ABSTRACT
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud develops his theory of how modern subjectivity arose out of primitive groups or communities. This chapter follows the argument of Group Psychology to search out the logic internal to its configuration of primitivity. It examines the relationship between race and gender as found in Freud's configurations of primitivity and femininity and explores the psychologies of enthrallment with male power by which he characterized them both. The raced and gendered characterizations are then traced back to the psychoanalytic premise of separation or exclusion as the operation necessary to the constitution of subjectivity; and toward the end, the chapter turns to an investigation of this premise and suggests a possible alternative. Psychoanalytic notions of primitivity and femininity as inferior others are overlapping and mutually implicating, in a continuation of the age-old homology linking women and so-called primitives with nature.
