‘Race’ in European Psychology to 1940: I. Primitive minds and Aryan supermen

Prior to the 1930s, such explicit attention as post-Victorian European academic Psychology paid to race issues was scattered and disparate. Even after 1930 only the Nazi psychologists-plus a few Italian, Dutch and East European sympathisers-tackled it systematically. In this chapter we consider two mainland European developments in the Psychological treatment of race, first examining a significant transformation of the terms in which ‘primitive’ psychology was conceptualised, notably by the French anthropologistphilosopher Lévy-Bruhl, and by Carl Jung and Freud. Secondly the most extreme manifestation of racist thought in Psychology, its treatment by avowedly Nazi psychologists, will be tackled.