L CARRANCA

A WILD FREUDIAN IN MEXICO: RAU

Y TRUJILLO

Ruben Gallo, Princeton, NJ, USA

One of the most original and eccentric readers Freud had anywhere in
the world was Raul Carranca y Trujillo, a Mexican judge who studied in
Spain, returned to Mexico City in the 1930s, and worked tirelessly to
reform the judicial system by, in part, incorporating psychoanalytical ideas
into the legal profession.1 Carranca was also Freuds only Mexican
correspondent, and the two exchanged ideas about the relation between
psychoanalysis and criminology.2
Raul Carranca y Trujillo was born in 1897 in the southern state
of Campeche to a Spanish father. He received a scholarship to study
in Spain, at the Central University in Madrid, where he completed his
undergraduate and graduate studies before returning to Mexico City in
1925. He rose quickly through the judicial system and became a university
professor, editor of Criminalia, a journal of criminology, and eventually

1. Editors note: In both the Mexican and the Austrian judicial systems, but unlike the
English common law systems, a judge has investigative functions in addition to judicial
functions; this should be borne in mind in understanding the work of Carranca y Trujillo,
as well as in Freuds discussions of judicial investigation. Freud uses the term
Untersuchungsrichter (literally investigating judge), which Strachey translates as
examining magistrate.
2. For a more detailed discussion of Carranca y Trujillo, see my book Freuds Mexico:
Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (Gallo, 2010).
RUBEN GALLO is the author of Freuds Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis
(MIT, 2010, winner of the Gradiva prize for the best book on a psychoanalytic topic). He
has also authored Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological
Revolution (MIT, 2005). His next book is an essay on Marcel Prousts Latin
Americans. He teaches at Princeton University. Address for correspondence:
Director, Program in Latin American Studies, Burr Hall, Princeton University,
Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. [gallo@princeton.edu]
Psychoanalysis and History 14(2), 2012: 253268
DOI: 10.3366/pah.2012.0111
# Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/pah

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a judge. He was an ambitious young man and wrote his first book an
essay on the political evolution of Latin America (Carranca y Trujillo,
1925) in his 20s. By age 35, he had published a novel and four volumes
dealing with various aspects of Mexican and Spanish law.
In one of his publications, Derecho penal (Carranca y Trujillo, 1937), a
textbook on criminal law, Carranca presents himself as a disciple of Cesare
Lombroso, a firm believer in positivism, and defines criminology as a new
science dependent on a series of auxiliary disciplines. Carranca believed
the modern criminologist needed to employ the methods and investigative
techniques developed by a series of related disciplines: anthropology,
endocrinology, sociology, statistics, medicine and psychology (Carranca y
Trujillo, 1937, p. 34).
Of all these auxiliary disciplines Carranca was most interested in
criminal psychology. As he explained in Derecho penal, he was an avid
reader of Freud and considered psychoanalysis an invaluable tool for legal
work3 like forensic medicine; psychoanalysis could help lawyers and judges
reach a well-founded verdict (Carranca y Trujillo, 1937, p. 42). The
interpretative techniques discovered by Freud could be used to analyse the
criminals psychological traits and to pinpoint the causes for his
transgression (Carranca y Trujillo, 1937, p. 42). Criminals often suffered
from unresolved complexes and other active neuroses; psychoanalysis
could reveal their unconscious motives. Carranca presented himself as an
authority, telling his readers he had published several articles on criminal
psychology, and that one of these had been favourably reviewed by none
other than Doctor Freud himself.
The article in question, A judicial experiment with psychoanalytic
techniques, was published three years earlier, in 1934; it was one of a series
of articles Carranca wrote for Criminalia exploring the possible uses of
psychoanalytic theories in the practice of criminal law and presenting
one of the most creative and unusual readings of Freud anywhere in
the world.
In the pages of Criminalia, Carranca published a series of articles using
psychoanalytic theory to shed light on problems in criminology. In 1933
he published Sexo y penal [Sex and the penal system], an effort to
think through the problems of spousal visits for prisoners. A few months
later, Carranca wrote a second essay inspired by Freud: A judicial
experiment with psychoanalytic techniques, published in the February
1934 issue of Criminalia. Here Carranca argued that Freuds uvre was an
invaluable tool for judges and criminologists in elucidating the criminal

3. Certain crimes, he writes, can be traced back to the complexes and thus positivist
criminal law can turn to psychoanalysis in order to investigate their causes (Carranca y
Trujillo, 1937, p. 43).

