Three decades after soldiers with red carnations in their gunbarrels ousted a dictatorship, Portuguese remain shackled by a fear that stifles their economy, according to a best-selling 'psychoanalysis' of the country. "There is no dictatorship, there's freedom, but we act as if we are still prisoners inside.
The behaviour of the days of the dictatorship exists today," says Jose Gil, a philosophy professor whose book "Portugal Today: The Fear of Being" has taken the country by storm.
What Portuguese fear, he says, is change.
Having broken with a half-century of dictatorship in 1974 and joined what is now the European Union in 1986, Portugal remains the poorest country in western Europe, resistant to reform, Gil says, and beset by a passivity.