 57 El Sol. 12 April 1926, and 3 April 1930. 5 8 [bid., 23 February 1927, and 15 April 193 1 . 5 y CCsar Juarros, "Una lanza en favor de psicoanilisis," El Sol. 15 January 1928

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R~ccytionin Nonpsychiutric Branches of Medicine

The first course on psychoanalysis offered to Spanish medical students was given by Mira y Lopez at the Academy and Laboratory of Medical Sciences in Barcelona in April 1926.60 Mira's psychiatric group in Barcelona was more psychologically and less neurologically oriented than its counterparts in Madrid, so strongly influenced by Cajal. The primary interest of Mira y Lopez was in diagnostic testing and it is clear from the published version of his course that he performed extensive free association tests on his own patients. Among the students in the course was Juan Rof Carballo, who had begun medical school in Madrid in 1923 very much under the spell of the Obrus completus. In 1925, he suggested to his pathology professor, Roberto Ndvoa Santos, that it would be interesting to apply the results of psychoanalysis to internal medicine. Ndvoa responded favorably, and Rof enrolled in Mira's course and subsequently specialized in psychosomatic m e d i ~ i n e . ~ ' N6voa was obviously receptive to Rof's idea because he had himself already begun to integrate Freudian concepts into his approach to general pathology. One of the most significant evolutionary thinkers in modem Spain, he stated that his interest, rather than focussing on processes of integration of the ego, lay more in the biological roots of consciousness, or "the conscious function" which, according to Bleuler, was different from introspection. Nevertheless, he was impressed by the importance of the Freudian concept of censorship as an instinct-modifying mechanism. In explicating the concept, as it appears in dream analysis, it is clear that as early as 1922 he had fully accepted the sexual symbolism which was the key to the Freudian interpretat i ~ nThrough successive editions of his general pathology textbook, Novoa . ~ ~ influenced the entire prewar generation of Spanish physicians. The volume begins with a characterization of disease as maladaptation to the environment. In higher organisms, including man, the adaptive apparatus is represented mainly by the nervous system, "and adaptive reactions should be considered at base as phenomena of a reflexive nature. Yet, it is obvious that the most complex processes of the life of the mind, psychic functions, ought also to be considered as expressions of a particular adaptive form, or, stated differently, as adaptive reactions of a higher order." From this point, he was able to launch a discussion of the protective function which the psyche exercises over

Emilio Mira y Lopez, El Psico-analisis (Barcelona: Monografias MCdicas, 1926). This is the Castilian version; there was also a Catalan edition, partially reproduced in Mira, La psicoandlisr. Ramon V~dal-Teixidor,ed. (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1974). Note that psychoanalysis is feminine in Catalan but masculine in Castilian (because uncili.sis is masculine), although Lopez Ballesteros, inexplicably, rendered it in the feminine. h 1 Juan Rof Carballo, Biologitr y psicoundli.sis (Bilbao: Desclke de Brouwer, 1972), 44. 62 Roberto Novoa Santos, Physis v pswpis (Santiago de Compostela: El Eco de Compostela, 1922). 109, 231, 239, 249-50. On the biomedical thought of Novoa, see Jacinto Candelas Barrios, La untropologiu dc Ndvou Sunros (Barcelona: Pulso, 197 1).

"'

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the entire organism (his discussion of censorship was in this context), which in turn leads to an invocation of modem psychologies: Bleuler, James, Freud.63 References to Freud occur throughout the text, notably in the sections on general psychopathology and on sex, the latter organized around a discussion of psychosexual d e ~ e l o p m e n t . ~ ~ Freud's greatest impress on Spanish medicine outside of psychiatry, however, was on endocrinology. Because of the characterological overtones of much endocrinological writing, according to which persons were typed according to glandular criteria, endocrinology in the 1920s was perceived as being akin in aim and emphasis to psychoanalysis. Thus the sociologist Quintiliano Saldaiia observed in 1929: "Fertilized by new methods, unusual disciplines illuminate the sciences of man for us. In the corporeal area we have endocrinology, or the doctrine of internal secretions, which 1 would term Physioanalysis [italics added]. In the spiritual sphere, Psychoanalysis hurries to the scene, penetrates resolutely and invades everything." 65 Less florid, but equally insistent on the analogy, was Gregorio Marahon, the founding father of Spanish endocrinology. Reflecting on the state of medicine in 1935, he contrasted "individualist" with "statistical" medicine. In this context, he praised psychoanalysis, for "in no other clinical effort has the imperium of the individual over the disease, the humanistic and anti-statistical tendency of medicine, been revalued with such determination." And endocrinology, he continued, had played a similar role over the past several years: just like psychoanalysis, it had provided each individual with "an intimate identification card. Maraiion's research on sex endocrinology and the evolution of sex coincided with many Freudian points of view and, although Marahon was frequently critical of Freudians (for invading the privacy of the individual), various elements of psychoanalytic theory supported or reinforced his own conclusions. For Maraiion, as for Freud, the libido, which Marah611 defined as "sexual hunger," was a primary drive. But for the endocrinologist, this specific energy is originally produced by a chemical phenomenon, which is the irruption into the blood of internal secretions emanating from the gonads. (Freud admitted this, but understood that the chemical origins of the libido were irrelevant to its psychology.) Although there is no libido until the gonads start to function, the chemical differentiation of the sexes is not immediate but
63 Roberto Novoa Santos, Manual de patolo~iageneral, 5th rev. ed., 2 vols. (Santiago de Compostela: El Eco de Compostela, 1930). 1, 3-4. 64 [bid., 1 1 , 774-85. 65 Quintiliano Saldana, "Prologo" to Psico-analisis del suerio profltico, by Camargo, 6 . Saldana was popularly perceived as a Freudian. See his discussion of the relationship of Freudianism to criminology, "La psiquiatria y el codigo (Estudio de ttchnica legislativa)," Revista General de Legislacirin y Jurisprudencia (Madrid), 146 (1925), 772-77. Gregorio Maraiibn, "Veinticinco anos de medicina," in the commemorative volume issued by his disciples, Veinticinco arios de labor (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 19.15). 37-39.

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passes through a precocious phase of evident lack of differentiation. In childhood, therefore, there is a dormant, undifferentiated sexuality. "We owe to Freud the proof of the existence of infantile sexuality and its undifferentiated character; this is one of the indisputable merits of his work." Infantile sexuality manifests itself in social activities of a not directly erotic type (e.g., playing with dolls), but there also exists "an obscure libidinous activity in the infantile soul, perhaps of less significance than Freud asserts, at least for the normal life, but undeniable. "67 Still, Maranon was not completely comfortable with infantile sexuality, a notion which seemed to offend "the patriotism of the human species. We want to believe that a child's soul is pure."68 He questioned the utility of dealing with immature instincts. He further believed that Freud's theory was, in part, culture-bound and that the precocious sexual activities ascribed to children by Freud did not occur in Spain: "It is certain that our children are not like that," he asserted bravely. 69 According to Marafion's endocrinological theory of sexual development, both sexes pass through crises of intersexuality, the male undergoing a feminoid crisis before puberty and the female suffering a viriloid crisis after menopause. In the context of the then current psychoanalytic discussion of the "masculinity complex" in women, Maranon's theories were, at the least, consonant with Freudian ideas and, indeed, Marie Bonaparte recommended the endocrinologist as being "one author, not in the ranks of the psychoanalysts, whose work merits their a t t e n t i ~ n . " ~ ~ Maranon viewed Freud as a romantic thinker, and psychoanalysis as the last redoubt of romanticism. "1 don't believe that anyone has said this, but it seems evident to me: that Freud who has been so frequently labeled, at times in fact insulted, as an atrocious materialist, was purely and simply a great roman ti^."^' Libidinal anomalies, such as desperation, which come up habitually in psychoanalytic literature, are commonplaces of the romantic mentality, he noted. Not only did Maranon describe Freud as a frustrated
Maranon, Obras compleras, 10 vols. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968-77). VIII, 542-43. Ibid., 111, 168. Ibid., 111, 171. 70 Marie Bonaparte, Female Sexualiry (New York: International Universities Press, 1953). 7-8. Saldana ("La psiquiatria y el codigo," 77411.) identifies Maranon as a follower of Freud and he was so perceived popularly. In 1928, Maranon noted, "I have been combatted-n some occasions quite recently-for the unspeakable sin of supposed Freudianism" (Obras complerus, 111, 167). Because he was able to explain sexual and, indeed, libidinal phenomena in a purely biological framework (that is not to say a completely somatic framework; he was not opposed to psychology), Maranon played an important role in running interference for Freud in Catholic countries. On his influence, "como sosrituto di Freud," in Italy, see Michel David, La psicoanulisi nella culrura italiuna. 2d ed. (Torino: Boringheri, 1970), 22. David characterizes Maration's sexual theories as "parafreudian." For a summary of Freudian influence in Maranon's work, see Pedro Lain Entralgo, Gregorio Maruridn, vida, obra y persona (Madrid: Austral, 1969). 97-98, and Juan-Jose Lopez Ibor, "Le psychologue," in Hommage d Gregorio Maratidn (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1963), 81-85. 7' Maranon, Obras compleras, 111, 1033-34.
b7