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mind: psychoanalytic theory could be applied to criminal psychology and

used to reveal how criminal acts stem from unconscious motivations and
desires.
Carrancas article was full of praise for the father of psychoanalysis.
Sigmund Freud, he wrote, that intrepid explorer of the human soul and
its dark, subterranean recesses, offers his psychoanalysis to prosecutors as a
sort of magic lantern capable of illuminating the way. Freud is an Aladdin
with a marvellous lamp, a type of open Sesame (Carranca y Trujillo,
1934a, p. 125). Carranca recommends that judges study psychoanalysis and
apply its techniques to criminal cases.
Rather than writing a theoretical comparison between the conceptions of
subjectivity presented by psychoanalysis and criminology, Carranca chose
a more pragmatic approach: the young judge decided to play the role of the
therapist, turned his office into a consulting room and invited defendants
sent to him for judicial examination to talk freely about their lives, dreams,
frustrations, desires, sexual fantasies and anything else that might shed
light on their unconscious mental processes. To carry out the analysis,
Carranca even considered putting a couch in his office, but in the end opted
for a less intimidating option: a chair facing away from him so that his
patients could speak without looking at him.
One of his first cases involved a young man identified as RHV like
Freud, he referred to patients by their initials to protect their privacy
accused of shooting his wife in a fit of jealousy. On their first meeting,
Carranca led the defendant into his office, summarized the basics of
Freudian methods, invited him to sit on the analytic chair, facing away
from him, and tell him anything and everything that came to mind.
Dreams, slips and sexual fantasies, he told him, were of particular interest
for his work. The judge gave the following account of his first session:
Following Freuds method [. . .] I decided to analyse RHV in a simple and
straightforward setting [. . .] I chose to use my own professional office, sheltered
from noise and people, especially in the early hours of the morning. I had R
brought there, and he remained completely alone with me. In order to gain his
confidence, I clearly explained my intentions, my interest in him, the way in
which we were to work together. I had taken the precaution of visiting him in
prison beforehand, so that he would not fear me. When our [analytic] work
started, I had already obtained from him a certain degree of trust, the necessary
condition for honesty.
Starting with our first session, I asked R to sit facing away from me, facing a
white and empty wall. I told him he could close his eyes if he wished. At first it
was a great struggle: he was reluctant to face away from me, fearing I might play
some kind of trick on him (or hypnotize him, as he told me later). After
explaining in detail my purpose, I told him he was completely free to move about
as he wished, and even to turn around and look at me if he so desired (I thus
prepared myself for being surprised in the midst of my note-taking). This last

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proposal persuaded him, and a good number of our sessions unfolded in this
manner. Sometimes, at the most interesting point in his confessions, he would
close his eyes, cover them with his hands, or face away from me. We worked
together for several sessions, and I attempted to glimpse into his innermost
thoughts, into his subconscious. (Carranca y Trujillo, 1934a, pp. 1278)

Carranca published the case study of his first patient in Criminalia. After
quoting extensively from the defendants own account of his childhood,
family dynamics, work history, marriage and the fit of jealousy that led
him to shoot his wife, the judge offers an analytic interpretation of these
events: R had a very creative imagination and sometimes confused
fantasy and reality; he suspected his wife might be cheating on him, and
this fear led him to picture her in bed with another man, a mental image
that became as real and as unbearable as if it had actually occurred;
R was overwhelmed by violent passions as he flew into a murderous rage
and shot her to death (Carranca y Trujillo, 1934a, p. 131).
During the legal proceedings, the defence argued that R had committed
a crime of passion a momentary lapse in judgment that was treated with
leniency in Mexican criminal law. The prosecution, in contrast, construed
the killing as a premeditated homicide. Carranca was not persuaded by
either argument: based on the unconscious material uncovered during his
analytic sessions, he found the defendant guilty of homicide, but ruled that
it had not been premeditated since he had been provoked by the victim
and by her flirtatious behaviour towards other men. R, the first defendant
to be psychoanalysed by a judge in Mexico, was sentenced on 27 December
1933 to three years in prison (Carranca y Trujillo, 1934a, p. 127).
Carranca closed his article by noting that he was the first judge in
Mexico and probably one of the first in the civilized legal world to
have delved into the unconscious of a criminal (Carranca y Trujillo, 1934a,
p. 132). At the age of 37 Carranca was already a bold explorer, intent on
breaking new ground in the field of criminal law. Some years before
Carrancas experiment, the Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos called
himself Ulises criollo, a Mexican criollo version of the Homeric hero.
Carranca hoped to become a Freud criollo, an analyst who recreated the
experiments of the Viennese doctor on Mexican soil.
One wonders what Freud might have thought of Carrancas creative
but unorthodox use of psychoanalysis. Would he have been pleased to
know that his theories were making ripples throughout the world, reaching
even Mexican courthouses? Or would he have dismissed these judicial
experiments as the type of unprofessional abuses that had given analysis
a bad name in certain circles? Was this a legitimate branch of
psychoanalysis? Would he have seen Carranca as a faithful disciple or as
an imposter?

