The roots of violence in Brazil: Impasses and possibilities

Abstract

Nowadays, violence appears in various forms in Brazil. From an agricultural country, Brazil became rapidly industrialized, which resulted in large rural exodus and explosion of population density in major cities. Brazil faces today a great social and economic disparity, added to endemic corruption of government, nepotism and lack of social planning. The roots of such violence can be found in our archaic heritage that has been forming Brazilian identity since its early days. The interest of former colonizers was to extract wealth, without regarding the establishment of a nation. This exploitation has been always done by force and violence, with the slave labor of native Indians and imported black people. As a state Brazil was exposed to the primal father’s law, and to the absence of a symbolic father, who could have provided his people with a more stable identity, only given by the paternal law. Is it possible to reframe archaic heritage, rebuilding the missing father image without resorting to a false savior of the fatherland? Is it possible to construct a more equitable society that could propitiate true conditions of citizenship in order to make every citizen, to the extent possible, the protagonist of his own history?

Key words:

• violence
• colonization
• archaic heritage
• identity
• primal father
• symbolic father

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eliana Rodrigues Pereira Mendes

Author

Eliana Rodrigues Pereira Mendes is specialized in clinical psychology. She is a psychoanalyst of the Cìrculo Psicanalítico de Minas Gerais (CPMG), Brazil, was its president from 1999 to 2001 and from 2011 to 2014, and teaches “Psychoanalysis and culture” on the CPMG program for training analysts. She was a delegate from Brazil to the IFPS, and has been regional editor for South America for the International Forum of Psychoanalysis (I FP) since 1998. In addition, she has published several books and articles in Brazilian journals, as well as in the IFP, and has been a guest editor for three of its issues.