Page 186 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

THE NEGRO AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY 147

as every man climbs up toward whiteness and light, the European
has tried to repudiate this uncivilized self, which has attempted
to defend itself. When European civilization came into contact
with the black world, with those savage peoples, everyone agreed:
Those Negroes were the principle of evil.
Jung consistently identifi es the foreign with the obscure, with
the tendency to evil: He is perfectly right. This mechanism of
projection—or, if one prefers, transference—has been described
by classic psychoanalysis. In the degree to which I fi nd in myself
something unheard-of, something reprehensible, only one solution
remains for me: to get rid of it, to ascribe its origin to someone else.
In this way I eliminate a short circuit that threatens to destroy my
equilibrium. One must be careful with waking dreams in the early
sessions, because it is not good if the obscenity emerges too soon.
The patient must come to understand the workings of sublimation
before he makes any contact with the unconscious. If a Negro
comes up in the fi rst session, he must be removed at once; to that
end, suggest a stairway or a rope to the patient, or propose that
he let himself be carried off in a helicopter. Infallibly, the Negro
will stay in his hole. In Europe the Negro has one function: that of
symbolizing the lower emotions, the baser inclinations, the dark
side of the soul. In the collective unconscious of homo occidentalis,
the Negro—or, if one prefers, the color black—symbolizes evil,
sin, wretchedness, death, war, famine. All birds of prey are black.
In Martinique, whose collective unconscious makes it a European
country, when a “blue” Negro—a coal-black one—comes to visit,
one reacts at once: “What bad luck is he bringing?”
The collective unconscious is not dependent on cerebral heredity;
it is the result of what I shall call the unrefl ected imposition of
a culture. Hence there is no reason to be surprised when an
Antillean exposed to waking-dream therapy relives the same
fantasies as a European. It is because the Antillean partakes of
the same collective unconscious as the European.
If what has been said thus far is grasped, this conclusion may
be stated: It is normal for the Antillean to be anti-Negro. Through
the collective unconscious the Antillean has taken over all the
archetypes belonging to the European. The anima of the Antillean

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