The Psychology of Carnaval

Analyzing Brazil's orgy at carnaval time is almost as much fun as participating in it. American Psychiatrist Dr. Reba Campbell feels that it offers Brazilians "a chance to live deep in fantasy," fulfilling everyone's "need to be important." A Brazilian psychiatrist, Dr. Jose Leme Lopes, sees it as a "kind of collective cathartic." Psychologist J. Wayne Gibson, an American living and working in Brazil as an industrial consultant and private therapist, has watched half a dozen carnavals. Last week he offered a TIME correspondent these observations on the festival's psychic roots and meaning:

Carnaval is not so much a time to prepare for Lent and deny earthly pleasure as it is an opportunity to realize romantic ambitions. It is the one time when a person is permitted to work out his sex problems in his own fashion. He finds a new love, or dances with a woman he has loved from afar. There's even a word for it: namoro de carnaval, or carnival affair. A frustrated husband can finally go out and dance with young girls. Young bachelors can find girls to fall in love with. There are so many amorous dynamics tied up in carnaval love that the murder rate increases tremendously. Very few of the murders involve robberies, but the majority are a way of solving the eternal triangle--by knocking off one of the corners.

Brazil is ostensibly a Catholic country, but it is not really Catholic. African rites were brought by slaves, and the lower-class people who prac tice spiritism have adopted Catholic saints and some Catholic rituals. They use the Catholic icons to represent their African gods. Carnaval ends up as a time when the lower class uses the status of the rich white man's religion mixed with African gods--the ones the poor believe in. The celebration thus pulls the country together.

In the U.S., everyone can afford to live it up more than once a year. But the poor Brazilian is kept away from places of entertainment by his color and his clothes; he wouldn't know how to act, and he doesn't have the money anyway. Carnaval is the only time of the year when the doorman or the janitor who has worked for the rich man all year long can dress up in the rich man's clothing and feel that the two of them have something in common.

The phenomenon of carnaval is that a person begins to think, "It's not so much that I am having fun, but I see so many people having fun that I too begin enjoying myself. And because they see me having fun, they, in turn, have more fun." That is why carnaval is so embedded in the culture. One can see poor, ragged people looking as if they were having fun. You would have to ask each individual if he is enjoying himself; but at least they look as if they were. This is agreeable to the human being who gets caught up in it; one feels he must become involved in it. But on the other hand, a lot of people leave Rio at carnaval time because they are afraid to get caught up in it.

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