ABSTRACT
This chapter draws a final cluster of references around the conjunction of two eminent European cultural landmarks, as a way of illuminating the particular importance that, despite all the problems inherent in Freudianism, the concept of the unconscious has for Antillean writers and thinkers. Sigmund Freud is using Ariel's song to illustrate his thesis that the murdered primal father does not disappear, but is preserved in the unconscious of his descendants, transformed 'into something rich and strange'. Freudian theory is in many ways inadequate and even inimical to colonized subjects; it can be used to devalue political struggle, to marginalize non-European cultures, and to legitimize and perpetuate different kinds of institutional racism. It has therefore provoked a considerable amount of hostility among Antillean intellectuals. The Caribbean experience seems to create an extremely profound, constantly recurring need for some conception of the unconscious, which overrides the limitations of the theory in its more precise formulations.