68

romantic, he did so to his face. Maran6n was the only Spanish professional who knew Freud personally, having met him in 1938 at Marie Bonaparte's home, when both were political refugees in Paris. As Maranon recalled the encounter, Freud "laughed heartily when I told that 1 had subjected him to psychoanalysis and that my diagnosis was that, the last romantic. This took place in a Bonapartist salon where everything was reminiscent of Chateaubriand and his time. And in this atmosphere, which exuded Romanticism, the old, already sick psychiatrist, truly seemed like a fish in water. Psychoanalysis has been the last attempt of individualism to defend itself against the wave of the universalization of mankind."72 Spanish gynecologists were also receptive to Freud. Vital Aza remarked in 1924 on the clinical preponderance of Freudian ideas in the treatment of sexual dysfunction in women and noted the importance of sexual trauma in Freudian theory. The dean of Spanish gynecologists, Sebastiin Recasens, in a lecture on sex education in 1927 "commented on the opinions of Freud in considering that the first manifestation of sexual instinct is already found in the infant, during the period of nursing, reappearing between three and six years of age. Without accepting these theories in an absolute way, he recognizes that the sexual instinct, far from making its appearance in puberty, is manifested in very diverse levels and conditions in the first years of life."74 The above examples should suffice to illustrate that Freudian ideas had pervaded the entire Spanish medical community, and not merely those disciplines concerned with the nervous system.

''

V . FREUTIIANISM: T H E S O C I A L D E B A T E

Admitting the correctness of Fernindez Flores's statement that reading Freud marks a watershed in the life of an individual, we might add that the same is true of societies. Once a sufficient number of persons had assimilated Freudian ideas there was bound to follow a debate over their implications for social life. In Spain this debate took the form of a sexual reform movement, overtly inspired by Freudian ideas, which attempted to tear away the foundations of the "civilized morality" whose basis was the dysfunctional relationship between the sexes.75 The sexual reform movement was a coalition of interest groups-those favoring feminism, prostitution reform, sex education, mental health, and
7 2 Maranon, Ohrus compleras, 111. 949. The date of the meeting was 5 June 1938; see Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmutzd Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 111, 227-28. 7 3 Vital Aza. "El coito doloroso en pinecologia (Apuntes sobre la frialdad sexual en la mujer)," El Siglo M&dilrco, 743705 (1924). 569-73; reprinted in idem, Feminismo sexo (Madrid: Javier Morata, 1928), 119-46. 7J Sebastian Recasens, "Educaci6n sexual femenina," El Sol, 26 March 1927. 7 5 This section summarizes my article, "Psicoanalisis. reforrna sexual y politica en la Espafia de entre-guerras." Archivos d~ Neuropsiquiatria (Madrid), in press.

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eugenics-which had an interlocking leadership of doctors and lawyers whose attitudes towards sexual relations were highly colored by Freudian arguments. Maranon was popularly regarded as the leader of the movement, whose leaders also included Sinchis Banus, Juarros, Novoa, and the lawyer Luis Jimenez Asua. 76 All five of these men were elected to the Cortes of the Second Republic, where the movement reached its apex in the successful fight for a divorce statute. The leadership of the movement was not ideologically homogeneous but its members shared, at least, a minimalist position which included the following points: the liberation of sex from conventional morality, from the Church, from discriminatory laws, from ignorance; an end to donjuanism; a sharing of responsibility between husband and wife in sexual matters; sex education; the study of sexuality and the active intervention of physicians in the treatment of sexual dysfunction; reform of prostitution laws; equal opportunity for women; and legalization of divorce. Freud was invoked as a scientific justification of the need for sexual reform, but it is clear that different members of the movement sought different things from Freudian doctrine. Maranon and Nbvoa, both of whom believed that male and female social roles were biologically determined, read Freud looking for support of their biological typologies of sex roles. Juarros and Sanchis Banus, who were more wholehearted Freudians, were looking for something else in the Freudian corpus, namely an explanation for the dysfunctional relation between the sexes in Spain, informed by an egalitarian social philosophy. The conservative social philosophy of Maranon and Novoa and the kind of analysis they applied to sexuality seem related. The same is true of the progressive republican Juarros and the socialist Sanchis Banus. Throughout the l'920s, Juarros campaigned publically for sexual reform, and particularly for sex education. "It is not possible," he noted in his manual on psychoanalysis, "to confront seriously the education of a child if one is lacking in psychoanalytic background." In a 1929 lecture, he alluded to "infantile sexuality, sadly ignored by most or all parents, who do not perceive sexual appetites in children." He observed that large numbers of students in his course on forensic psychiatry were seeking in psychoanalysis the answers to a "long series of conflicts caused by sexual abnormality," and by the end of the decade he had become the spokesman and standard-bearer of the sexually discontented young. The political maturity of the sexual reform movement was clearly demon76 Jimenez Asua was the author of P.sicounu1i.si.s crimrnul. 5th ed. (Buenos Alres, L.osada, 1947 (1st ed., 19401). 77 Juarros, Los horizontes. 1 18; El Sol. 19 Fehruary, 1929, and 21 January 1933. See also Juarros's article, "El prohlema soclal y familiar de los ninos mentalnlente anormales,"El Siglo Medico, 87:4038 (1931), 470. where he notes. following Freud and Marie Bonaparte. that "to deny sexual life to the child constitutes the determining factor of a great number of the neurotic processes of childhood. "

strated on 15 October 1931, when Sinchis Banfis rose in the Cortes to deliver a powerful speech defending the divorce statute in terms of a Freudian explanation of the relation between married life and the psychosexual development of children. Divorce was a necessity in order to ensure the happiness of spouses, which in turn was a precondition for the effective formation of citizens. The lack of such a condition gives rise to pathological states, which he explained in terms of the psychosexual stages and the Oedipal conflict. If the "intrafamilial crisis of the renunciation of the mother" was not solved, the future male citizen would be unable to share maternal love with his siblings nor to respect his father, both failures having ineluctable social connotations. 7 8
V I . T H E B E G I N N I N G S OF ORTHODOXY

