ABSTRACT
The bearing of biological theories on images of the savage has been described in previous chapters. Vogt, it will be recalled, proposed the following descending scale: Europeans, blacks, idiots and apes. Darwin in one passage linked monkeys, microcephalous idiots and the 'barbarous races of mankind' . Comparisons of this kind were adopted by the emerging science of psychology as it became progressively more oriented towards an evolutionary stance. This was reftected in the ways the sub-divisions of the discipline came to be seen. An early example is that ofWundt (1862: XIV) who then envisaged two main branches ofthe subject, namely 'the evolutionary history of mind [Seele]' and comparative psychology; the second of these whould deal with differences in the animal kingdom and the races ofman. A generation later Charles Peirce (1839-1914), the founder of pragmatism, proposed a classification of the sciences. As far as psychology was concerned, he also suggested two main divisions, the second of which included animal, pathological and race psychology (Vidal 1994). This of course was not an arbitrary categorization, and the supposed 'animality' of the 'lower races' has already been extensively discussed. What may seem stranger today is the coupling of savagery with pathology, to which infancy also came to be added. It was a linkage that had been foreshadowed by the social evolutionists, and was still widely taken for granted during the 1920s. The underlying idea was that savages have less impulse control than civilized people, a characteristic they share with infants. Savages were thought to display openly some ofthe seamier side ofhuman nature that is suppressed among the civilized, and mental disorder was conceptualized as a regression to the features of infancy and savagery. This was expressed very clearly by Rivers (1919, p. 891):
are primitive, they furnish material which helps us to understand and deal with the regressive states exhibited by sufferers from disorders of mental function.