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In 1910 Freud had published a paper criticizing the sloppy methods

of certain therapists: Wild psychoanalysis, he declared, was practised
by doctors who had never undergone proper training, had little or
no experience with the technique of free association, and lacked an
understanding of unconscious processes. In most cases, these practitioners
had reduced Freuds theory of sexuality to a caricature: they understood
sexual drives as simply the need for coitus or analogous acts producing
orgasm and emission of the sexual substances (Freud, 1910, pp. 2223).
Would Freud have considered Carranca a wild analyst? The Mexican
judge certainly fits the profile sketched in the article: in his writings
Carranca reduced sexuality to its genital component, and his article on
prison sex argues that neuroses can be averted or cured by engaging in
regular sexual intercourse the same argument as Freud puts in the lips of
a wild analyst. Freud recommended that only those familiar with the
technical rules practise psychoanalysis, and that a treatment was an
extremely long process that could not be rushed. Carranca, in contrast, had
little familiarity with the technique of analysis, and his psycho-legal
treatments lasted no more than a few days. It seems almost certain that
Freud would have considered him a practitioner of wild psychoanalysis
or, in this case, wild psycho-legal analysis.
But, contrary to our expectations, Freud had an altogether different
response to Carrancas experiments. Soon after A legal experiment
with psychoanalytic techniques appeared in Criminalia, Carranca mailed a
copy to Freud. Freud responded with a gracious albeit brief letter,
telling the Mexican judge that he had read his article with great interest,
that he approved of the efforts to find new applications for psychoanalysis,
and that it has always been an ideal desire for the psychoanalyst to win two
people for our discipline: teachers of youth and judges. To my knowledge,
Freud never made this last assertion anywhere else in his writing.
Far from considering Carranca a wild analyst who might hurt the cause
of psychoanalysis, Freud celebrated his role as a proselytizer, as someone
who might win desirable allies for the cause.
Carranca, who was understandably proud to have received such a
glowing review from the father of psychoanalysis, published a facsimile of
the letter in Criminalia:
13.2.1934
Hochgeehrter Herr
Ich habe zum Gluck in meiner jungen Jahren Ihre schone Sprache lesen
gelernt und bin so im Stande, mich an der Schatzung und dem Interesse zu
freuen, das Sie unserer Psychoanalyse zeigen und an der Anwendungen
teilzunehmen die Sie auf ihren Arbeitsgebiet von ihr machen. Leider habe ich
es nicht so weit gebracht auch Spanisch zu schreiben und mu sie bitten sich eine
deutsche Antwort gefallen zu lassen.

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Es war immer ein Idealwunsch des Analytikers, zwei Personen fur unserer
Deutungsart zu gewinnen, der Jugendlehrer und der Richter.
Ihr herzlich ergebener,
Freud4
[13/2/1934
Dear Sir,
I had the good fortune of learning to read your beautiful language in my youth;
I was pleased to discover the interest and the appreciation you have shown
towards our Psychoanalysis, and to learn of how you have applied it to your
discipline.
Unfortunately I cannot go as far as to write you in Spanish, and I must ask you
to accept a response in German.
It has always been an ideal desire of analysts to win over two people for our
discipline: teachers and judges.
Yours sincerely,
Freud]

This is Freuds only letter to a Mexican correspondent, and one of the

very few texts in which he addresses the relation between psychoanalysis
and criminology.

Freud and Criminology

But what was Freuds position towards criminology? How did Freud see
the criminal system and the figure of the judge? Did he believe, like
Carranca, that criminology was compatible with psychoanalysis? Was his
enthusiasm for Carrancas variety of judicialanalytic experiments an
honest assertion or simply a polite remark written hastily in a thank you
note to a far-away correspondent?
From his early psychoanalytic years, Freud expressed an interest in
criminology and deployed a number of legal metaphors in explaining
psychoanalytic concepts: he described the superego as a judge, argued
that civilization was based on a primeval crime, and considered why
neurotics feel inexplicably guilty. On at least two occasions Freud was
asked to provide expert opinions in criminal trials; he thus had ample
opportunity to consider closely the workings of the Austrian judicial
system. One of these opinions has been published as The expert opinion in
the Halsmann case (Freud, 1931). In addition, in 1922 Freud wrote a
memorandum for the defence in the trial of a man charged with assault, but

4. Freud to Carranca y Trujillo, 13 February 1934. Reproduced in Criminalia 8 (April

1934): 160 (Freud, 1934).