The history of orthodox psychoanalysis begins in October 1931 when Angel Garma returned to Madrid from Berlin to become Spain's first practicing analyst with orthodox training. Garma (b. 1904) entered the Faculty of Medicine in Madrid in 1921 and first heard of Freud during 1924-25 when he began to study in Marafion's clinic-not from Marafion directly, but from fellow students. 7 9 The first works of Freud he read were the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, volumes 4 and 5 of the Obras completas. He decided to further his studies of psychiatry in Germany, went first to Tiibingen and then to Berlin, where he became disillusioned with psychiatry. In Berlin, he was approached by a German analyst, upon whose recommendation he went to the Psychoanalytic Institute and spoke with the director, Max Eitingon. Eitingon advised him to undergo analysis and recommended Theodor Reik. Garma found analysis to be a revelation through which, as he later described the experience, he found what he had been looking for all his life. In 1930 he was elected to membership in the Berlin institute, after presenting a paper on an obscene gesture made to the Devil by Saint Teresa in a famous vision. Associating God with the superego and the Devil with the id, Garma
7X The text of Sinchis Banus's speech can be found in Diurio de Sesiones de las Cortes Consrituyentes de la II Republics [Madrid], no. 57 (15 October 1931), 1759-64. Jimenez Asua referred to "the mixed arguments of biology and law" in the debate on divorce and alluded to the "magnificent biological foundation" contributed to the debate by Sinchis Banus (Proceso histdrico de la Consfitucidn de la Replihlica Espanola (Madrid: Reus, 1932). 278, 282). 79 The following material comes from an interview with Angel Garma held in Buenos Aires, 11 and 13 November 1979. This interview was made possible by a grant from the Fund for Psychoanalytic Research of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In Argentina, where Garma was a pioneer in psychosomatic medicine, his detractors claimed his ostensibly overly medical orientation was a result of his medical education with MaraAon (Garcia, Lu entruda del psicoanulisis, 213). This is suggestive but, in the context of recent Argentinian psychoanalytic polemics, is a mere canard; in the same pre-Berlin period, Garma also worked with Sacristkn at Ciempozuelos, which was a psychiatric environment congenial to Freudianism. 80 Angel Garma, "Interpretacion psico-analitica de un gesto de Santa Teresa," Archivos de Neurohiologia, 10:6 (1930), 528-34.

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explained Teresa's warding off of the latter as a repression of sexual instincts. The discussion of the paper was extremely heated, as Garma later recalled the participation of Eitingon, Otto Fenichel, Hanns Sachs, and Karen Homey, because the Spaniard did not accept Freud's explanation of the significance of psychosis. For Freud, the neurotic represses instincts in order to deal with external reality, but the psychotic represses the real world and satisfies his instincts through fantasy. For Garma the psychotic, whose behavior is similar to that of a religious fanatic, is much more under the control of the superego (the internal representative of exterior reality) than is the neurotic, and he represses instinct more intensely, which, as a consequence, heightens his separation from reality. 1 cite this episode to show that even Spain's most orthodox analyst was by no means uncritical of Freud. Returning to Madrid, Garma began private practice as an analyst, but immediately reestablished contacts with the medical community. Maranon invited him to give a short course on psychoanalysis in his clinic, which was attended by about fifty persons. But, as indicated below, it was impossible to earn a living wholly from psychoanalysis in Madrid at this time, and therefore Garma obtained a post as attending psychiatrist of the juvenile court in December 1933.81 His first patients came to him either by referral from other physicians, both psychiatrists (Sanchis Banus) and internists (Carlos Jimenez Diaz), and through a personal network of friendships with intellectuals whom he had met while living at the Residencia de Estudiantes before his departure for Berlin. Among those friends were two young psychiatrists, Mariano Bustamante and Jose Solis, who began didactic analyses with Garma around 1934. Bustamante quickly assimilated psychoanalytic techniques and began to practice psychoanalysis, seeing his first patients in Garma's office.82 Neither Bustamante nor Solis practiced psychoanalysis after the civil war. Another psychiatrist, Jeronimo Molina Nuiiez, underwent therapeutic psychoanalysis with Garma, which later served him as a didactic analysis. After the civil war he practiced a kind of unorthodox group psychoanalysis in Murcia. 8 3 Garma's published work in the period 193 1-36, including its case histories, largely reflects his Berlin experience, although there are few interesting
Garma's application for the appointment was encouraged by Jimenez Asua, who was president of the court, the Tribunal Tutelar de Menores. X2 Bustamante's psychoanalytic orientation is clear in the article. "El psicodiagnostico en la nuerosis obsesiva," in his Estudios sobre neurobiologiu, neurologiu psiyuiatria (Bilboa: Diputacion de Vizcaya, 1976). 47-135. This article was originally published in Archivos de Neurobiologia in 1934.) Note the heightened interest in Spain in psychoanalysis as a diagnostic technique. R3 Luis Valenciano, personal communication, Murcia, 8 June 1980. See Molina NuAez's book, Observaciones psicoanaliricas (Madrid: Escelicer, 1950), with a prologue by Cesar Camargo. According to Molina (p. 84). "around 1933, there was one orthodox analyst in Spain and quickly three students of psychiatry went to him to acquire . . . didactic formation." Molina was one of the few in Franco Spain to criticize official psychiatry from a Freudian perspective.

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cases from Madrid. 84 AS a group, his articles, mainly published in Archivos de Neurobiologia, can be taken as a statement to the Spanish psychiatric community of the bases of psychoanalytic technique and theory. 8 5 The Second Republic undertook a strenuous mental hygiene campaign, carried out under the auspices of such semiofficial entities as the Liga Espafiola de Higiene Mental. Garma, who was treasurer of the league, lectured frequently on psychoanalytic topics under its auspices: on "Mental Hygiene of Children: Psychoanalytic Considerations" in June 1932, on "The Psychology of Sexual Identification in Children" in October 1932, "On Dreams of Anxiety in Children" in May 1933, and so forth. 8 6 During "mental hygiene weeks," the league spread the psychoanalytic approach to the provinces. When the townsmen of Montijo and Zafra in Badajoz province heard lectures on sexual illnesses and mental disorders in 1931 and 1932, when Salvador Ruse11 lectured in Almeria in 1935 on the metaphysical roots of psychoanalysis and mental prophylaxis, or when Juarros delivered a radio broacast on "The Psychoanalytic Study of Delinquency" in the same year, we can presume that the process of diffusion of psychoanalysis was complete, and that at this point Freudian ideas had reached everyone in Spain capable of understanding them in their medical context. 87 The League was also responsible for the requirement of a knowledge of psychoanalysis in the competitive examinations for provincial psychiatric posts, which amounted to official sanction for Freudian psychology. 88 When the civil war broke out in July 1936, Garma was in France and did not return to Spain. Instead, he went to Buenos Aires, where in 1943 he and three colleagues founded the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association. Two years later, the nucleus of what was to become the Canadian Society of
8" See Garma's collected articles from this period, El psicoanalisis, la neurosis J la sociedad (Madrid: Archivos de Neurobiologia, 1936). There is a fascinating case of hysteria, reflecting the political ambience of Republican Spain (pp. 125-28). X5 See, for example, the following articles, all from El psicoanalisis, to which the page citations refer: "El tratamiento psicoanalitico y la transferencia afectiva," 60-65 (originally published in Archivos de Neurobiologia, 11.3 (1931), 267-73; "El proceso de la curacion en el psicoanalisis," 66-82 (originally in Anales de Medicina Interna, 1:s (1932). 41 1-26); and "C6mo se estudia el psicoanalisis," 83-92 (originally in Archivos de Neurobiologia, 1 0 2 (1930). 217-25. Garma accounted for most of the articles on psychoanalysis published in the latter journal; see F. Martinez Pardo, La neurop.siyuiutria e.spariola vista a truv6.s de 'Archivos de Neurobiologia' (1920-1972) (Madrid: Archivos de Neurobiologia, 1978), esp. p. 63 (graph 19). 8h Higiene Mrnral: Bolrtin Oficiul de lu Liga Espunolu dr Higiene Mental. 2d epoch, no. 3 (1935), 17, 76, 81, 86. 87 Ibid.. 21, 27, 56, 89. XX Ibid., 152-58: "Reglumrnro para /as oposicionrs a plazas dr midicos de estahlecimientos psiquidtricos J cuesrionarios . . . referrnrrs a /as mismus" (as published in Guceta Ojfcial. 14 October 1933). The sixteenth lesson in the psychiatric qucstionnairc (p. 157) is: "Psicotrrupiu J sus disrintos mPtodos: sligestirin, hipnosis, psicologia individual, psicoanalisis, psicagogia. etc. The league submitted a memorandum to the interior minister in January 1933 whose section on sex education referred explicitly to psychoanalytic recommendations that a discussion of incest be included in sex education for adolescents (El Sol. 29 January 1933).
"

