ABSTRACT
The analogy between "negroes" and psychoanalytic patients suggests that the racial subtext of psychoanalysis was not limited to its theoretical structures but filtered through to the clinical relationship as well. This chapter contributes to the susceptibility of the clinical relationship to place "the doctor in the role of colonizer and the patients as the colonized people", as Octave Mannoni described the situation that he felt psychoanalysis was "liable to inherit". It traces the way the inescapably racial conception of primitivity can make its way into the clinical encounter. The chapter investigates Sigmund Freud's formulations of the topics of suggestion, hypnosis, regression and resistance, relating his technical considerations concerning these topics as found largely in his Papers on Technique, to his discussions of the same topics in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and elsewhere.
