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THE NEGRO AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 123

Since his ideal is an infi nite virility, is there not a phenomenon
of diminution in relation to the Negro, who is viewed as a penis
symbol? Is the lynching of the Negro not a sexual revenge? We
know how much of sexuality there is in all cruelties, tortures,
beatings. One has only to reread a few pages of the Marquis de
Sade to be easily convinced of the fact. Is the Negro’s superiority
real? Everyone knows that it is not. But that is not what matters.
The prelogical thought of the phobic has decided that such is
the case. Another woman developed a Negrophobia after she
24
had read J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. I tried to demonstrate the
irrationality of her position by pointing out to her that victimized
white women were as sick as the Negro. Besides, I added, this was
no case of black vengeance, as the title of the book might seem to
imply, because the author was a white man, Boris Vian. I had to
accept the futility of all such efforts. That young woman did not
want to listen. Anyone who has read the book will understand at
once the ambivalence her phobia revealed. I knew a Negro medical
student who would not dare to make a vaginal examination of
any patient in the gynecological clinic. He told me that one day
he had heard one of them say, “There’s a nigger in there. If he
touches me, I’ll slap his face. You never know with them. He must
have great big hands; and besides he’s sure to be rough.”
If one wants to understand the racial situation psycho-
analytically, not from a universal viewpoint but as it is experienced
by individual consciousnesses, considerable importance must be
given to sexual phenomena. In the case of the Jew, one thinks of
money and its cognates. In that of the Negro, one thinks of sex.
Anti-Semitism can be rationalized on a basic level. It is because he
takes over the country that the Jew is a danger. An acquaintance
told me recently that although he was not an anti-Semite he had
been constrained to admit that the majority of Jews whom he
had known during the war had behaved very badly. I tried in
vain to get him to concede that such a statement was the fruit

24. To continue in Odier’s terminology, it would be more accurate to say “paralogical”:
“The term ‘paralogical’ might be suggested for the regression of the neurotic adult.”
(Anxiety and Magic Thinking, p. 118.)

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