ABSTRACT
In keeping with the colonialist attitudes of his class and time, Sigmund Freud was racist. He described colonized people as savage and primitive, and he likened them to infants and young children. He also went along with colonialism and racial prejudice in writing about ‘wars between primitive and civilized peoples’ and between ‘races divided by the colour of their skin’. He nevertheless objected, not surprisingly, to anti-Semitic racism resulting in his being expected, as a university student, ‘to feel himself to be “inferior and an alien” because he was a Jew’. Anti-Semitism was an issue in Britain. Examples included the October 1936 Cable Street riots in London. Anti-Semitism persisted following Freud’s death in Hampstead on 23 September 1939. The struggle to secure and develop Freud’s psychoanalytic insights did not end with his death. It continues largely because of their importance as means of understanding unconscious-conscious dynamics in everyday life, of understanding psychosexual development, and as a basis for treating psychological ills.
