Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts given in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a genealogy of the figure of the primitive in western thought, tracing the contexts in which Europe's raced others came to be understood as representatives of the European past and came to furnish the basis for theories of "the primitive mind". It discusses some of the specific writers, forerunners of today's anthropologists, on whom Freud relied, particularly in his writing of Totem and Taboo and other works on culture and society. The book explores the relationship within psychoanalysis between race and gender by comparing Freud's psychologies of primitivity and femininity. It contextualizes Freud's discourse of primitivity in two ways: by placing it within the larger historicizing framework of psychoanalysis, and by relating it to the social and cultural situation in which Freud lived and wrote. The book examines clinical psychoanalytic situation, drawing connections between Freud's Papers on Technique and texts.