Page 149 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

110 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

grown up in a normal family will be a normal man. There is no
2
disproportion between the life of the family and the life of the
nation. Conversely, when one examines a closed society—that is, a
society that has been protected from the fl ood of civilization—one
encounters the same structures as those just described. Father
Trilles’ L’âme du Pygmée d’Afrique, for instance, convinces us
of that; although with every word one is aware of the need to
Christianize the savage Negro soul, the book’s description of the
whole culture—the conditions of worship, the persistence of rites,
the survival of myths—has nothing of the artifi cial impression
given by La philosophie bantoue.
In both cases the characteristics of the family are projected onto
the social environment. It is true that the children of pickpockets
or burglars, accustomed to a certain system of clan law, would
be surprised to fi nd that the rest of the world behaved differently,
but a new kind of training—except in instances of perversion or
arrested development (Heuyer) —should be able to direct them
3
into a moralization, a socialization of outlook.
It is apparent in all such cases that the sickness lies in the family
environment.

For the individual the authority of the state is a reproduction of the
authority of the family by which he was shaped in his childhood. Ultimately
the individual assimilates all the authorities that he meets to the authority
of the parents: He perceives the present in terms of the past. Like all other
human conduct, behavior toward authority is something, learned. And it is
learned in the heart of a family that can be described, from the psychological

2. I should like to think that I am not going to be brought to trial for this sentence.
Skeptics always have a fi ne time asking, “What do you mean by normal?” For
the moment, it is beyond the scope of this book to answer the question. In order
to pacify the more insistent, let me refer them to the extremely instructive work
by Georges Canguilhem, Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le
pathologique (Paris, Société d’Editions, 1950), even though its sole orientation is
biological. And let me add only that in the psychological sphere the abnormal man
is he who demands, who appeals, who begs.
3. Although even this reservation is open to argument. See for example the question
put by Mlle. Juliette Boutonnier: “Might not perversion be an extreme arrest in
affect development, furthered, if not produced, by the conditions under which the
child has lived, at least as much as by the congenital tendencies that are obviously
factors in it but that probably are not alone responsible?” (Revue Française de
Psychanalyse, No. 3, 1949, pp. 403–404.)

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