Forerunner of the Science of Psychoanalysis? An Essay on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition.

The inquisitions in Spain and Portugual were state organs, rather than church-run enterprises; their purpose to modernize disparate jurisdictions during the final stages of Reconquista (return of Moorish areas to Christian administration) to ensure security and loyalty. So many Jews converted (under duress or willingly for strategic reasons) and inter-married with middle-class and aristocratic families, that their sincerity and loyalty was suspected, This meant going beyond traditional monitoring of ritual acts and social behaviour; there was a need to look below the surface, to interpret ambiguity, and to break codes of duplicity. Inquisitors developed techniques of a form of psychoanalysis before the discoveries of Freud: methods of questioning to bring out repressed beliefs and motivations, unriddling equivocational performance and speech-acts, and integrating fragments of information from family members, business associates and neighbours collected over many years. Torture, more threatened than actual, and lengthy incarceration punctuated by periods of exile and re-arrest after years quiet, provoked desperate confessions and specious denunciations, all of which had to be subject to intense scrutiny and analysis. The assumption was modern: a person's self was no longer equivalent to their words and actions; instead, a deep dark and traumatized inner self to be revealed.