Religious Intolerance in Brazil: Symbolic Heritage in the Construction of the Other.
Religious intolerance; complex psychology; shadow; cultural complexes; otherness.
This dissertation investigates religious intolerance in contemporary Brazil as a complex psychosocial phenomenon, whose constitution involves historical, social, cultural, and psychological dimensions. The study is based on the understanding that relationships with the Other are shaped by processes of classification, hierarchization, and exclusion, examining how European expansion, the colonization of the Americas, evangelization, slavery, and racialization contributed to the delegitimization of forms of existence, culture, and religiosity, particularly those associated with Indigenous peoples and African and Afro-Brazilian populations. The research is qualitative, theoretical, and interpretative, grounded in Carl Gustav Jung’s Complex Psychology and combining bibliographic research, literature review, and documentary analysis, with Symbolic-Archetypal Processing (PSA), proposed by Eloisa Penna, as its interpretative framework. Data from Disque 100, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Brazilian legislation, and reports on religious intolerance and violence were used to contextualize the phenomenon and identify recurring patterns, which were subsequently subjected to symbolic amplification. The analysis draws on the concepts of Shadow, projection, archetype, religious function, and cultural complexes, as well as the image of Wotan, analyzed by Jung in relation to National Socialism and used heuristically to consider the collective actualization of archetypal contents in specific historical contexts. The Spherical Graph of Bio-Psycho-Social Values (GEV-bps) is employed as a tool for organizing the different levels of belonging involved in the experience. The results indicate that religious intolerance in Brazil cannot be reduced to doctrinal disagreements or individual behaviors, but is articulated with historical structures of racialization, hierarchization, and the construction of otherness. It is concluded that religious violence can be understood as a configuration in which religious experiences, power relations, and collective psychological contents interact, making it necessary to broaden the discussion beyond legal protection to encompass the recognition of otherness and the elaboration of the symbolic structures that sustain exclusion.