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this document has not survived.5 Prior to these occasions, he wrote two
other short essays on the relation between psychoanalysis and criminology:
Psycho-analysis and the establishment of fact in legal proceedings (Freud,
1906) and Some character-types met with in psycho-analytic work (Freud,
1916).
Psycho-analysis and the establishment of fact in legal proceedings, the
first of the three publications, was originally given as a lecture at the
seminar of Dr Loffler, Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of
Vienna. Speaking to an audience of aspiring prosecutors and legal scholars,
Freud suggested that criminology and psychoanalysis have much in
common: the judge, like the analyst, must uncover the hidden psychical
material, by deploying a set of detective devices. And criminals, like
neurotics, go to great trouble to protect a closely guarded secret (Freud,
1906, p. 108).
Criminals resemble neurotics but Freud concedes there are important
differences between the two. Although both of these figures have
something to hide, in the case of the criminal it is a secret which he
knows and hides from [the judge], whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a
secret which he himself does not know either, which is hidden even from
himself. The criminal stages a pretence of ignorance, while the neurotic
patient suffers from a genuine ignorance of the originating cause for his
illness (Freud, 1906, p. 111). Both criminals and neurotics deploy defence
mechanisms to prevent their secret from being exposed but, while criminals
put up a resistance that comes entirely from consciousness, the neurotic
equivalent arises at the frontier between unconscious and conscious
(Freud, 1906, p. 112).
Freud remarks that for obvious reasons patients tend to be more
cooperative than criminals:
In psycho-analysis, the patient assists with his conscious efforts to combat his
resistance, because he expects to gain something from the investigation, namely
his recovery. The criminal, on the other hand, does not work with [the judge]; if
he did, he would be working against his whole ego. (Freud, 1906, p. 112)

Finally, Freud asserts that judges are at a disadvantage because their

discipline does not allow them to probe beyond the defendants conscious
mind. Without access to the unconscious and its complex web of desires,
fears and drives judges can easily misinterpret the defendants
behaviour. They could, for instance, be led astray by a neurotic who,
although he is innocent, reacts as if he were guilty, because a lurking sense
of guilt that already exists in him seizes upon the accusation made in the

5. This memorandum is described by Jones (1957, vol. 3, pp. 102, 245) and Strachey
(1966, p. 102).

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particular instance. Judges, in other words, are unable to perceive the

difference between a conscious and an unconscious sense of guilt a
distinction that would not be lost upon the psychoanalyst (Freud, 1906,
p. 113).
Professor Loffler invited Freud to present this paper at his seminar
because he, like Carranca, believed that analysis could be a useful tool for
the criminologist. Freud was sceptical: he did not like the idea of analysis
being used as a tool, and was more interested in comparing the working
methods of criminology and psychoanalysis only to conclude that his own
line of work was much more sophisticated. Only psychoanalysis, with its
capacity to delve into the unconscious, can do justice to the complexities of
the criminal mind.
Almost a decade after the publication of this paper, Freud (1916)
expanded his observations on criminology and psychoanalysis in a new
essay entitled Some character-types met with in psycho-analytic work.
The third section of this work focused on Criminals from a sense of guilt,
a peculiar type of individual Freud had encountered in the course of his
analytic work.
Freuds earlier paper presented the case of an innocent defendant who,
tormented by an unconscious sense of guilt, behaved as if he were really
guilty. He now considers the case of a criminal who is guilty of a crime and
also tormented by an unconscious sense of guilt. Inverting commonsense
logic, Freud argues that such delinquents do not feel guilty because they
have broken the law but, on the contrary, break the law because they were
tormented by an unbearable sense of guilt.
Freud explains this paradoxical assertion as follows: analytic work shows
that committing a crime can bring mental relief [to its] doer. He gives the
example of a criminal who was suffering from an oppressive feeling of
guilt, of which he did not know the origin[;] after he had committed a
misdeed this oppression was mitigated [. . .] his sense of guilt was at least
attached to something. Freud calls these neurotics criminals from a sense
of guilt (Freud, 1916, p. 332).
Freud asks two questions about this peculiar type of criminals. What is
the origin of the sense of guilt before the deed, and is it possible that this
kind of causation plays any considerable part in human crime? He answers
the first by stating that analytic work has shown that an obscure sense of
guilt can always be traced back to the Oedipus complex, and to the crimes
of patricide and incest that lie at the origin of civilization.
Freud does not have as clear an answer to his second question about the
role of unconscious guilt in criminology. He suggests that an archaic sense
of guilt is probably present in most criminals, a fact that should be taken
into account by judges as they mete out punishments and attempt to
elucidate the psychology of the criminal; but he offers no clues as to how
this might be done (Freud, 1916, p. 333).

