Sou caipira, pira-pora, Nossa Senhora de Aparecida...

mas, como eu não sei rezar, trouxe aqui meu olhar, meu olhar, meu olhar...¹

(Renato Teixeira).

I’m a caipira, born in lands that once were part of the São José do Buquira farm. Such farm belonged to the writer Monteiro Lobato and it is now called Monteiro Lobato City, being located in a region known as Serra da Mantiqueira, between the cities of São José dos Campos and Campos do Jordão, bordering São Francisco Xavier City and other rural sites. I am a psychologist and became an analyst in the field of Analytical Psychology, which favors a look at the symbols of culture, especially those who give meaning to a synthesis between the personal and the collective.

When thinking about the analyst and the caipira who live inside of me, I started to realize that the better analyst I was getting, the more caipira I was becoming. This revelation of my own uniqueness has made me enjoy renewed energy at work and has also awakened a lot of reflection being made henceforth.

My current findings tell me that every analyst has to be a caipira. And it is not only a restoration or inflation of my personal equation. I think that every analyst, whether they want it or not, needs a partnership with the caipira to better execute their analytical work. There are many creative possibilities arising from this analyst-caipira encounter. New meanings are formed when we try to compose some toadas² together, because we have discovered some causos³ in common.

Antonio ^{Candido, in his text Caipiradas (1989, p. 36)} defines a caipira as “a rustic man of very slow progress who has as a balance formula the intense fusion of Portuguese and Aboriginal cultures.” He also emphasizes that a caipira “is the product of this fusion of origin and at the same time they are very active agents of a great unique cultural differentiation process.”

From the perspective of analytical psychology, one can understand the caipira and their culture as an archetype of the anthropos, the natural man, taking into consideration the fact that as being (the caipira) an expression of original fusions, it maintains this anthropos revelation and power which are contained in the natural man.

We found this archetype in its original manifestation in the experiences of the peasant, when the stimuli of nature are highly significant to understanding and maintaining life, creating a culture exchange with nature and its mysteries. As an archetype, it is also present in the city man, although in general they are more related to the stereotypes of a caipira culture, rejecting it as old fashioned, using it as a parameter to show their superiority or caricaturing it in picturesque spectacles.

A caipira’s original soul power tends to get lost amid the calls for adaptation to a supposedly more enlightened city like culture. This also applies to many caipiras who deny their origin, get lost in the urban collective desire, dissociating themselves from their roots and end up stuck to marginal and negative expressions of man’s town, once they do not find a suitability axis for their expression.

Returning to the caipira and their archetypal manifestation with regard to the psyche, we can consider it as an original instinctual energy, or that it contains an impetus for the merger of the collective forces that aim to have their own cultural differentiation. In this sense, I think the caipira can be the urge to make our own individuation within each one of us. If our unique individuality is still tied to the forces of the collective and we can barely distinguish it, we become just a rehearsal of ourselves, even a caricature, a maladaptive social persona and then the trend is for us to be showing this still poorly articulated imitation of ourselves. And then we become a ridiculous caipira, a parody indeed. Rather, the closer we get to our individual and genuine expression, the closer we’ll be to have assumed our picturesque singularity. It will make us unique and authentic, with our own original caipira like behavior. We will be our own folklore.

Jungian analysis is proposed as the rescue of individual peculiarity, the conquest of the original man who is inside of a collective culture. The ritual of analysis is a means to contact this anthropos or the divine child, ^{Jung’s (1956, par. 289)} “Initial and Terminal Creature”. The intention is to place or return the man to their own path of individuation by offering meanings for their personal trajectories. Also, it is aimed the redemption of their tokens which can be immersed in (a) a collective psychic culture, (b) in a species heritage or (c) in their reproduction. The search for the unique creature we are returns us to our archetypal human condition and puts us back into the species instinctive learning. Therefore, we necessarily meet with the anthropos or the archetype of the natural man, or with our collective and individual caipira expressions.

However, finding the genuine man in us requires abandoning an evolutionary desire idealized in the scientific and technological progress personas that our society sponsors. It also requires decentering our ego from power and control policies of a given normality, with assessment of pathological deviations or correction of absent developments. It implies an unbound knowledge of absolute truths and the knowledge that recognizes their constant not knowing together with the autonomy of the psyche. It has to do with a knowledge that is made in the allure of the soul by an Eros who wants to accomplish his best esthetics with the creature.