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Psychoanalysts coalesced around Miguel Prados in Montreal. 8 y The outbreak of the civil war and the subsequent success of two Spaniards in new world psychoanalytic institutions seems an appropriate point at which to comment on the early success or failure of Freudianism in Spain. It was generally argued by psychiatrists favorable to Freud that psychoanalysis had failed in Spain, for which they cited cultural grounds. Thus Juarros thought that it could not compete with the confessional. According to Antonio Abaunza, a disciple of Sanchis Banus, the "architecture of the Spanish mind" was to blame. Freud had attracted the profound interest of Spaniards because they were indeed sexually repressed. But psychoanalysis cures through examining symbolic complexes that enclose the psyche, and "to speak to the patient in the language of these symbols---even though not in an orthodox Freudian one-is impossible in Spain." A Spaniard cured in such a way, in Abaunza's view, would become a social outcast, alienated from a society in which virtually everyone else was repressed. Garma's explanation was also cultural, although couched in psychoanalytic terms. Comparing resistance to psychoanalysis in Spain with its easy acceptance in Argentina, Garma remarked that the superego was more internalized in Europe, seemingly because the weight of tradition on individuals was greater; this is how he explained the low incidence in Argentina of obsessive neurosis, the most characteristic mental illness in Spain.Y2But Garma also pointed to institutional factors which, to my mind, better account for the slow development of orthodox psychoanalysis in Spain. We indicated earlier that Garma quickly reintegrated himself into the Spanish psychiatric community upon returning to Madrid. He was very active in psychiatric institutions such as the Sociedad de Neurologia and the lnstituto Psicotkcnico, but he later perceived that opposition or resistance to psychoanalysis came primarily from organized psychiatry, and not from the public at large. "' Indeed he felt that
X' See "Historia de la Asociacion Psicoanalitica Argcntina (A.P.A.)" in Arminda Abcrastury, Fidias R. Cesio, and Marcclo Abcrastury, Hisioria, ensenanza y ejercicio legal drl psicoandlisis (Buenos Aircs: Omeba, 1967), 23-45; and Migucl Prados, "Psychoanalysis in Canada," Canadian Psvchoanalviic Review, 1:1 ( 1954), 2-33. Summary of Juarros's lecturc, "El psicoanalisis," 14 January 1928, in El Siglo Medico, 81 :3867 (1928), 74-75. " A b a u n ~ a ,"Ensayo a modo de prcilogo," xii-xiii. y2 Interview with Angel Garma, Bucnos Aires, 13 November 1979. Note that he also viewcd the success of his analytic practicc in Berlin as attributable to the "cnvironment of great liberty of customs" (Garma, El psicoundlisi.~.74, n. I ) . 9 3 Garma stresscd to me his active participation in the Sociedad de Ncurologia. His participation in the Instituto de Psicologia (Instituto Psicotkcnico) is wcll documcntcd (see thc report of his lecture there on transfercncc in El Sol. 17 Fcbruary 1932) and was singled out by his friend Josc Germain in the 1981 Madrid lccture cited in note 12, abovc. According to Luis Valenciano, Germain engaged in "psychoanalytic digressions" (from his work on schizophrenia, ctcctcra) in the late 1920s, but Garma, who was his closc friend, said that Germain's interest in Freud was superficial. In spite of his high professional profile within Spanish psychiatry, Garma stated (interview cited in note 79, above) that hc fclt himsclf "isolated from thc scientific standpoint, in

the republic had awakened in the people "a spirit of liberation and social change which surely stimulated people to change their own individuality, their way of being, to accept untraditional stances like psychoanalysis and to fight against their neurotic conflicts." In Argentina he was careful not to repeat what he perceived as an error of strategy, and thus he studiously avoided psychiatrists. Other institutional and professional factors were also present which adequately explain the slow development of orthodox analysis in Spain without the necessity of invoking modal personality. According to Garma's contemporary, Luis Valenciano, it was nearly impossible to practice psychoanalysis in Spain before the civil war because it was an extremely expensive treatment, and the number of patients who could afford it was insufficient to support a full-time practice. There was no public assistance, and no practicing physician could afford to devote the entire day to a handful of middle- or lowincome patients. Paradoxically, Freudian doctrine itself worked against the expansion of psychoanalytic practice. Many of the best young psychiatrists, including most of those in the Freudian-tinged orbits of Sacristan and Prados, were assigned to work in asylums. Antonio Linares Maza stated that "all of us [in Prados's group around 1931) accepted the psychology of Freud, at the same time as we carried on an impoverished psychiatric practice. It was impossible to practice psychoanalysis in the asylum. Freud's dogma that psychotics could not be treated by psychoanalysis was the The implantation of orthodox analysis was retarded in Spain owing to the social structure of the psychiatric profession no less than to its neurological and psychologically eclectic traditions, and also because of unfavorable economic conditions. It seems clear, however, that Garma's activities would have led, in the late 1930s, to the formation of a small, but dynamic, orthodox school had not the civil war intervened. The proof is the subsequent institutional success and professional careers of both Garma and Prados, in exile. We have noted considerable opposition on the part of psychiatrists to what was labeled "pansexualism. But a closer reading of the Spanish literature on Freud causes surprise not for its hostility to sexual aetiology but rather for the extent to which almost all parties to the debate were willing to assign great significance to sexual factors in emotional life. Opposition to pansexualism was almost always phrased in terms of Freud's exaggeration of sexual factors or of their exclusivity in Freudian aetiology (the death wish was welcomed
"

a [professional] environment fairly hostile to psychoanalysis and, . . . to confront this situation, began a self-analysis based primarily on the study of [his] own dreams." Spanish psychiatry was a high-prestige profession and one in which a stance close to neurology was the norm, both circumstances thanks to Cajal. It was difficult for an outsider with a radically different view to break into this closed circle. Y4 Luis Valenciano and Antonio Linares Maza, personal communication, Madrid, 3 April 1981.

