The Psychology of Regeneration: Spain and America at the Turn of the Century

In: The review of politics, Band 43, Heft 2, S. 218-241

Abstract

In this essay, the investigation of United States images of Spain and Spanish images of North Americans serves as a point of departure in the search for larger patterns in intercultural relations — patterns that encompass far more of humanity than the two countries under consideration. My basic premise is that personal, psychic factors often lie at the heart of images that representative thinkers of a particular culture at a given moment form of other cultures. Personal, psychic factors lie also at the heart of an issue that has been central to history since the dawn of the modern age: the clash between modernity and traditionalism. The essential points of this article could have been made just as well by contrasting the mutual relationships between virtually any two national cultures, providing only that one was rather highly developed and modern, the other relatively backward economically and traditional or even primitive in social-political organization. I base my study on mutual images of North Americans and Spaniards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries simply because this is a subject about which I have thought at some length, even if not in much depth. Finally, if my conclusions have any validity, it derives not so much from historical methodology as from the analyses of Jungian psychology and the use of concepts such as individuation, archetypes, ego consciousness, and the personal and collective unconscious.