Re-interpreting Elián González.

This article has two parts. The first part compares two Jungian interpretations of the Elián González affair in 1999 in which a family custody battle metastasized into a Cuba-U.S. international event. One interpretation is brief, simple, and integrated, and revolves around a single complex. The other interpretation, building forward on the first, is longer, complicated, fragmentary, and evokes multiple complexes. The second part of the paper poses some taxing questions around matters of epistemology and methodology: What kind of evidence is needed to construct the interpretation of an event? How does one go about gathering that evidence, and how does one spot a complex or an archetype? And, more fundamentally, how does one choose one interpretation of an event over another? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]