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As he had done in the 1906 essay, Freud pits the judge against the
analyst, concluding that the latter is better prepared to deal with the
complexities of the criminal psyche. A judge rules on whether a defendant
is guilty or innocent, whereas analysts can trace the origin of a criminal
deed back to the early history of the individual and the infancy of
civilization.
Freud published his third and final comment on criminology and
psychoanalysis in 1931: The expert opinion in the Halsmann case. A
young Austrian student, Philipp Halsmann, had been tried for parricide,
found guilty, and subsequently pardoned. Josef Kupka, a professor of
jurisprudence at the University of Vienna, who believed the young man
had been wrongly convicted in the first place, launched a campaign to
overturn the original verdict and clear Halsmanns name. As part of his
legal strategy, he asked Freud to write a memorandum for the court, a
request the analyst honoured.
During the Halsmann trial, the prosecution introduced the testimony of
a doctor who argued that Halsmanns active Oedipus complex was the
motive for killing his father. The prosecutor also argued that, after the
crime, the student had undergone a severe repression that erased all
memories of the deed from his conscious mind.
Freuds brief has little to say about Halsmann, his guilt or innocence, but
in contrast he has much to say about the prosecutions case and its shoddy
understanding of psychoanalytic concepts like the Oedipus complex and
repression.
Freud recalls that the principal characteristic of the Oedipus complex is
its universality; it is thus equally present in criminals and in law-abiding
citizens. Precisely because it is always present, he writes, the Oedipus
complex is not suited to provide a decision on the question of guilt. To
illustrate this point, Freud deploys one of his most favoured rhetorical
strategies: he tells a joke:
There was a burglary. A man who had a jemmy in his possession was found guilty
of the crime. After the verdict had been given and he had been asked if he had
anything to say, he begged to be sentenced for adultery at the same time since
he was carrying the tool for that on him as well. (Freud, 1931, p. 252)

The Oedipus complex, a universal attribute, cannot be considered proof of

parricidal intentions any more than the possession of a penis could be
taken as proof of adultery.
Freud also objects to the prosecutions use of the psychoanalytic concept
of repression: the doctors had argued that, after the murder, Halsmann had
repressed all memories of the deed, and thus was unable to recollect any
details related to the crime. I must say, Freud quips, that a repression of
this kind occurring out of the blue in an adult who gives no indication of
a severe neurosis [. . .] would be a rarity of the first order (Freud, 1931,

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p. 253). Interestingly, Freud does not attempt to speculate on whether

Halsmann was innocent or guilty; the focus of his paper is to criticize the
prosecutions inaccurate use of psychoanalytic concepts.
A common thread runs through these three essays on criminology:
Freud acknowledges the similarities between the judge and the analyst, as
individuals charged with uncovering a well-kept secret. But while judges
must remain within the bounds of conscious thought and can only attain a
limited understanding of the defendants mind, psychoanalysts aided by
the couch, the analytic frame, and the various techniques for interpreting
free associations can glimpse into the unconscious and gain a deeper
understanding of the criminal mind.
If we now return to Carrancas experiments in psycho-legal analysis, we
see that Freud had every reason to be enthusiastic in his response to the
Mexican author. In his three articles on criminology, Freud lamented the
fact that judges lacked the tools to delve into the criminal unconscious.
Carranca seems to have followed to the letter Freuds suggestion that
judges had much to learn from analysts, and that they would never fully
comprehend the psychology of lawbreakers without taking into account the
complexities of the criminal psyche.
Carranca had read Freuds three essays on criminology. His article
Psychoanalysis and the examination of criminals the third and last he
wrote for Criminalia on a psychoanalytic theme quotes at length from
Freuds 1906 essay, mentions the analogy between the criminal and the
neurotic, and argues passionately that judges should use psychoanalysis to
elucidate the unconscious motives behind the criminal act. Carranca stops
short of recommending that judges follow his example and psychoanalyse
the defendants, but he does call for the creation of a Laboratory of
Criminal Psychology to probe into the criminal mind (Carranca y Trujillo,
1934b, pp. 18390).
Carranca summed up his view of the relationship between criminal law
and psychoanalysis in Derecho penal: parte general. He argued that:
Crimes stem from an inability to adapt to society, as a result of the various
complexes (Oedipus, Electra, Cain, Diana, castration, etc.), and that the
judge aided by psychoanalysis can elucidate how these unconscious
phenomena led to criminal acts (Carranca y Trujillo, 1937, pp. 27ff). Freud
might have objected as he did in the Halsmann case to linking the
Oedipus complex to criminality, but he would certainly have applauded
Carrancas insistence on the need to incorporate the psychoanalytic theory
of the unconscious into the practice of law.
In 1938, a year after receiving Carrancas Derecho penal, Freud
left Vienna for London, where he died in 1939. Meanwhile, Carranca
continued to climb the echelons of Mexicos judicial system: in the summer
of 1940 he was appointed the judge of the district of Coyoacan, the
southern neighbourhood in Mexico City that was home to Diego Rivera,

