ABSTRACT
This chapter is motivated by a desire to reflect upon Mexican national identity, as depicted by Mexican essayist and Nobel Prize winner for literature, Octavio Paz, in his prominent work The Labyrinth of Solitude (1960). In this set of essays, Paz outlines “the Mexican” and gives an account of this character’s customs, passions, angst, fantasies, and history. Moscovici’s concept of “social representation” (2008) is helpful to describe the type of knowledge that Paz pins down when using the notion of “the Mexican”: a set of images, information, and attitudes about Mexican national identity socially constructed and perpetuated. Paz’s work proves to be quite psychoanalytically informed, and I will outline my interpretation of his claims and contribute some of my own. The psychoanalytic reading of the national identity of Mexicans, however, presents problematic paradoxes when it comes to attributing history with the causes of the Mexican’s psychic conflicts and phantasies. I shall explore some of these problems and, with a paradoxical note, will set forth the conclusions.
