ABSTRACT
Initially Christopher Columbus was not able to give a precise location for where they have landed. He thought that they must be somewhere in the Indies, somewhere off the coast of China, somewhere on the Asian Continent. Columbus perceived the land he encountered in images of round, swollen protuberances and erect nipples; he responded to it with the hunger of a suckling newborn and the lust of an aroused lover. Columbus’s belief in vast amounts of gold was proved irrational over and over again; nonetheless, this illusion could have had a psychological purpose. The archetypal images that seized Columbus’s imagination and fed his relentless illusions turned out to be inborn in the American psyche. In the late eighteenth century, Columbus became a patriotic symbol for the newly formed United States of America. He was praised as a great hero—courageous, resolute, and victorious.