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Frida Kahlo, and many other artists and intellectuals. This was not a
particularly troublesome district, and his first cases involved petty crimes
and other minor offences; he led a quiet life in this suburban enclave, with
plenty of free time to devote to reading Freud, until one day he was
assigned a high-profile case that would turn out to be the most important of
his entire career.
On 20 August 1940, Carranca was put in charge of a foreign defendant
who went by the aliases of Frank Jacson and Jacques Mornard, and
was accused of a crime that made headlines around the world: the murder of
Leon Trotsky, the Soviet revolutionary who had been exiled in Mexico City
since 1937. Jacson had gone to visit Trotsky at his home in Coyoacan with
the pretext of showing him an article, and struck him on the back of the
head with an ice-axe while the old man was reading the text. Jacson was
immediately apprehended. Trotsky died some hours later in hospital.
Jacson his real name turned out to be Ramon Mercader readily
admitted committing the murder, but the account he gave the police raised
suspicions from the beginning: he described himself as a disillusioned
Trotskyite, a young revolutionary who had travelled to Mexico to meet the
leader of the movement, and had been disappointed to discover that the
man he admired had betrayed his ideals. Trotsky, he told the judge, had
asked him to murder Stalin, a request that so angered him he decided to
kill him.
Carranca soon found a number of inconsistencies in the murderers
account. He claimed to be a Belgian citizen who only spoke French, yet a visit
by a diplomat revealed he knew little about Belgium; he declared he had
acted alone, out of disillusionment with Trotsky, but the entire world
suspected that the assassination had been ordered by Stalin; he assured
investigators he did not know any of the Mexican Stalinists who had
participated in the first attack against Trotskys house, yet he rented an office
in the same building Edificio Ermita, near Colonia Condesa where
David Alfaro Siqueiros, the ringleader of an earlier plot, kept a studio.
Carranca had a curious case before him: the defendants guilt had been
established Mercader never denied killing Trotsky but his motives
were obscure. To write his verdict and select the appropriate sentence, the
judge had to understand the assassins motives and their impact on his
crime; but, since the killer refused to talk, Carranca had to find a creative
way of uncovering his secret.
The Trotsky Case turned out to be the perfect opportunity for Carranca
to put into practice his psycho-legal theories. Since Mercader refused to
talk, and would not reveal his identity or explain his motives for killing
Trotsky, the judges decided to probe his unconscious. Freud had once
written that nothing was harder to keep than a secret: a person can remain
tight-lipped but in the end he will always give it away through unconscious
gestures. Would the same hold true for Mercader?

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Carranca could have analysed Mercader himself, using as he had done

before his office as a consulting room for psycho-legal analysis. But in
this case the stakes were too high, and he opted to leave the defendants
analysis in the hands of two experts on criminal psychology: Alfonso
Quiroz Cuaron, a 30 year-old criminologist with a passion for cracking
complicated mysteries, and Jose Gomez Robleda, a forensic psychiatrist
who taught at the National University in Mexico City. Carranca asked
them to apply a battery of psychological examinations in order to uncover
the unconscious motives behind the assassination. The team visited
Mercader in prison and set up a schedule of daily sessions that would
include psychoanalytically inspired investigation as well as more traditional
psychological tests.
Quiroz Cuaron reported that during the first meeting Mercader was
uncooperative and refused to talk. The pair of doctors insisted, telling him
the sessions would be beneficial for his mental health. I will keep my mouth
closed, the prisoner lashed back in French, it is as if you were trying to stick
a spoon in my mouth to force things out (Garmabella, 1980, p. 52).
Eventually Mercader agreed, reluctantly, to work with the two doctors.
The team set up an intensive work schedule: for six months they met
with Mercader six hours a day, six days a week, spending a total of 942
hours with him. As Trotskys biographer, Isaac Don Levine, has written,
No psychological study of comparable magnitude has ever been made of a
political assassin (Levine, 1960, p. 150).
Following Freuds recommendations on technique, the two doctors asked
Mercader to talk freely, and proceeded to analyse his dreams, family
relationships, childhood memories, fears, fantasies, slips of the tongue and
sexual history. They subjected him to Rorschach tests, word reaction
experiments, handwriting analyses and drawing exercises, as well as to a host
of other procedures that were beyond the realm of Freuds interests: blood
and motor tests, electroencephalograms, and even an examination of body
scars. They tested his ability to disassemble and reassemble an assault
weapon in the dark; they measured the time he took to put together a jigsaw
puzzle; they asked him to draw his family and then interpreted the sketch as
an indication of an Oedipal conflict (the parents, they noted, towered over a
disproportionately small son); they administered dozens of other tests to
gauge his intelligence, quantitative skills, and logical capacities. The team
was determined to overcome Mercaders secret and to probe into the
innermost recesses of his psyche and of his bodily organs, if need be.6

