SEPTEMBER 2021

“Love for the Colonizer: Literary and Psychoanalytic Investigations of Brazil’s Foundational Trauma”

FRANCISCO ATTIÉ

ARTICLES

Published September 2021

ABSTRACT

The Brazilian cultural and political project began in 1822 with the end of 
colonization. At its outset,  colonization stood fictitious in its enormous power 
to shape reality. In Latin America there was a confluence between the 
politicians and writers of the 19th century that guaranteed wholly pervasive 
foundational mythologies—the people building the legal-political state were 
also setting the mythological ideology of the nation in stone. As such, 
foundational myths served to unify the people under a common national 
banner. However, in their attempts to overcome the ghost of colonization, 
they ended up guaranteeing a wholly pervasive structure wherein the 
repressed trauma could fester. In Brazil, foundational works, like José de 
Alencar’s Iracema, instead of rejecting the trauma of colonization, 
engendered myths that repressed it, romanticizing a narrative for the people 
to fall in love with their colonizer. This love, I argue, led to a specific cultural 
complex that induces a repetition compulsion of the original traumatic event 
up to this day, guaranteeing unconscious entrapment and a constant return 
and submission to the figure of the colonizer.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33682/mn24-v7av
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HOW TO CITE (CHICAGO):
Attié, Francisco. "Love for the Colonizer: Literary and Psychoanalytic Investigations of Brazil's Foundational Trauma." The Interdependent 2 (2021): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.33682/mn24-v7av