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THE NEGRO AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 117

1. a psychoanalytic interpretation of the life experience of the
black man;
2. a psychoanalytic interpretation of the Negro myth.
But reality, which is our only recourse, prevents such procedures.
The facts are much more complicated. What are they?
The Negro is a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety.
From the patient treated by Sérieux and Capgras to the girl
12
who confi des to me that to go to bed with a Negro would be
terrifying to her, one discovers all the stages of what I shall call
the Negro-phobogenesis. There has been much talk of psycho-
analysis in connection with the Negro. Distrusting the ways in
13
which it might be applied, I have preferred to call this chapter
“The Negro and Psychopathology,” well aware that Freud and
Adler and even the cosmic Jung did not think of the Negro in all
their investigations. And they were quite right not to have. It is
too often forgotten that neurosis is not a basic element of human
reality. Like it or not, the Oedipus complex is far from coming
into being among Negroes. It might be argued, as Malinowski
contends, that the matriarchal structure is the only reason for its
absence. But, putting aside the question whether the ethnologists
are not so imbued with the complexes of their own civilization
that they are compelled to try to fi nd them duplicated in the
peoples they study, it would be relatively easy for me to show that
in the French Antilles 97 per cent of the families cannot produce
one Oedipal neurosis. This incapacity is one on which we heartily
congratulate ourselves. 14
With the exception of a few misfits within the closed
environment, we can say that every neurosis, every abnormal

12. Les folies raisonnantes, cited by A. Hesnard, L’univers morbide de la faute (Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), p. 97.
13. I am thinking here particularly of the United States. See, for example, Home of
the Brave.
14. On this point psychoanalysts will be reluctant to share my view. Dr. Lacan, for
instance, talks of the “abundance” of the Oedipus complex. But even if the young
boy has to kill his father, it is still necessary for the father to accept being killed.
I am reminded of what Hegel said: “The cradle of the child is the tomb of the
parents”; and of Nicolas Calas’ Foyer d’incendie and of Jean Lacroix’ Force et
faiblesses de la famille. The collapse of moral values in France after the war was
perhaps the result of the defeat of that moral being which the nation represented.
We know what such traumatisms on the family level may produce.

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