Thanks to Jung, it seems that we are on the right way. As analysts, it is not about choosing the theoretical paths we are to follow, but a proper attitude before the revelations that the psyche will do by itself. It does not matter being good translators of psychoanalytic, Jungian and neo-Jungian truths. It is necessary the abandonment of built personas if we want to take part in the mysteries of transformation. That is why I believe the caipira can be a good partner for us analysts.

Reflecting on what has been said above and the possibilities of the caipira as an analytical partner, it is worth telling the following caipira joke:

Once there was a caipira bending in front of his house, puffing on his cigarette made of straw, when a car came from the road at a very high speed and stopped close to him.

– Could you tell me if that road up there can take me to São Paulo?

The caipira answered:

– Don’t know, sir.

– Do you live here?

– I do.

– And what about that road down below? Will I end up in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro in case I take it?

– Well, I do not know, sir.

– Have you lived here for a long time?

– Yes, sir, I have.

– So, tell me one thing, if I take that shortcut over there, will it take me to the main road?

– I do not know, sir.

– Come on, man. You live here and cannot tell me whether these roads will take me where I want to go?

And the caipira replied.

– Yeah, but I’m not lost.

We are sometimes in a hurry and end up getting lost trying to catch up with the various paths of theory and technique while the therapeutic interaction seems to rest on a more irrational and more emotional basis, which binds to spontaneous and creative manifestations of the psyche. We must believe, like Jung, that the objective psyche knows the path. It is all about, therefore, finding a “favorable attitude” and it seems to be rooted in a genuine ethical disposition rather than any technique.

Every single day, we look for this original man at the office and end up watching the ritual dance of souls doing, redoing, and undoing myths. Whether we want it or not, we have been under a devotional mythical living just like the caipira. We seek new and unique aesthetic, and this is also a children’s game that needs a naive willingness, an almost foolish playful lightness which believes in spontaneity as a bargaining chip to find wisdom in the unknown. It seems that the proper psychological attitude has to do with an act of faith that only our ethical integrity is able to activate.

Antonio ^{Candido (1989, p. 37)} speaks of the caipira as a “nerd brother for whom time ran so slowly that it often does not come as a criterion of knowledge.” In this perspective we can consider the caipira as our inferior function, the nerd brother inside of us who is still immersed in an original unconscious, but that is our touchstone, containing the power of our own philosophy. Thus, with the archetype of the caipira, we find the archetype of the divine child and the fool, which are archetypes that carry the expression of the inferior function in our culture. The child has an instinctive wisdom, carries the vital potentiality of the archetypal energy and therefore, according to Jung, “has far greater powers than those of common humankind ... It is smaller than the small, yet bigger than the big” ⁽¹⁹⁵⁶⁾. Also, the archetype of the fool knows its way into the world of instincts. For it, as for the caipira, each situation simply exists, each stage of its journey has its own value.

It seems to me that the caipira, the child, and the fool have an instinctive belief in destiny which gives them a proper psychic anchor to handle mental limits and grim adversity and gives them at the same time, the freedom needed to nurture from the joys of consciousness. Maybe that is the wisdom of the minimum, in the culture which is achieved through whatever is essential.

The contact with this archetypal caipira, which contains the naturalness and naiveté of both the child and the fool, can be established through the analysis of the unconscious, both in the symbolic material and in the transference-counter transference relation. It implies that the analyst has a receptive readiness to play the simple man in himself and in his patient, in an exchange of energy that retrieves unique aspects lost amid the whole psyche. It assumes deconstructing persona dark pacts, but the most important point is that there should be an open and almost naive belief that everything is possible and that the irrational elements play an essential role. It is in this analyst’s caipira empathy that seems to be the building of a creative axis in relation to the patient, in a contract clinical equation which includes hope.

Let us now consider some caipira schemes we can reframe and that we have already used in our practice of analysis.

The caipira features several of these important symbolic qualities such as generosity, obedience, reciprocity, submission, intuition, feeling, good mood, spontaneity, patience, stubbornness, laziness, pity, compassion, which are considered inferior functions in our society. By inferior function I mean the condition of being in the social unconscious and thus finding themselves in opposite correlation to functions which are considered superior in our collective consciousness. Additionally, they are considered inferior functions also by a social prejudice that sees them as inadequate, archaic or primitive. They belong to the caipira inside of us or to our inferior function.

Which symbolic bridges does the caipira use in their connection with nature that makes them experience in such a balanced and generous way these “inferior” qualities that would serve as a bridge to carry out the transcendent function?

