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Mediterranean Reception in the Americas 313
Not so distant from this, we find a whole discipline that has
built a wide collective imagery in the twentieth century, as well
as a new guild with its patterns of truth and authority, and with
its images of nature and society: Oedipus and Freudian psychoanalysis.
36 This is probably the most striking reappearance of
Greek myth, or at least its names and general plots, in contemporary
culture, a presence that reintroduces images of the family,
names and places of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean,
as well as a bond of solidarity between myth, science, and
society. More than the analytical patterns of social and structural
anthropology, psychoanalysis was a major academic and
social trend in Latin America in the twentieth century, especially
in Brazil and Argentina, driving the culture back into the
ancient landscapes of myth, and thus forcing another movement
of reading. The trajectories of reading, however, dressing up
Viennese types in Theban clothing and names, were marked by
a complex mirroring of images and references that almost put to
death the original Mediterranean DNA, previously expressed
in the myths of Greek heroes. As a result of this movement, we
can perceive that this was a remarkable vehicle for Mediterranean
codes, mixing ancient and contemporary identities,
wishes, and patterns.
As a source of meaning, the Mediterranean is ready to provide
the images and proofs requested by any kind of social
project. In every case, a transaction of information and intentions
starts a dance of historical information, in which no historian
or humanist can ever control the consequences, which are
inscribed on a larger social landscape, within the world of life. If
we seriously consider the consistency of these collective imageries
of the Mediterranean as cultural references of our modern
and contemporary cultures, we can perhaps often raise, with
absolutely different responses, the central question of this book:
what is the Mediterranean?
project investigates the recurrent pattern of the myth of the hero, as well as its
social consequences in modern contexts.
36
Cf. Francisco Marshall, ‘Édipo Tirano, Édipo Freud’, in Filosofia Política,
Série III, n. 1, Filosofia e Literatura: o trágico (Rio de Janeiro, 2001),
141–52.