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THE NEGRO AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 145

that Jung has deceived himself. Moreover, all the peoples that
he has known—whether the Pueblo Indians of Arizona or the
Negroes of Kenya in British East Africa—have had more or less
traumatic contacts with the white man. I said earlier that in his
Salavinizations the young Antillean is never black; and I have
52
tried to show what this phenomenon corresponds to. Jung locates
the collective unconscious in the inherited cerebral matter. But
the collective unconscious, without our having to fall back on the
genes, is purely and simply the sum of prejudices, myths, collective
attitudes of a given group. It is taken for granted, to illustrate,
that the Jews who have settled in Israel will produce in less than
a hundred years a collective unconscious different from the ones
that they had had before 1945 in the countries which they were
forced to leave.
On the level of philosophic discussion, this would be the place
to bring up the old problem of instinct and habit: instinct, which is
inborn (we know how we must view this “innateness”), invariable,
specifi c; habit, which is acquired. On this level one would have
only to demonstrate that Jung has confused instinct and habit.
In his view, in fact, the collective unconscious is bound up with
the cerebral structure, the myths and archetypes are permanent
engrams of the race. I hope I have shown that nothing of the sort is
the case and that in fact the collective unconscious is cultural, which
means acquired. Just as a young mountaineer of the Carpathians,
under the physico-chemical conditions of his country, is likely
to develop a myxedema, so a Negro like René Maran, who has
lived in France and breathed and eaten the myths and prejudices
of racist Europe, and assimilated the collective unconscious of
that Europe, will be able, if he stands outside himself, to express
only his hatred of the Negro. One must move softly, and there is
a whole drama in having to lay bare little by little the workings
of processes that are seen in their totality. Will this statement
be susceptible of understanding? In Europe, the black man is
the symbol of Evil. One must move softly, I know, but it is not

52. Salavin is a character created by Georges Duhamel, and who is the prototype of
the ineffectual man: a mediocrity, a creature of fl eeting impulse, and always the
victim of his own chimeras. (Translator’s note.)

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