ABSTRACT
The substantial use of Freudian concepts in French Caribbean culture occurs in the review Tropiques, founded in Martinique in 1941 by Aime Cesaire, Suzanne Cesaire and Rene Menil. Tropiques's version of this 'revolutionary' unconscious adds one further component: that of race. The surrealist model already implies that repression is both psychological and social—that is, the agent of repression is not only the individual consciousness but also, inseparably, the constraints of respectable bourgeois society. There is also another quite separate conjunction of psychoanalysis and ethnography that exerts an equally strong influence on Tropiques. The European surrealists, then, conceive of the unconscious not as purely individual but as a global collective entity which retains traces of primitive stages of humanity; and consequently they believe that ethnographic exploration and contact with peoples who are still primitive will enable them to release that primitive unconscious energy in themselves.