with relief) or in terms of its social implications. Clearly, there was a high correlation of the level of opposition to pansexualism in particular and Freudianism in general with conservative ideology. This is apparent in the biographies of our protagonists. Villaverde, the rabid anti-Freudian, was a reactionary conservative, assassinated in the early days of the civil war. The ambivalent Marahon and Ortega were liberal centrists, open to new ideas under conditions of civil discourse, but increasingly closed as repolarization set in. Sanchis Banus died in 1932, but he had been an ardent socialist whose activities and attitudes demonstrated that, in the context of political life of the 1920s and the republic, Freudianism was a progressive doctrine. There were anomalies and exceptions, but the general pattern is obvious. It is doubtful that modal personality-"national characterV<an be invoked to explain the Spanish resistance to Freud. The willingness of proFreudian psychiatrists to blame the culture for lack of receptivity to Freud seems either to be a reflection of sociopolitical cleavages or of the immediate professional environment, projected upon the society as a whole. Such notions as the sexual repression of Spaniards were simply cliches without foundation in reality. In fact, as Ramon Serrano Vicens's Kinsey-style study begun in the 1940s showed, the sexual habits of Spaniards were very similar to those of other Western s o c i e t i e ~ . ' ~ Contrary to such theories of cultural resistance, I believe that the general climate of reception was highly favorable to Freud. This presumes a high degree of cultural congruity between Freudian assumptions and Spanish values, particularly attitudes regarding the primacy of sexual factors in emotional life. Documentation of this contention is beyond the scope of this essay, but one proof lies in the popularity of the Don Juan myth and the readiness to accept Don Juan as a quintessential Spanish type. Spanish intellectuals readily recognized that the Don Juan myth was an obvious medium for the application of Freudian ideas and psychoanalysis of Don Juan quickly became a stock-in-trade of literary minded psychiatrists and of psychologically oriented writers. y b

9s Ramon Serrano Vicens, La sexualidad femrnina (Paris: Ruedo Iberico, 1972). Serrano's work was proscribed in Franco Spain and was published in France a decade after its completion. See his description (p. 7) of a dramatic meeting with Alfred Kinsey in Madrid in 1955. 9h See for example Gonzalo R. Lafora, Don Juan, 10s milagros y oiros ensaTos (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1927; rpt. Madrid: Alianza, 1975), 5-69; CCsar Camargo y Marin, Un iriptico sohrr Don Juan (Madrid: Morata, 1934); Grcgorio Maranon, "Notas para la biologia dc Don Juan" (19241, Obras completas, IV, 75-93; idem, "La vejez de Don Juan" (1928). Obras compleias, I , 437-44; Angel Valbuena, "En torno al psicoanilisis dc Don Juan," Rrvisia de y Psicolo~ia Pedago~ia,5 : 17 (1937), 170-83. For Maranbn, Don Juan was "hypergonadal"; Lafora said hc suffered from affectivc dissociation, ctcetcra. Corpus Barga tauntcd thc cntire genre in the namc of Catalinon, Chiutti, and other servants of Don Juan: Lafora claimed that Don Juan had suffered from "various sexual pathologics," but thc scrvants claimed he had never becn sick at all, just a little fevcr bcforc dying. "Don Juan y los doctores. Una protesta," El Sol, 18 December 1926).

VII. FREUD IN LITERATURE AND A R T

Freud's impact on Spanish letters and art before the civil war was so massive that not even an outline can be attempted here. I will confine my observations to two exempla which shed some light on the previous discussion: psychoanalysts in Spanish literature and the impact of Freud on Salvador Dali. Of the countries where a general debate on the merits of Freud took place in the 1920s and 1930s, Spain must have been the only one to have produced more fictional than real analysts. These characters appeared mainly on the stage, with some representation in novels. The earliest stage analyst was Dr. Ballina in Sanchez Mejias's play Sinrazdn, which opened in Madrid in March 1928. Sanchez Mejias, a bullfighter, seems an unlikely candidate to present Freud to Madrid theatregoers, but he was closely associated with the poets and artists of the "Generation of 1927"-Aleixandre, Lorca, Foix, etcetera-all of whom had been influenced by Freud. y 7 Ballina's encapsulation of Freudian theory is concise, but accurate enough:
There are those who believe . . . that madness is to the waking person what a dream is to the sleeping. A madman is, therefore, one who dreams continually. A dream, according to modern theories, is a desire repressed by our conscience. In the realization of this desire materials from our lives related to the same desire are taken incoherently but, upon waking, we forget what we dreamed, or else it is rejected by the rules of normality. Moreover, our infancy and youth are filled with desires, some logical and natural, others morbid and perverse, the majority of which are unconfessable. Our morality, acting as a censor is charged with rejecting them, and in this struggle between desire and censorship is the key to the majority of d i s t ~ r b a n c e s . ~ ~

The editor of a recent edition of Sinrazon guesses that Lafora may have been the model for Ballina; he was a friend of Sanchez Mejias and offered some remarks to the audience at the play's debut.yy Probably the guess is correct, because Ballina's description of his therapeutic method is similar to the shortened analytic procedure used by Lafora. Ballina describes having had a short psychoanalytic conversation with a patient, from which he made, of the elements which he recalled, "a psychoanalysis afterwards and become fully convinced that [the patient] was under the influence of a shock produced by a perverse feeling of sexuality." Later he gained more information from the patient, whom he then confronted with his findings. "I explained the process to him, spoke to him of the unconscious and of the process of censorship, of the struggles between consciousness and the unconscious, [and cured him.]" l o o Dramatic license aside (Sanchez Mejias makes no distinction beSee C. B. Morris, Surrc,ulism and Spain. 1920-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). y X Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, Toutro, Antonio Gallego Morell, ed. (Madrid: Centro, 1976), 53. I hid., 22. Ibid.. 41 -42.

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tween neurotics and psychotics), this method accords well with Lafora's descriptions, outlined above, of his own modus operandi. Ballina explains to his new asylum's benefactor, who is also the "cured" patient, Don Manuel, that psychoanalysis consists, in a nutshell, of the stripping of the patient's own consciousness. But Don Manuel rejoins that the "naked truth" must not be revealed to anyone and that the mad should be left to dream. At the final curtain, as Ballina explains to a patient on the couch that he will cure her, Don Manuel enters and strangles the overoptimistic analyst. Sanchez Mejias's message is one which echos the warnings of cautionary writers like Rafael Valle Aldabalde or FernBndez Sanz-that psychoanalysis is dangerous and one should not be deluded by facile claims of cure. l o ' One may assume that Lafora's talk on opening night was similarly cautionary, his words were doubtless the same as those published several days later in El Sol where he noted that an alienist like Ballina "who calls himself progressive because he discovers Freud when the latter's best theoretical conceptions are in decline, and who still wishes to cure psychoses of all kinds with psychoanalysis . . . does not seem interesting for the psychiatrist who is used to the great casuistic richness of his practice and of the scientific seesawing of pathogenic theories." I o 2 Lafora's astute comment reflects not only the ingrained eclecticism of Spanish psychiatry, but also what seems to be pique over the Freudian enthusiasm of young alienists such as those in the circle of SacristBn. October 1928 witnessed the debut of another play in which an important character was an analyst, Antonio and Manuel Machado's Lus Adeljus. The analyst, Carlos Montes, a physician trained in Germany, is called to treat the Duchess of T o m e s to whom he explains that "an Austrian doctor says that the dream is the guardian of sleep." Dreams, he continues, have passed from the hands of poets to those of medical doctors; they are studied, treated, and even operated upon. "Are they cured?" the duchess asks. "Sometimes, with divine assistance," Montes responds. He continues, asserting that "not all is farce in the new science of psychoanalysis. There is in it an undoubted truth, albeit an old one: the soul can become ill. When it does, we use the most direct way to cure it." This method, he explains to his patient, "is a new kind of interrogatory . . . a maieutic more subtle than that of Socrates." In the unconscious there are "unfulfilled desires, cloudy and ugly visions, an invisible world of failures and miseries. . . . Our job is to bring it out into the light." The duchess cries "What impertinence!", a response similar to that of
"" This point was not lost on critics likc Alcjandro Miquis, "Sinrazcin," La Esfora. 31 March 1928: "Psychoanalysis is too dangerous a weapon to use it without all kinds of guarantees and precautions." "" Lafora, "Una opinicin sobre Sinrazdn." It would be intercsting to know who else was in the audience on opening night. Vicente Alcixandre was there (Morris, Surrealism andspain, 59), and one may presume that other Spanish "Freudians" werc as well.

