Freud's Mexican readers.

This essay presents an overview of artists and writers who read Freud's work in Mexico between 1920 and 1968. The focus is on cultural readings of Freud: non-clinical interpretations of psychoanalysis that applied Freud's theory to literary, artistic, philosophical, or religious questions. The essay focuses on Salvador Novo, one of the poets associated with the Contemporáneos group, and his reading of the "Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality;" Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, a judge and criminologist who used psychoanalysis in his work, including the trial of Trotky's assassin; Octavio Paz, a poet and intellectual who wrote an essay on Mexican history, "The Labyrinth of Solitude," as a response to "Moses and Monotheism;" and Gregorio Lemercier, a Benedictine monk who placed his monastery in group analysis. These unorthodox readings of Freud opened the door for some of the most daring intellectual experiments in the 20th century.