The analyst’s empathy with the caipira starts on the matter of temporality. The time of analytical clinic has a circular and transpersonal quality as well as the caipira’s notion of time. Both happen in a psychic space that has nothing to do with linear and rational time or with the light time of consciousness. (And then we see the caipira at the end of the afternoon chilling out, puffing his straw cigarette, checking the time and thinking out loud: my God, I think it’s midnight already in São Paulo City! By the way, this is exactly the way we feel sometimes when we are connected to a patient’s clinical time).

Just like the caipira, we need a floating attention, which contains the goal now and the subjective then, in tune with the surroundings in which a symbolic ritual rehearses new ways. An intuition which is open to the mystery and an idea that is able to understand the image and give it an expression of consciousness. (The caipira can listen to all the sounds of the woods; they know whether it is going to rain by the singing of certain birds, etc. The analyst is also listening to a story and listening to other images, sounds and symbolic messages coming from the unconscious).

I think of the caipira-fisherman, who sits for hours by the riverbank waiting for the fish. We can make a parallel here with the fisherman analyst. However, in order to catch fish from the river of the unconscious, we need the patience of the caipira. And silence is also needed in order not to scare away the fish. An analytical silence replacing the anxiety of a quick insight, bowing to experience, in an initiatory passivity by the unexpected and the new which are about to come. One should have faith in the analytic fishery, on the set of his bait and patience to catch the fish that will nourish the symbolic elaboration of the patient, until he learns to fish all by himself.

Talking to João Samué, a buddy of mine and an expert fisherman, on my uncle’s farm, he tells me:

Fishing is all about science. Each type of fish has to have a hook and bait and in order to fish a good and big one, one must conquer it very slowly. The good fish are located in the deep and you can see it for only a few hours. Sometimes, you’d better leave the fishing tackle over there and go do other things. Sometimes, they get to eat a lot of your bait leaving you with nothing left. But you have to be patient, because they will get used to eating there, you take good care of them, making them need your food. In the end, they will get trapped in your hook themselves. This is the best part because you will have tamed them slowly. The fish is initially very angry and wild but you will have calmed him down just like it’s done with a horse.

Pay attention to the singing of the rooster or the bedtime of chickens, which are signs that can be related to psychic symbolic. The singing of the rooster may be signaling that the sun of a new consciousness is about to be born and we’d better be awaken to welcome it. Just like the chickens going to sleep, yawning in the middle of the analysis might mean that the unconscious has entered into a logical rest and at that moment we can only observe and respect.

We must recover this soul like wisdom soul, animal soul, instinctive, able to relate to the soul in the world. The caipira gives soul to the animal and therefore the horses and cows recognize their whistle and their call, unlike the farmer who sees the animals in a different way through the symbols of ownership, power, commodity trade. The same thing happens to the milk; the caipira needs the interactive milk once the same milk that feeds the calf feeds their son. This exchange of energy takes place in an instinctive interactivity, in a generous exchange of gifts. By the way, we try to have in the analysis ritual the possibility of such creative otherness, even as an initial exercise to conquer a new consciousness.

I do not know if you are aware of that, but the animals have very repetitive behavior called baldas or bardas in Portuguese. The horse of a friend, for instance, leaves the farm and after reaching this certain hill, it gets stuck leaning against a depression in the embankment in front of a house. It does not move anymore unless the rider dismounts a little. The horse got used to stopping by for visiting some friends. It got addicted to that. There are also animals which do not leave one another. They are used to being together and it is hard to put them apart. So, we can say that we also work with the repetitive behavior (or bardas) of our clients, with addictions and energy deviations acquired throughout their lives, with the complexes, or even with our getting stuck with people or things that end up deviating us from the route of our individuation.

Both the analyst and the caipira have the practice of secular patience and stubbornness. They work the land of the psychic field, throwing seeds and awaiting for the revelation of psyche’s nature countless times. Great psychological complexes erupt, sometimes from chthonic depths, flooding the plantation or drying the possibilities of seed germination. Just like the caipira, the analyst insists and tries to recognize new symbols in performances of a dark-ground bruised psyche, seeking new expressions of Eros and they also believe that one day the soul of Demeter will calm down and give us new crops. The same stubbornness empathy of the caipira toward their few resource-based crops facing the forces of Good and Evil. The same stubbornness of the caipira who has to fascinate the animal psyche until the threatened animal loses its fear and comes to eat the salt in its trough.

