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THE NEGRO AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 119

who had always practiced in Fort-de-France, I told him what
conclusions I had arrived at; he went farther, saying that they were
valid not only in psychopathology but also in general medicine.
“In the same way,” he added, “you never encounter a case of
pure typhoid such as you studied in the textbooks; there is always
a more or less manifest complication of malaria.” It would be
interesting to study, for example, a case of schizophrenia as
experienced by a Negro—if indeed that kind of malady were to
be found there.
What am I getting at? Quite simply this: When the Negro makes
contact with the white world, a certain sensitizing action takes
place. If his psychic structure is weak, one observes a collapse of
the ego. The black man stops behaving as an actional person. The
goal of his behavior will be The Other (in the guise of the white
man), for The Other alone can give him worth. That is on the
ethical level: self-esteem. But there is something else.
I have said that the Negro is phobogenic. What is phobia?
I prefer to answer that question by relying on the latest work
of Hesnard: “Phobia is a neurosis characterized by the anxious
fear of an object (in the broadest sense of anything outside the
individual) or, by extension, of a situation.” Naturally that object
17
must have certain aspects. It must arouse, Hesnard says, both fear
and revulsion. But here we encounter a diffi culty. Applying the
genetic method to the understanding of phobia, Charles Odier
wrote that all anxiety derives from a certain subjective insecurity
linked to the absence of the mother. This occurs, according to
18
Odier, sometime in the second year of life.
Investigating the psychic structure of the phobic, he comes
to this conclusion: “Before attacking the adult beliefs, all the
elements of the infantile structure which produced them must be
19
analyzed.” The choice of the phobic object is therefore over-
determined. This object does not come at random out of the
void of nothingness; in some situation it has previously evoked

17. L’univers morbide de la jaute, p. 37.
18. Anxiety and Magic Thinking (New York, International Universities Press, 1956),
p. 46. Originally, L’angoisse et la pensée magique (Neuchâtel, Delachaux, 1947).
19. Ibid., p. 76.

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