ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has stood at the center of the post-colonial critique since the emergence of this discourse after World War II. However, while scholars such as Franz Fanon in the 1950s and 1960s drew heavily on psychoanalytic notions to reveal the epistemology of the colonial gaze (Fanon 1967), since the 1980s, other scholars attacked psychoanalysis itself as a paradigmatic case study of Europocentric social science (Nandy 1995; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Seshadri-Crooks 1994; Khanna 2003; Brickman 2003; Said 2004; Anderson, Jenson, and Keller 2011). Post-colonial literature has shown the importance of nineteenth-century anthropology in the development of Freudian thought, particularly in Freud’s speculative cultural writings on the pre- and early-history of humanity, and especially Totem and Taboo. In this and other works, scholars have shown that Freud was a loyal follower of Darwinian anthropologists such as Edward B. Tylor and James G. Frazer. They argued that so-called “primitive” people are living evidence of the early stages of the human being. For nineteenth-century British anthropologists, “they” (primitive people) are what “we” (progressive, civilized people) used to be thousands of years ago.1