Don Manuel in Sinrazon, but Montes reassures her that this is "a sun cure, like any other." The duchess then recounts a dream caused by jealousy in which, under Montes's prompting, she identifies the protagonist as an old schoolmate. O 3 Jn Fedrr, a play written in the early 1930s by the psychiatrist-writer Lloren~ Villalonga, the analyst states a number of Freudian truisms, such as all neuroses being repressed wishes; but, in this specific case, the disease is diagnosed as belonging "to the type classified by Adler as a neurosis of the will to dominate. " O 4 These plays were attempts to deal in a serious manner with ideas by then familiar to all theatregoers and, in the first two cases, to pronounce a mixed judgment. More satirical, but expressing similar positions, was Juan JosC Domenchina's 1929 novel, La tunicu d r Nrso, a chapter of which is set on the premises of the Neurasthenics Club of Madrid. To qualify for club membership, applicants were required to be suffering from an inveterate neurosis and to pay a minimum of 15,000 pesetas in dues. Those who were only recently neurasthenic-nuevos locos-were ineligible, and homosexuals, priests, and women paid double dues. I U 5 The club library of 22,000 volumes contained such titles as Thr Jokr and Its Relution to Puroxistic Tachvcardia by a Dr. Siemens, described as "a Freudian of good stock," and Sublingual Cancer and Labial Epitheliomus us u Consrqurncr of the Supervaluation of the Sexual Object. IU6 The novel's psychoanalyst, Jose Solesio, "was educated in Germany, where it is very probable that he did his course work [although] he received his degree in Madrid. A personal enemy of [Luis] Simarro [a Spanish neurologist], he dishonored one of his domestic maids, thus giving rise to a stirring professional polemic. . . . Nowadays he is fully devoted to Freudianism. He is an apostle of Freud who practices his therapeutic successfully. As he is young, clever and pedantic, he will soon be the last word. As you know, the endocrinologists, although chic, are somewhat soft in the head."i07 The association of endocrinology and psychoanalysis as providing analagous, or even competing, therapies for character disorders was common in Spain in the 1920s. Two other themes, in common with Sinruzbn, also appear in the novel. The first is the undeniable importance of the unconscious-Freud is quoted as saying that the unconscious is spiteful. l o 8 The second is the idea that psychoanalysis is a dangerous therapy. Solesio is denounced as a fool, "a psycholIo3 Manuel and Antonio Machado, Obras compleras (Madrid: Plenitud, 1967), 402-03. Cf. Carlos Feal, "Los Machado y el psicoanilisis," Insula. no. 328 (March 1974). '04 Llorenq Villalonga, Ohres compleres. (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1966), 1, 774. Io5 Juan Jose Domenchina, La rdnica de Neso (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1929), 146-47. See Morris, Surrealism and Spain. 123-25. Domenchina La tdnica de Neso, 143. '07 Ibid.. 35. lox Ibid.. 346.

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN SPAIN

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ogist of undigested Freudianism," by a character who goes on to explain that "psychoanalysis is a valuable discovery for literature, but it cannot, in good faith, be considered as therapy. Besides, who among us possesses perfect mastery of Freudian technique? To attempt psychoanalysis . . . with the stammering and vacillation of an inexperienced Freudian is idiotic and criminal" ' O Y Virtually the entire "Generation of 1927," which included Vicente Aleixandre, Federico Garcia Lorca, Josep V i ~ e n s Foix, Luis Buiiuel, and Salvador Dali, to name those most affected, was influenced by Freud. Dali first read Freud, beginning with The Interpretution of Dreams, while a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. At the same time, along with Lorca and others, he lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, which was a center of Freudian discussion. In 1929, Dali began to elaborate what became his famous "paranoic-critical" method, which took, in its representations on canvas, its most familiar form of a pseudohallucination: the artist concentrates on an object which he is about to paint, then free associates to something else, and integrates the double image into a composition. The representation of Freud's head as a snail is an appropriate example. Dali also used this method, together with a more orthodox Freudian approach, to explicate the theme of sexual repression in the "Angelus," a painting by Millet. His method of conjuring pseudohallucinations, which he termed "paranoid delusions," led Dali to an explication of the two figures in the painting-a mother and sonin terms of the Oedipus conflict. The mother is portrayed in a mantis position, about to devour the son, whose hat held at the waist symbolizes shame of virility. The clues leading to Dali's conclusion were provided by the "paranoid delusions" which caused him to confront his own Oedipal conflicts. For Dali, the Freudian interpretation was the only way to explain the widespread reproduction of this insipid canvas. Dali was not only an early Spanish Freudian, but was also the first Spanish Lacanian. While preparing his thesis on paranoia, Jacques Lacan sought out Dali in Paris and heard the painter's explanation of his own method. A student of that encounter, which occurred before 1932, has concluded that Dali's influence on Lacan was greater than Lacan's on Dali. Patrice Schmitt denotes five areas of concordance between Dali and Lacan: the paranoid phenomenon was pseudohallucinatory; delirium and interpretation were consubstantial (in the literature on paranoia, interpretation meant the morbid interpretation of a normal event); the paranoid phenomenon was close to the dream; madness was creative; and paranoia, considered from a formal perspective, contained
Ihid.. 81-82. See the concise definition in "La conquista de lo irracional" (originally published in French in 1935) in Dali's Si (Barcelona: Ariel, 1977), 23. Salvador Dali, El mito trugico del "Angelus" de Millet (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1978).
lUy

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obsessional elements. l 2 Dali's use o f Lacan has been as a referent for the scientific justification o f his method; but the content seems to have been worked out before the meeting. Moreover, like many Spaniards o f his generation, Dali gave Freud a distinctly biological reading, in contrast to Lacan's antibiologism. '"alali follows Freud (and possibly Novoa) in using a recapitulation argument to explain the symbolic representation o f ancestral sexual aggression, an atavistic phenomenon, according to Freud. l 4 There are numerous accounts o f Dali's July 1938 meeting with Freud where the artist made the famous double-image drawing o f Freud's head-assnail. Freud told Dali that the conscious content o f his paintings interested him more than the unconscious. Dali opined, in retrospect, that this was because Freud believed the unconscious was forever expelled from the conscious mind; Dali believed that, had Freud lived longer, he could have been convinced that Dali's paranoic-critical method was a way o f making the unconscious conscious.

