ABSTRACT
The use of the idea of primitivity in psychoanalysis is so ubiquitous and taken for granted that it is difficult to recognize its function as the key to the code of racial difference embedded in psychoanalytic theory. This chapter examines the term primitive to demonstrate how its psychoanalytic usage conceals within it an anthropological and racial meaning by tracing the colonialist contexts in which it had developed by the time it reached Freud. It begins by focusing largely on the history and resulting representations of primitivity that emerged out of the European encounters with the Americas. The ideas concerning American "primitives", elaborated through religious, legal and administrative rulings that governed their colonization and enslavement, took on a life of their own as Europeans struggled to include what they were learning about them and other non-Europeans in their understanding of the human condition.