6. Quiroz Cuaron and Gomez Robleda incorporated transcripts of the tests in their
report to the court. In Prisoner against Psychologist, Chapter 8 of Mind of an Assassin,
Isaac Don Levine draws on these tests to sketch a psychological portrait of Mercader.
See Levine (1960, pp. 14994).

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265

The doctors also administered a word response test a procedure

during which the prisoner was given a word and asked to say the first
association that came to mind; the associations were then mined for their
unconscious content. Interestingly, Freud had considered word response
tests in his essay on Psycho-analysis and the establishment of legal facts,
but dismissed them as unreliable since the associations were produced
under pressure. Quiroz Cuaron and Gomez Robleda gave Mercader a
series of charged words that elicited political associations: he responded
to commerce, with legal theft; wealth was that which will soon belong
to the oppressed classes; religion, the opium of the people; and Trotsky,
a self-centred egotist. There is little unconscious content in these
associations, expressions of Marxist dogma (Levine, 1960, pp. 1745).
The two doctors compiled the results of the numerous tests, added their
own analyses and interpretations, and submitted their findings to the court.
Their 1,332 page brief bore the ominous title OrganicFunctional and
Social Study of the Assassin of Leon Trotsky and was divided into two
volumes: the first focusing on Mercaders conscious mind and the second
on an examination of his sub-conscious mental functions (Hemmer
Colmenares, 1994, pp. 287ff.).
The brief opened with a detailed introduction in which Doctors Quiroz
Cuaron and Gomez Robleda summarized their findings. Mercader, they
wrote, had suffered an affective trauma in his early childhood that pushed
him into a neurotic state and led him to develop a very active Oedipal
complex. Test results suggested that from an early age Mercader felt a
violent hatred for his father and for paternal figures in general a
murderous impulse he eventually directed against Leon Trotsky (Quiroz
Cuaron, 1957). The real culprit for Trotskys murder was Oedipus, the
report suggested.
When the presiding judge handed down his sentence on 17 April 1943
Carranca had been removed from the case some months back his ruling
quoted the doctors findings and concluded the motive for the crime was
an active Oedipus complex. Mercader was sentenced to 20 years in prison
and, despite his lawyers shrewd legal manoeuvres, served his full sentence.
He was released in 1960, whisked to the airport, and put aboard a flight to
the Soviet Union, where he was decorated and awarded a military pension.
For years he lived a quiet life under yet another new name: Ramon
Pavlovich Lopez. In the 1970s he moved to Cuba, the land of his ancestors,
where he died of bone cancer in 1978. His ashes were flown to Moscow and
buried in the Kuntsevo cemetery.7

7. The most complete account of Mercaders life after his release from prison can be
found in Garmabella (2007).

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Although Carranca did not stay on as a judge in the case following a

motion by the defence he was replaced by judge Manuel Rivera Vazquez,
who wrote the verdict in 1943 his theories on criminology and
psychoanalysis shaped the trial from beginning to end. His articles for
Criminalia encouraged the use of psychoanalysis to penetrate the criminal
unconscious, and his wish was fulfilled in a high-profile case that was
closely followed around the globe. When the judge handed down his
sentence, newspapers and illustrated weeklies throughout Mexico reported
that an active Oedipus complex had pushed Mercader to kill Trotsky. If
the use of psychoanalytic techniques in legal proceedings seemed like a
utopian dream in 1934, by 1943 it had become accepted practice in Mexico
Citys criminal courts.
Had Freud lived to see the psychoanalytically inflected trial of
Trotskys assassin, he would have surely objected to the courts focus on
the Oedipus complex as a motive for the killing just as he had done in the
Halsmann case. He might have acknowledged, however, that psychoanalytic
techniques led to a breakthrough by offering the most complete
psychological portrait of Mercader. Julia Kristeva once remarked that the
Oedipus complex is not only about parricide it is also an inquiry into ones
origins: Oedipus murdered his father, but he also solved the riddle of the
sphinx. dipe veut savoir, writes Kristeva. Like Oedipus, the analysand
wants to know, to make sense of the past and understand the present
(Kristeva, 1996).
Understood in this way, psychoanalysis emerges as the perfect tool for
cracking the mystery of Mercaders true identity. From the moment of his
arrest, he lied about his name and origins: one of the objectives of the
trial and of the extensive psychological tests was to solve the Oedipal
riddle of origins. The questions Quiroz Cuaron and Gomez Robleda asked
were the same as those posed by Oedipus: who is he and where did he
come from? (Though, as Levine observes, unlike a real analytic treatment,
Mercaders analysis involved no confidential relationship of doctor and
patient [and] it was virtually unlimited in scope (Levine, 1960, p. 150).
Mercader was successful in keeping his secret for many years. He was
tried and sentenced as Jacques Mornard, and he continued to live under
this assumed name until his release from prison in 1960. Whenever a
journalist, a historian, or an investigator would ask his real name, he
snapped back he had no other name beside Jacques Mornard. But, in the
end, a psychoanalyst would unmask him.
After the trial, Carranca moved on to other cases and did not write again
about Freud or Mercader. The criminologist Quiroz Cuaron, on the other
hand, maintained his interest in both psychoanalysis and the Trotsky case,
and spent many years after the trial working diligently to discover the
assassins true identity. In the 1950s Quiroz Cuaron travelled to Europe
and matched Mercaders fingerprints with a police file in Spain. He then