'

VIII. THE COUNTERREVOLUTION

One o f the most startling aspects o f the Freudian discussion in Spain in the 1920s was that most o f it took place during a political dictatorship, that o f Primo de Rivera (1923-30). The universities became centers o f free discussion and new ideas, while at the same time the regime encouraged clerical obscurantism. Nevertheless, civil discourse in science seemed well enough established to survive a political situation which the clerical right might well have used to shut it down. Possibly it survived as a function o f the powers o f control that the regime had, but which in general it chose not to exercise. The political right, in this view, could afford to embrace Einstein and remain at least neutral toward Freud and engage in open scientific debate, so long as the
I l 2 Patrice Schmitt, "De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec Salvador Dali," in Salvador Dali, r4trospective. 1920-1980 [catalog] (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1979). 262-66. Lacan's thesis was first published in Paris in the fall of 1932 as De la psychose paranoiuque dans ses rapports avec la personnalit4. Dali first cites it in 1933 in an article in Minotaure; Spanish translation, "Nuevas consideraciones generales sobre el mecanismo del fencimeno paranoico desde el punto de vista surrealista." Si, 35. In Dali's 1944 novel Hidden Faces (1974 ed., Haakon Chevalier, trans. (New York: William Morrow), 214-IS), there is a psychoanalyst, Dr. Alcan, a thinly disguised acronym for Lacan. Dali still follows the work of Lacan, whose name he castilianizes as "Lacante" (interview in Destino, no. 2193 (17-23 October 1979), 8). He is pictured with Lacan in El Puis (Madrid), 2 March 1980. I I' See Sherry Turkle, Psychoana&tic Politics: Freud's French Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 17. ]I4 Dali, El mito tragico. 78; cf. Candelas, La untropologiu de Novoa Santos. 132. I I s On Dali's meeting with Freud, see Dali, Confisiones inconfesahles (Barcelona: Bmghera, 1975). 175-78; Jones, Life and Work of Sipnund Freud. 111. 235; Ronald W. Clark, Freud, the Man and the Cause (New York: Random House, 1980), 516-17; Dawn Ades, "Freud and i Surrealist Painting," in Freud, the Man. His W o r l l , H s Influence. Jonathan Miller, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 147. See Dali's three ink sketches of Freud in Schmitt, Salvador Dali. rirrospective. 260-6 1.

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social structure was protected by the regime. A revealing example of just where the limits of discourse lay was the regime's cancellation of the First Eugenic Course, organized by the sexual reform leadership, on the grounds When the course was that it was a "pornographic entertainment. " eventually held in 1933, there were numerous references to Freud and psychoanalysis. Paradoxically, it was under the politically open conditions offered by the Second Republic that civil discourse in science began slowly to erode. As civil conflict sharpened, the ideological charge attached to scientific ideas increased, and it became harder for conservatives to take a dispassionate stand on revolutionary scientific ideas. In 1933, perhaps under the stimulus of the right's assumption of power, Maraiion pointed to the rising tide of conservative "antisexualist" reaction to the spate of publications on sexuality, of which Freud was seen as the evil inspiration. Maraiion here defended Freud but reiterated his feeling that it was highly dangerous and counterproductive medically to lay bare the "sewers" of the unconscious mind. l 7 At the same time, right-wing clerical hostility to Freud became overt. In Barcelona, Juan Tusquets dedicated a volume of his inflammatory Biblioteca Las Sectas (which attacked communists, Freemasons, Jews, and Ortega y Gasset, among others) to "Freud: A Critique of his System" by E. Roman. I s Roman's article bears the subtitle "Pseudoscientific Justification of Sexual Aberrations," which gets to the heart of the ultraconservative approach to Freud. Roman identified Freud as a Jew, his doctrines as anti-Christian, and pointed out that the republican regime had granted all manner of facilities to the youth movement which sought in Freud the justification for all kinds of moral and intellectual abberrations. l 9 Roman declared that Maraiion had combatted Freud, but with no success; rather Maraiion, because of his "humanistic and naturalistic proclivities," had shown youth the way to arrive at its unspeakable conclusions. 2 0 There is no need to elaborate further. This kind of attack, a carbon copy of the nineteenth-century clerical harangues against Darwin, linked Freudian ideas to determinism and materialism, to political liberalism, to pornography and immorality, and to "humanistic" (as opposed to theistic)
' I " On the intellectual climate of the dictatorship, see Shlomo Ben-Ami, "La rebellion universitaire en Espagne (1927- 1931)," Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemnporuine, 26:3 (1979). 365-90. On the eugenic course, see Enrique Noguera, "C6mo se yugul6 la generosa idea del Primer Curso Eugenico Espanol," in Geniticu, eugenesiu y pedugogia se.ruul (Libro de las Primeras Jornadas Eugenicas Espanolas), Enrique Noguera and Luis Huerta, eds., 2 vols. (Madrid: Javier Morata, 1934). 11, 40.5-06. I l 7 Gregorio Maranbn, "Libros a la hoguera" (written 1933), in Ruiz y decoro de Espuiia (Buenos Aires: Austral, 19.52), 1 1 1-16. 'IX E. Roman, Freud y su sistema, Vol. VII of Biblioteca Las Sectus (Barcelona: Vilamala, 1933), 27-69. The frontispiece of the volume bears the title, "Freud: Criticia de su sistema." ' I y Ibid., 28, 33. (Freud is there identified, in italics, as judio de ruza.) 120 Ibid., p. 33.

education. Such outbursts, to be sure, had little impact at the time and would have had little significance at all had not those who held such opinions come to power after the civil war, e.g., Tusquets became professor o f pedagogy at the University o f Barcelona. Had not the civil war intervened, we might have expected a continuation o f previous trends, with the leadership o f Spanish psychiatry promoting an open but critical integration o f Freudian ideas. Instead, the leadership was overthrown or exiled, and Spanish psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s came to be dominated by those who opposed Freud in the name o f religion and traditional values. But the very negative commentary o f the 1940s had its antecedents in the conditions o f civil discourse prevailing over most o f the two preceding decades. W e can trace the beginnings o f a school o f explicitly anti-Freudian psychiatry o f the 1940s to a seminar conducted at the medical school o f the University o f Valencia in 1930-31 by Juan Barcia Goyanes. Barcia was an anatomist who, although self-trained in psychiatry, had conducted a small psychiatric practice before coming to Valencia. In a 1929 article, Barcia noted that the differences between Freudian and Adlerian psychotherapies could no longer be reduced to the "exclusivism" o f the erotic, a stand which only a few diehard Freudians still insisted upon, but rather represented "the struggle between two philosophies which dispute the domain o f biology," i.e., between that which makes causality the efficient principle and that, o f Kantian ancestry, which makes the tendency toward an end the characteristic o f life. For Barcia, Freudianism was a mechanistic system. The analyst acts like a surgeon to identify and extirpate the cause o f the disorder and has no interest in what its function may be. Individual psychology makes the finality o f the neurosis the decisive element o f the cure. For Barcia, to discover the cause o f a conflict was not in all cases sufficientto effecta cure; rather it was necessary to elucidate the finality or function o f the illness. He gave as examples two cases from his own practice; in the first, it was necessary to complement the discovery o f the cause o f conflict with an explanation o f the function o f the neurosis in order to cure the patient and, in the second, the latter was sufficient to effect a cure without delving too deeply into causes. In some cases, Barcia pointed out, it is therapeutically counterproductiveto lay bare all levels o f the origins o f a conflict. I * ' It should be noted that Barcia was using a variation o f psychoanalytic therapy, and that he did not doubt the great significance o f sexuality or o f Freudian techniques (he analyzed dreams). What began as the introduction o f a modest teleological component and as a philosophical justification for avoiding certain o f the therapeutic consequences o f Freudianism as a psychological system became, in Barcia's disciples, the basis for a radical, religiously motivated antagonism to Freudianism. Such an
12' Juan Jose Barcia Goyanes, "Causalidad y teleologia en la psicoterapia," Crrinica MPdica [Valencia], 33 (1929), 751-58. The fact that Barcia was an anatomist reinforces the picture of Freudian influence spreading well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of psychiatry.

