The Savage Rests in Every Soul: Social Misfits and the Primitive Unconscious in Arthur Ramos’s Social Psychology

Abstract

Between the 1920s and 1940s Arthur Ramos (1903–1949), a doctor from Alagoas, was part of a group of Brazilian intellectuals dedicated to reflect on the direction, identity and modernisation of the country, especially on health issues and education. While at the Bahia School of Medicine, he studied the relationship between folklore and psychic dynamism elaborating the concept of the Unconscious Folkloric and signalling their approaches between demopsychology, anthropology, medicine, collective psychology and psychoanalysis. From his reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo and The Interpretation of Dreams, Ramos devoted himself to analysing the phylogenetic origin of primitive fantasies and to understanding the similarities between the mental dynamics of children, ‘primitive’ peoples and schizophrenics. In his consideration of the content of psychosis he argued that it would be possible to perceive the relationship between an ancestral unconscious, depositary of the phylogenetic legacy, an ethnic soul, and an interpsychic unconscious, which would rest on the complex influences of the social environment on the individual. In this movement, Ramos elaborated the notion of social maladjustment, a fundamental object for Mental Hygiene that would become an Applied Social Psychology and would expand psychiatric practices beyond the asylum walls to reach ‘normal’ individuals and, with a view to health promotion and prevention of mental illness, elected children as privileged subjects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)