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267

published an article explaining that the real name of Trotskys assassin was
Ramon Mercader, that he had been born in Barcelona, and that he was the
son of Caridad Mercader del Ro, a notorious Stalinist who was the
mistress of Leonid (Nahum) Eitingon. In his articles published on this
topic, Quiroz Cuaron brought to fruition the ambitious project for
integrating psychoanalysis and criminology that Carranca had proposed
in his articles for Criminalia, including the use of free association, the focus
on pathological complexes, and the attention to unconscious motivations.
The procedures for psycho-legal analysis that Carranca had tested on a
small scale in the 1930s were now applied, with the blessings of the legal
and medical establishment, to one of the most famous criminal cases
anywhere in the world. The judicial use of psychoanalysis had become a
mainstream practice, fulfilling what had once seemed an idealistic young
judges utopian vision.

References
Carranca y Trujillo, R. (1925) La evolucion poltica de Iberoamerica. Madrid:
Editorial Reus.
Carranca y Trujillo, R. (1934a) Un ensayo judicial de la psicotecnica. Criminalia 6
(Feb): 125.
Carranca y Trujillo, R. (1934b) El psicoanalisis en el examen de los delincuentes.
Criminalia 89 (Nov): 18390.
Carranca y Trujillo, R. (1937) Derecho penal. Parte general. Mexico: Editorial
Porrua.
Freud, S. (1906) Psychoanalysis and the establishment of the facts in legal
proceedings. SE 9, p. 108. London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1910) Wild psychoanalysis. SE 11, 2223. London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1916) Some character-types met with in psycho-analytic work. SE 14,
p. 332.
Freud, S. (1931) The expert opinion in the Halsmann case. SE 21, p. 252.
Freud, S. (1934) Letter to Carranca y Trujillo, 13 February 1934. Reproduced in:
Criminalia 8 (April 1934): 160.
Gallo, R. (2010) Freuds Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Garmabella, J.R. (2007) El grito de Trotsky: Ramon Mercader, el asesino de un
mito. Barcelona: Debate.
Garmabella, J.R. (ed.) (1980) Doctor Alfonso Quiroz Cuaron: Sus mejores casos de
criminologa. Mexico City: Editorial Diana.
Hemmer Colmenares, F. (ed.) (1994) El Caso Trotsky. Mexico City: Consejo
Nacional de Posgrado en Derecho.
Jones, E. (1957) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3. New York, NY: Basic
Books.
Kristeva, J. (1996) Sens et non-sens de la revolte. Paris: Fayard.
Levine, I.D. (1960) Mind of an Assassin: The Man Who Killed Trotsky. New York,
NY: New American Library.
Quiroz Cuaron, A. (1957) El asesino de Leon Trotzky y su peligrosidad en vista de
tudes Internationales de Psycho-Sociologie Criminelle
los datos de su identidad. E
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in legal proceedings. SE 9, p. 102. London: Hogarth.

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ABSTRACT

Raul Carranca y Trujillo was a Mexican judge who experimented with ways of
integrating psychoanalysis and criminology. He corresponded with Freud and
Freud applauded his efforts. In 1940 Carranca was assigned the case of Ramon
Mercader, who was accused of assassinating Leon Trotsky, and he deployed his
psycho-judicial techniques to investigate the unconscious motives behind the
killing.
Key words: Freud, criminology, Mercader, Carranca y Trujillo, Mexico, Trotsky