For all those who know his texts and for those who had the privilege to attend his classes and multiple conferences, José Gabriel Pereira Bastos was one of the most creative and innovative Portuguese social scientists, with a courage and rare theoretical ambition in Portugal.
Being a trained psychoanalyst and having accumulated decades of experience as a therapist, he was also one of the people who, in Portugal, most deeply knew Freud's thought and the intricacies of his work. He took the theories of this author as a starting point for an explanatory framework capable of founding a general anthropology, a global theory of the human being whose integrative and transdisciplinary dimension aimed at overthrowing what he called “disciplinary splintering”.
His first essay for the exploration of this vast epistemological program consisted of a “structural-dynamic” theory, built on a critical dialogue with the then dominant French structuralism, applied to the analysis of the literary text developed within the discipline of Psychoanalysis and Literature that he taught at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (FLUL). The second step was his transition to Anthropology, a scientific area where he also graduated and doctored (with a doctoral thesis to which he gave the provocative title of “Portugal, minha Princesa), having joined the Anthropology department of the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH).
Articulating psychoanalysis with anthropological knowledge, he developed a theorization about the anthropology of identity processes, thoroughly tested in his work “Portugal Europeu: Estratégias Identitárias Inter-nacionais dos Portugueses” (Celta Editora 2000). This seminal work provided the theoretical grounding, always reconstructed, for more than a dozen research projects funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) within the Center for the Study of Migration and Ethnic Minorities of FCSH at NOVA University Lisbon, rated Very Good.
His most complex theoretical construction, and perhaps the most ambitious, was published in a long text, entitled “What are we talking about when we talk about identities”, integrated in the work of which he was co-editor “Identity Processes and Dynamics in Multiethnic Europe” ( Amsterdam University Press, 2011). However, beyond his texts, the great masterpiece that José Gabriel Pereira Bastos leaves us as a legacy were his public, national and international classes and interventions (namely at the University of California, Berkeley). Those who knew him and wished to become better people simply by listening to him recognize the immense quality of everything he had to convey.
The loss of Professor José Gabriel Pereira Bastos is truly irreparable, as he was in full possession of his abilities, his sharpness and his creativity. It is also an irreparable loss, because he was unable to finalize the text that should have been his most significant work: a book on the thought of Freud which, in fact, would be a book on the thought of José Gabriel Pereira Bastos based on the work of the creator of psychoanalysis. and, more specifically, it is related to the fact that he was unable to finish the text that should have been his most significant work: a book on the thought of Freud which, in fact, would be a book on the thought of José Gabriel Pereira Bastos developed from the work of the creator of psychoanalysis.
NOVA is in mourning and joins the family and friends of Professor José Gabriel Pereira Bastos to whom expresses the most heartfelt condolences.
SOURCE: NOVA FCSH