Once, a friend told me that there is this passage in the Apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas, in which he says the following to the Pharisees: “You look like dogs in the manger that neither eat nor let the animals feed themselves.” The ones who are familiar with this practice of putting salt in the trough to feed the cattle know what this is all about. If the dog stays around the trough, the other animals will not get close. We might think of a Pharisee’s behavior, permeated by false powers and culture illusions. Also, we can even make a parallel and think that one of the shadows of the analyst may be that of a sometimes exaggerated identification with the patriarchal norms of the culture, thus becoming an arrogance persona of power. By willing to have the power and ego control of the salt of knowledge, they prevent the transcendent function, the interaction between the symbols and the sacred. Therefore, they become the anti-caipira, not allowing the archetypal interaction of the symbols.

Another shadow may be that of the farmer who uses the persona of the caipira, but it is actually a feudal boss-lord ego who has a spoliative relationship with work energy and with the precious purity of the caipira. It is the farmer who treads on snakes, falls from the horse, because actually they are completely detuned with the present symbolic living; they are serving their own dark inadequacies. Therefore, it may be said that this can also be a shadow of the analyst: when they end up desecrating a sacred interaction with vital symbols due to ego interests.

The caipira is a natural alchemist. Ash soap is one of their alchemical works. It is made of the mixture of wood stove ashes with animal fat. These are days and days boiling the mixture in the pan, only able to be moved by the female caipira that started it. According to Mrs. Nair, Mr. Zé Mira’s wife, no one with a brave heart or an evil eye may be approaching the mixture in order not to contaminate the purity of the soap, “otherwise the soap won’t go right.” It only gets ready when it loses all the fat and then it is used to remove the fat from things, to do the dishes, to do the laundry, to take a shower. It is the very process of one’s personality alchemical transformation. What was gray, death, the “evil” becomes the remedy, the gift itself, the “good.”

Also, the making of the castor oil is a secular caipira alchemical work. It is exciting listening to the women who make it. There is this hermetic knowledge, which makes it possible to be made only by few women who have been initiated into such mysteries. According to them, the moment of processing the oil is sacred. Mrs. Biana says: “we pray, hoping that the spirit of God gives it the right cooking point since this is one of the most important remedy for all of us. For a long time we only had castor oil to cure everything from people to animals” (^{MUSEU DO FOLCLORE, 1998, p. 6}).

Moreover, there are the traditional healers and midwives who are knowledgeable of the deep mysteries of life and soul. And here we see the great creative expression of a matriarchal caipira culture. The realm of the sacred belongs to women here. They are the only ones who are initiated in the soap ashes, castor oil etc. The mystique is an ancestral mixture, which leads us to a pagan culture, that of the great Goddesses. They represent the caipira female archetypes. The healers are able to cure the “evil eye” of envy, the “greedy eye” of pain and unfulfilled love, the “melancholy” of sadness and longing, and the “upset stomachs” of frustrated desires. They bless little children, adults and elderly, feeling the spirit projected on the matter. They shiver, yawn, waging a struggle with the spirit of Good and Evil in their own bodies. They are natural born analysts. According to Rudolf ^{Otto (1992, p. 185)}, in his book “O Sagrado”: “We recognize the sacred by the shiver down the spine when the skin gets goose bumps like chicken skin, this is the contact with the numinous, with the sacred”. The alchemy of the transcendent function is flesh and blood being represented here. The healers are the hermetic vessel for processing themselves. It might be acknowledged here the similarities among traditional healers and midwives and analysts: the three are linked to the archetype of the female caipira and their matriarchal magic.

The big secret initiation that the caipira brings to us seems to be that instead of trying to unravel the mystery, we must be able to live with it.

Even the vaunted laziness of the caipira seems to be a part of this devotional ritual. It resembles a moment of contemplation and assimilation, a psychic reorganization of energy for a reconnection with the vital cosmic energy. It is as if they knew how to be partners with life and death, with a daily reality where tragedy and miracle are constant and independent of their will. There is a daily struggle between the maximum and the minimum, with a need of assimilation and compensation which are also constant and natural.

The Italian sociologist Domenico De Masi has currently developed theories about creative leisure, as a fundamental need for humans allowing them to create beauty and to feed the world of aesthetics. The idle is sacred to the caipira as well; it is sacerdócio⁴, ritualized through the respect which is shown for holy days. This is an opposite view to our city culture which relates to leisure as a negócio⁵ or the denial of idleness. I believe that in the analytic setting we have exactly the situation of creative leisure. We are just like the caipira, sitting, sometimes even puffing a cigarette, listening, talking, and trying to create within a time which is giving a break for daily activities. We frame a time in which the “leisure” is creative. And then we make psychic culture.

