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an affect in the patient. His phobia is the latent presence of this
affect at the root of his world; there is an organization that has
been given a form. For the object, naturally, need not be there, it
is enough that somewhere it exist: It is a possibility. This object
is endowed with evil intentions and with all the attributes of a
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malefi c power. In the phobic, affect has a priority that defi es all
rational thinking. As we can see, the phobic is a person who is
governed by the laws of rational prelogic and affective prelogic:
methods of thinking and feeling that go back to the age at which
he experienced the event that impaired his security. The diffi culty
indicated here is this: Was there a trauma harmful to security in
the case of the young woman whom we mentioned a little earlier?
In the majority of Negrophobic men has there been an attempt at
rape? An attempt at fellatio? Proceeding with complete orthodoxy,
we should be led by the application of analytic conclusions to this:
If an extremely frightening object, such as a more or less imaginary
attacker, arouses terror, this is also—for most often such cases
are those of women—and especially a terror mixed with sexual
revulsion. “I’m afraid of men” really means, at the bottom of the
motivation of the fear, because they might do all kinds of things
to me, but not commonplace cruelties: sexual abuses—in other
words, immoral and shameful things. 21
“Contact alone is enough to evoke anxiety. For contact is at
the same time the basic schematic type of initiating sexual action
(touching, caresses—sexuality).” Since we have learned to know
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all the tricks the ego uses in order to defend itself, we know too
that its denials must in no case be taken literally. Are we not now
observing a complete inversion? Basically, does this fear of rape
not itself cry out for rape? Just as there are faces that ask to be
slapped, can one not speak of women who ask to be raped? In If
He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes describes this type very
well. The big blonde trembles whenever the Negro goes near her.
Yet she has nothing to fear, since the factory is full of white men.
In the end, she and the Negro go to bed together.

20. Ibid., pp. 58 and 68.
21. Hesnard, op. cit., p. 38.
22. Ibid., p. 40.

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