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Though psychoanalysis has, over the past thirteen decades or so, developed into an exceedingly complex and variegated discourse, incorporating and considering much that it initially ignored, it nevertheless has substantial roots, like so many theoretical paradigms, in whiteness and masculinity. This is perhaps most succinctly and easily seen in Sigmund Freud's statement in 1926's “The Question of Lay Analysis” in which the father of psychoanalysis notes, “We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology” (p. 212). In these two sentences, Freud admits that the scaffolding of early Oedipal psychoanalysis was based almost completely on less than half of the population, due to the lack of study of women (or those with any gender other than traditionally binary male), while simultaneously revealing an unsurprising investment in colonialist and racialist thinking. By borrowing phraseology from explorer/colonialist John Stanley's description of Africa as the “dark continent,” Freud links all that is “dark,” mysterious, and not understood about the human psyche to Africa and its inhabitants, while tying psychoanalysis itself to colonialism, exploring and bringing understanding, or “light,” to an entire continent and people stereotypically and offensively defined by ignorance and incomprehensibility. While Freud, and thus psychoanalysis at its origins, claimed to be working towards the understanding of the human psyche, making a more or less universal claim, its case studies were hardly so, with the initial basis for Freudian psychoanalysis being based very heavily on white male European subjects, as well as on implicit biases