ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the psychoanalytic issues in conversation with recent postcolonial critiques of anthropology. It discusses the development of the anthropological and postcolonial critique and then directs this critique toward psychoanalysis. The chapter leads to a consideration of Freud's works on religion, together with some psychoanalytic responses to these works, since religion constitutes the crystallization of the authority of the past from which it was Freud's project to emancipate us. It focuses on Freud's work in the religious and racial context in which he wrote allows us to see how his responses to the crises of his time and place translated into the historicizing strategies of psychoanalysis itself. The chapter examines the overall meaning and function of time, history and historicization in psychoanalysis, since psychoanalysis, like anthropology, placed the development of the modern subject within an evolutionary conception of the development of the human race.
