Civilisation and savagery?

Psychoanalysis has many sources. Among them is the kind of colonial mind-set that dominates European thinking at the end of the 19th and right into the early 20th century.

Cannibalism in Brazil in 1557 as described by Hans Staden (b. around 1525 – Wolfhagen, 1579). Gravure de Théodore de Bry, 1562. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

We can see this operating in Freud’s work, especially in his 1913 anthropological text Totem and Taboo, in which he explores what he calls the “mind of the savage” and what it might teach us about the more “advanced” mind of the “civilised” European. He makes a very direct association in this book between what he calls the savage or primitive – by which he means the Black people of Africa and the indigenous Aboriginal people of Australia – and the infantile mind of the European child.

Fundamentally, he thinks in terms of what we call ontogeny following phylogeny; that is, the development of the individual following the development of the race or the species. He thinks that just as you can see an infant developing into an adult human and gradually becoming more sophisticated in its mental functions, so you can see that between different societies.

Freud’s colonial mind-set

According to Freud in Totem and Taboo, adult humans and more sophisticated societies have at least a tendency to grow away from these infantile, primitive origins. This is very clearly a colonial mind-set, and it serves a number of functions for Freud.

Among those is a very important move that he makes, which is about anti-Semitism. For much of the Europe of the 19th century, the other to the European is not so much the colonised other of, say, Africa; it’s the Jewish other. A long history of Christian anti-Semitism and what’s known as supersessionism, in which Christianity is held to replace Judaism, is the source of this deeply embedded view that the other to the European is the Jew. However, with the emancipation of the Jews in the mid-19th century, we see a move among some secular, highly educated European Jews, such as Freud, to identify the Jew as European and to make the other to the European the colonised black. You can see that at work in Totem and Taboo. Freud is basically writing for “we” Europeans, including the Jewish Europeans, and positioning as other the “primitive” African.

Love, envy and cannibalism

Psychoanalysts talk quite a lot about primitive emotions. Most of the time they mean something quite basic, an emotion which is absolutely fundamental: hate, love and especially envy – loving and destructive emotions that are foundational for the human psyche.

Along with this notion of the primitive, there are echoes of the colonial mind-set in which some people, and peoples, are held to be more primitive than others. We can also see it in the notion of cannibalism, which continues to be used today, especially among certain schools of psychoanalysis. To “cannibalise” something simply means to take it in and make it your own. It’s a psychic process which we’re very familiar with. Identification, for example, could be seen as part of that, where we become like another person, absorbing their ideas and making them our own.

But why use the term cannibal? It’s linked to the power of a certain kind of European fantasy of the late 19th century in which the black primitive other was also a cannibal: absorbing dangerously the ideas, but also the physical being, of its antagonist. Living primitively. Savagely incorporating the other.

The primitivity within us all

Photo by Everett Collection

Freud could not avoid noticing that the heart of civilisation in Europe was also the most barbarous of all places. He lived through the First World War. He was in exile from Nazism, dying just after the Second World War was declared but in full awareness by that point of what was happening in Nazi Europe. Barbarism is the other side to supposed civilisation – and not very well hidden, either.

Freud was deeply aware of all this, and the notion that he developed in the 1920s of the death drive as something fundamental to the human psyche could also be taken as a kind of social critique of civilisation itself. We might look like we’re sophisticated, but underneath us all, within us all, in the form of a certain type of unconscious force, there is something deeply destructive and primitive. Each one of us, however sophisticated we might think we are, has primitivity within us. So once you accept that notion, you’ve gone quite a long way to dismantling the colonial division between the civilised and the primitive, between the sophisticated and the savage.

The social and psychic underpinnings of racism

It’s obvious that racism is something social, something structured within our societies. Institutions are racist. Sometimes whole societies such as apartheid South Africa are built on racism. So it’s a social phenomenon, but it’s equally obvious that people invest in it greatly. Racism becomes integral to their personality and their way of understanding the world. It’s as if they’re in love with their racism, which comes to mean more to them than almost anything else in their lives.

How can this be? Psychoanalysis has had a lot to say about this. It suggests, for example, that there might be aspects to all of us that are destructive to our personalities – things that we do or suffer that we can’t stand. So we need to somehow get rid of them psychically. That’s called projection. We push them out of ourselves.

Where do they go? Perhaps they go into socially derogated categories within our society, by which I mean groups already chosen for political, social and historical reasons to be available to receive this badness – the “blackness of our soul”, thought of in racist terms. Of course, there’s no reason why blackness should be destructive and negative, but negative ideas about blackness are already implanted in us from social and historical sources. Then it becomes organised and pushed out into the Black other in our society.

Lessons from Brazil

It’s very challenging, of course, to think of practical ways in which psychoanalysis can confront some of the huge issues that face us in contemporary society. Among these, I would place racist thought as being one of the primary and perhaps the primary destructive force.

Photo by Jorge hely veiga

One practical way that psychoanalysis can help is to reach out to people who are working in conditions of considerable social privation and precariousness around race. In Brazil, for example, from the early 2000s to the election of the authoritarian Bolsonaro government in 2018, there was a state-funded movement called Testimonial Clinics. This program aimed to use psychoanalytic principles to confront the legacy of state violence. It worked with people in deprived areas, particularly members of Black populations, favelas and so on, and was spearheaded by a number of psychoanalytic clinics in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. They would train people in psychoanalytic principles so that they could go and listen to the stories people had to tell about the violence they had been subjected to, both during and after the dictatorship that ended in the early 1980s.

Making lives matter

In her recent work, the American social philosopher Judith Butler has been developing an idea she calls “grievability”. By that she means whether particular lives are seen as grievable. Would we grieve for them if they were lost? Butler argues that some lives are regarded as being more grievable than others.

Black Lives Matter has really brought this to the fore. There are certain lives that “don’t matter”, socially speaking. What Butler also suggests is that in addition to the social dimension of grievability, there is a kind of psychic dimension that we can understand through psychoanalysis. She points to the way in which each of us is vulnerable in all sorts of ways. For example, each of us is dependent in early life and so vulnerable to the ministrations that we get from those who look after us. Hopefully those ministrations are loving. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are even violent.

This vulnerability to the whim of the other is something we carry with us all through our lives. She also points out how our immersion in our own vulnerability can lead us to discount the vulnerability of others: because I am fragile and my life is precarious, I have no space for the vulnerability, fragility and precariousness of your life. Go away from me; leave me to live with my own vulnerability, and don’t threaten it.

She suggests that that kind of response to vulnerability is part of the problem of gaining grievability for others. We allow them grievability when we recognise that their lives are both vulnerable and valuable. We discount their grievability when we regard their lives as not worthy of mention, and also when we cannot imagine the vulnerability of their lives without somehow giving up our awareness of our own insecurity.

Discover more about

psychoanalysis and race

Frosh, S. (2005). Hate and the ‘Jewish Science’: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis. Palgrave Macmillan.

Frosh, S. (2013). Psychoanalysis, colonialism, racism. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 33(3), 141–154.

Frosh, S. (1999). The Politics of Psychoanalysis (2nd Edition). Red Globe Press.

Colonialism and racism in, and through psychoanalysis