When reflecting on the leisure of the caipira, Antonio ^{Candido (1988, p. 86)} refers to it as the locus of creation of their culture. Such culture comes alive through the joy of having the caipira meeting with other people, and with ritual dance and chanting. Such gatherings will invariably include music, the viola, the accordion. Also, these are devotional rites of prayers, promises, novenas⁶, processions⁷, congadas⁸, catiras⁹, moçambiques¹⁰, arrasta-pés¹¹, jongos¹², calangos¹³, follies of kings¹⁴, Holy Ghost Party¹⁵, or Saint Benedict’s party or Saint Gonçalo’s party, among others. Each one of these events brings aspect of a total psyche which is ritualized, reenergized and renewed. A very diversified cultural living is being constantly and ecologically ritualized. A faith that invests in partnership as a proposal and thus allows one to go deep into this mixture, this mixing of various pagan Christian, Indian, black, Portuguese, and Spanish symbols, such symbols are inserted in a historical psyche, and are ecologically renovated in a spontaneous religious syncretism.

They recreate the world countless times through a living which is both playful and sacred with images, thus keeping alive an ancient soul steeped in a very Brazil-like mythology. They live in this totally psychic reality that contains both nurturing and destructive forces. They live with loneliness, isolation, pain, fear, impotence, diseases, tragedies, uncertainties, without identifying with them, though. There is this certain grounding in the whole of things, in a God, in a Self, and thus a favorable attitude of submission to their instinctive immanence. They lead their lives in the logic of the simple, the natural, and the spontaneous and despite feelings of deep despair, some routine, common, and trivial actions seem to help keep the ego out of the realm of shadows. They bind to the energy potentiality inserted in each moment and this way, they reconnect with a situation in harmony with the whole of things or with the Self, which nourishes them again. They live around the axis of the archetype of the wholeness. They are agents of maintaining a balance with the divine. And therefore they are naturally religious, simple and dignified.

They have a very good religious touch to cope with the Huge, with the other, with the unknown. The necessary analytical tact we seek as a bridge to activate transcendence. In this perspective, a caipira partnership seems to be a proper attitude. It will make us actually “think with your heart and reason with the soul,” as ^{Hillmann (1978)} states. It will train our ears to hear the “unspoken” better, to give voice to a world that we do not know. It will refine our vision to a polysemy of images, which will reinvigorate our belief in the healing power of imagery.

It will place the analyst in line with the “causos” teller that dwells within each one of them. The one analyst who can translate what is going on for their patient with a good story, sometimes even a good joke, things of the mind, in ways which sound both fascinating and like a good gossip. The analyst it the one who knows how to use the same caipira’s imaginative power and mood to create new trails in the world of the collective unconscious, structuring new times and connecting us to a more basic human level.

That is exactly why I do not believe, as many do, that the caipira culture is that of poverty. On the contrary, I state such culture is all about the richness we have lost. They are an upside down poetry, showing us what we do not have. They are an original legacy which was left along the way, when the desire for progress and for the international covenants began to divert the Brazilian soul. They do not represent an underdeveloped soul. Conversely, they are an alive and soul-like provision which has not been implicated in the process yet.

They remain ground, earth, stone, tree. But they are just like the “oak on the fields that knows that to grow and bear fruit, it needs to open itself to the vastness of the skies, and also take root in the darkness of the ground” (^{HEIDEGGER, 1969, p. 41}).

Today, the caipiras represent a very important human essence, our ecology of species. They always light a candle of devotion to the sacred and they also save us all through their rites. They are a living flame in the praying places of our countryside cities, on small farms, on our ranches. A filament, a subliminal source which, whether or not has established itself as part of what is already conscious, remains as an ecological reserve of our psyche.

To get in connection with this pure energy, we need to have the courage and daring to be simple. And it is not easy to be simple, to be oneself, the caipira, in the cultural world in which we live. We must be convinced that we will find a creative soul in a land that at first glance seems unproductive. We need to find favorable attitudes that will open passage and protect us at the same time.

Jung was a great caipira. He remained at the connection of the ordinary man until the end of life. At 85, he still used well water, taken with a pump, cut firewood and cooked his own food. And he used to say: “These simple acts make a man simple; and it is very difficult to be simple” (^{JUNG, 1975}). He would be in talks with the soul contained in the stone.

If today we can find some sort of ethical lyricism in a caipira’s life, perhaps we can legitimize it with the image of a stone: rustic, tamed soul, suppressed, but with an alchemical blood circulating on the inside. And then poetize it, as Jung did:

This is the stone, of humble appearance. Regarding the value, it is worth very little – Despised by the fools

And therefore, the more it is loved by the ones who know it (1975, p. 199)