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exaggerated turn of events could not have happened without the mandatory closure of civil discourse and the concommitant application, after 1940, of the repressive powers of the state to psychiatric practice and medical education. During 1930-3 1 Barcia offered an elective seminar on the interpretation of dreams in psychiatry. Among his seven or eight students were two of the postwar intellectual spokesmen for Spanish psychiatry, Pedro Lain Entralgo and Francisco Marco Merenciano. 1 2 2 They, together with Juan Jose Lopez Ibor, the most influential psychiatrist in Franco Spain, who was also in Valencia in this period, form a distinctive school of commentary on the work of Freud. Marco Merenciano, according to autobiographical notes, began to read Freud in his third year of medical school (1924-25). "I began to read German and a lot of literature. Freud, Maration, Novoa. Classical and modem [works]." 2 3 He perceived that his vocation as a psychiatrist emerged as a result of his personal confrontation with Freudian psychology: "I owe to psychoanalysis my vocation as a psychiatrist. I did not feel myself to be a psychiatrist until it was possible for me to overcome psychoanalysis. This happened in 1936 when I gave a course of eight lectures [on psychoanalysis]." l Z 4 For Marco, Freud was wrong because pansexualism was chimerical in its absolutist sense, and his anthropology was false and destructive because it was based purely on the instinctual. As for psychoanalytic therapy, he accepted it while denying that it was Freudian: "The author is not a Freudian, but he is, in the true sense of the word, a psychoanalyst. He does not admit in the unconscious the perverse extension that Freud wanted to give it."lZ5 His own therapeutic method was psychoanalytic, but not orthodox, and was successful only if the patient relived the psychogenic conflict and not merely remembered it. This mechanism, therefore, had only the appearance of being Freudian, but was not. He took pains to point out, moreover, that he rejected not only the libidinous basis of neurosis but every point of psychoanalytic interpretation. I z 6 If we take Marco at his word, what then is left of Freud's impact on him? Recognition of the possibility that a psychogenic factor could figure in any organic disturbance, of the relevance of the patient's entire biography to the clinical history of his illness, and of the indispensability of psychotherapy as a tool of internal medicine were three features that he listed. At the outbreak of the civil war, Barcia and Lain were scheduled to give a summer course at San Sebastiin on medical anthropology, a great part of
Juan Jose Barcia Goyanes, personal communication, Valencia, 20 September 1979. Pedro Lain Entralgo, prologue to Ensuyos ,nPdicos y literurios, by Francisco Marco Merenciano (Madrid: Cultura Hispinica, 1958), 10. In a second prologue to the same volume, L6pez lbor notes (p. 24) that Marco's reading of Freud was a revelation, like the discovery of a new continent. 124 Marco Merenciano, Ensuyos mPdicos y literarios. 436.
2 '1 Francisco Marco Merenciano, F'ronterus de lu locura (Valencia: n.p., 1947), 20. lZ6 Francisco Marco Merenciano, Tres ensuyos psicologicos (Valencia: Metis, 1949), 64-68.
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THOMAS F . CLICK

which turned on the work of Freud. Several years after the war, Lain published a long essay on Freud, doubtless reflecting the same points. Lain's problem with Freud was a philosophical one, based on Lain's religious convictions. Freud negated the primacy of the spirit postulated by HellenicChristian civilization-he converted the logos into pure instinctual-libidinous metaphor, and this constituted a negation of spiritual love and moral law. 27 Perhaps unwittingly, Freud sexualized a large number of neuroses which were nonlibidinous in origin, i.e., once a neurotic has heard of the Oedipus complex, as doubtless many in Spain had, he will interpret his family history accordingly. 1 2 8 Therefore, one had to be anti-Freudian, in the name of the true nature, both philosophical and psychological, of mankind. I z 9 Nevertheless there was ample recognition by Lain that Freud had revitalized medicine. 130 Lopez Ibor, writing in the shadow of the approaching war, cited a Nazi medical authority to the effect that psychoanalysis had to be extirpated as a system of values. Freud could serve only as a model of how to construct a psychological doctrine from the curing of patients. It was allowable to retain Freud's notion that psychotherapy must be informed by a philosophy of human nature, but his philosophy was the wrong one. For Lopez Ibor there was a relationship between neurosis and religion (the incidence of neurosis increased as religious life decreased), on the one hand, and between Freud's psychology and his negative attitude towards religion, on the other. 1 3 1 After the civil war, psychoanalysis in Spain was virtually proscribed; it was systematically excluded from university instruction and any scientific value it may have had was denied a priori "owing to its supposed revolutionary and subversive character and . . . its interest in sexuality which rendered it inappropriate for 'serious' university education. " According to the same commentator, the official rejection of Freud had ultimately to do with the fact that the Freudian notion of the genesis of neurosis through the action of the superego, as a consequence of the internalization of social values, bore an implicit criticism of the repressive nature of social organization. Official psychiatry had much stake in the new social order, instated through repres-

"

' 2 1 Pedro Lain Entralgo, Estudios de historiu de la medicinu y de antropolo~iarnidicu (Madrid: Escorial, 1943), 270. IzX Ibid.. 104. 12" Ibid.. 278. I3O In later vears. Lain became uneauivocal on Freud's positive contribution to medicine, particularly on his refinement of the technique of anamnesis and the revolution he brought about in the taking of clinical histories generally. See Pedro Lain Entralgo, La historia cli'nicu. Historia ! teoria del relato putografico. 2d ed. (Barcelona: Salvat, 1961), 500-5 19. : 13' Juan J. L6pez Ibor, Lo vivo y lo jnuerto delpsicounalisis (Barcelona: Luis Miracle, 1036), 138, 140-43. lZ2 Enrique Gonzalez Duro, Psiquiutria y sociedud autorituria: Espuiia, 1939-1 975 (Madrid: Akal, 1078), 75.

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sion, and therefore it had to abolish the superego. In Lopez Ibor's psychology, the superego was replaced by an innate "instinct of perfection," part of Official psychiatry whose function was to neutralize unhealthy instincts. followed the psychiatric orthodoxy of Nazi Germany which, with Freud removed, had to rely on second-rate successors of Emil Kraepelin, such as Oswald Bumke, all of them stridently anti-Freudian. In 1948, the Lopez Ballesteros translation of the Obras completcis was reedited by Biblioteca Nueva, in a deluxe edition in order to restrict sales. Ortega withdrew his prologue, which was replaced by another in which the publisher explained that Freud ought to be interpreted "in the Christian sense." Anti-Freudianism in Franco Spain was highly associated with the political generation of 1936; when that group passed from the scene, its psychological tenets were quickly discarded. In the vociferous, constantly reiterated denials of Freud by Lopez Ibor, Marco Merenciano, and the other mandarins of Francoist psychiatry, psychological resistance acquired social meaning. When the full weight of governmental authority was on the side of an anti-Freudian stance, there was no need for these men to repeat-and repeat-their outrage. They wanted to create a new psychology for the new order, but without Freud there was apparently little to say. Such men were too much influenced by Freud to envision either an abandonment of psychotherapy or a return to a wholly somatic psychiatry. Hence they invoked Freud again and again (as a precursor, as a mad but inventive genius, etcetera), unable to ignore him. The pattern of the reception of psychoanalysis in Spain was similar to that which greeted the theory of relativity. There was an early phase where knowledge was restricted to those who read German; then a phase of rapid expansion and popularization in the 1920s with remarkably fast permeation of and acceptance by most intellectuals and professionals through circles of affinity. In the 1930s, conservative opposition to Einstein mounted, with some persons who formerly supported relativity switching sides. In the 1940s, relativity was proscribed and official physics turned to noncontroversial areas, e.g., optics. Conservative physicists and mathematicians of the 1920s, however, felt more at ease with relativity (because its theological significance was, at best, far removed) than conservative psychiatrists did with Freud. Under conditions of civil discourse, strident opposition was confined to the extreme, clerical right, anti-Semitism was not an issue, and conservatives were able to gain a sense of participation in modern science which their anti-Darwinism had previously denied them. When civil discourse failed and class interests reasserted themselves, it became clear that, once again, association with revolutionary scientific ideas was viewed as indelibly progressive and that anyone aspiring to professional leadership in Franco Spain could not maintain such ties.

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133
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Ihid.. 79-80.
Ihid.. 71.