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THE NEGRO AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 111

point of view, by the form of organization peculiar to it—that is, by the way
in which its authority is distributed and exercised. 4

But—and this is a most important point—we observe the
opposite in the man of color. A normal Negro child, having
grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the
slightest contact with the white world. This statement may not be
immediately understandable. Therefore let us proceed by going
backward. Paying tribute to Dr. Breuer, Freud wrote:
In almost every case, we could see that the symptoms were, so to speak,
like residues of emotional experiences, to which for this reason we later
gave the name of psychic traumas. Their individual characters were linked
to the traumatic scenes that had provoked them. According to the classic
terminology, the symptoms were determined by “scenes” of which they
were the mnemic residues, and it was no longer necessary to regard them
as arbitrary and enigmatic effects of the neurosis. In contrast, however, to
what was expected, it was not always a single event that was the cause of
the symptom; most often, on the contrary, it arose out of multiple traumas,
frequently analogous and repeated. As a result, it became necessary to
reproduce chronologically this whole series of pathogenic memories, but
in reverse order: the latest at the beginning and the earliest at the end; it
was impossible to make one’s way back to the fi rst trauma, which is often
the most forceful, if one skipped any of its successors.
It could not be stated more positively; every neurosis has its
origins in specifi c Erlebnisse. Later Freud added:
This trauma, it is true, has been quite expelled from the consciousness and
the memory of the patient and as a result he has apparently been saved
from a great mass of suffering, but the repressed desire continues to exist
in the unconscious; it is on watch constantly for an opportunity to make
itself known and it soon comes back into consciousness, but in a disguise
that makes it impossible to recognize; in other words, the repressed thought
is replaced in consciousness by another that acts as its surrogate, its Ersatz,
and that soon surrounds itself with all those feelings of morbidity that had
been supposedly averted by the repression.

4. Joachim Marcus, “Structure familiale et comportements politiques,” L’autorité dans
la famille et dans l’État, Revue Française de Psychoanalyse, April–June, 1949.

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