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THE NEGRO AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 127

Before we go further, it seems important to make this point:
Granted that unconscious tendencies toward incest exist, why
should these tendencies emerge more particularly with respect
to the Negro? In what way, taken as an absolute, does a black
son-in-law differ from a white son-in-law? Is there not a reaction
of unconscious tendencies in both cases? Why not, for instance,
conclude that the father revolts because in his opinion the Negro
will introduce his daughter into a sexual universe for which the
father does not have the key, the weapons, or the attributes?
Every intellectual gain requires a loss in sexual potential. The
civilized white man retains an irrational longing for unusual eras
of sexual license, of orgiastic scenes, of unpunished rapes, of
unrepressed incest. In one way these fantasies respond to Freud’s
life instinct. Projecting his own desires onto the Negro, the white
man behaves “as if the Negro really had them. When it is a
question of the Jew, the problem is clear: He is suspect because
he wants to own the wealth or take over the positions of power.
But the Negro is fi xated at the genital; or at any rate he has been
fi xated there. Two realms: the intellectual and the sexual. An
erection on Bodin’s Thinker is a shocking thought. One cannot
decently “have a hard on” everywhere. The Negro symbolizes the
biological danger; the Jew, the intellectual danger.
To suffer from a phobia of Negroes is to be afraid of the
biological. For the Negro is only biological. The Negroes are
animals. They go about naked. And God alone knows. . . .
Mannoni said further: “In his urge to identify the anthropoid
apes, Caliban, the Negroes, even the Jews with the mythological
fi gures of the satyrs, man reveals that there are sensitive spots in
27
the human soul at a level where thought becomes confused and
where sexual excitement is strangely linked with violence and
28
aggressiveness.” Mannoni includes the Jew in his scale. I see
nothing inappropriate there. But here the Negro is the master. He
is the specialist of this matter: Whoever says rape says Negro.
27. When we consider the responses given in waking-dream therapy we shall see that
these mythological fi gures, or “archetypes,” do reside very deep in the human mind.
Whenever the individual plunges down, one fi nds the Negro, whether concretely
or symbolically.
28. Mannoni, op. cit., p. 111.

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