`Race' in European Psychology to 1940: I. Primitive minds and Aryan supermen

Prior to the 1930s, such explicit attention as post-Victorian mainland European academic Psychology paid to race issues was scattered and disparate. Even after 1930 only the Nazi psychologistsÐplus a few Italian, Dutch, and East European sympathisersÐexplicitly tackled it systematically. In this chapter we consider two mainland European developments in the Psychological treatment of race, ®rst examining a signi®cant transformation of the terms in which `primitive' psychology was conceptualised, notably by the French anthropologist-philosopher LeÂvy-Bruhl, and by Carl Jung and Freud (this being only implicitly racialist). Second, the most extreme manifestation of racist thought in Psychology, its treatment by avowedly Nazi psychologists, will be tackled, albeit more brie¯y than I would have liked.