Ressentiment, médecine et société dans la biographie biologique de Gregorio Marañón

The goal of this article is to shed light on the historical relationships between resentment and medicine by analysing a rare work devoted to the study of this emotion, Tiberius written by Gregorio Marañón in 1939, during his exile in Paris. Halfway between history and psychology, Tiberius belongs to what Marañón called a “biological biography”, a genre which he created to explain the character of great historical figures by applying his research on the influence of endocrinology and sexuality to the configuration of personality. However, the project of Tiberius went beyond the clinical examination of the passion defining Caesar’s personality. It was an obvious political document aiming at developing a cultural analysis of the Second Spanish Republic and its incarnation—Manuel Azaña. This is made clear by comparing Tiberius with other texts belonging to the same generation of intellectuals, who relied on resentment to interpret the cultural history of Spain and that of the Civil War. Tiberius is a relevant document in the larger theoretical frame of the history of emotions, since the meaning resentment changes, coinciding with the advent of Totalitarianism in Europe, when this emotion would be adopted by the Fascist psychiatrists to justify the extermination of certain sectors of the population such as the Spanish Republicans.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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