Freud and the Non-European by Edward Said. Published by  Verso, London, 2003;  84 pp; £11.50.

This book reproduces the lecture that the late Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, delivered at the Freud Museum of London in 2001. Said's qualifications on the subject are rooted in a combination of painful life experiences and academic excellence. As Dr Christopher Bollas remarks in his excellent and informative introduction, Said and his family were driven from their home in Palestine after the 1948 war. Said went into exile in the USA where he was educated and subsequently became one of the most respected thinkers in his field. He was always involved in politics and was a member of the Palestinian National Council between 1977 and 1991. In his political writings Said made use of psychoanalytical concepts to understand the events in the Middle East. For example, as Bollas reminds us, Said thoroughly examined the structure of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians during the 35 years of occupation of the West Bank and Gaza following the 1967 war. Projection of violence by successive Israeli governments as well as the psychology of the stubborn refusal to recognize both Palestinian national identity and Palestinians as people deserving of the same basic human rights as accorded to Israelis, are amongst Said's themes elaborated in one of his most well-known books, The Question of Palestine.

The term ‘Non-European’ used by Said in this book is to be understood within the framework of nineteenth and twentieth-century European history, which was characterized by often brutal and violent colonial occupation of land and the subjugation of entire populations throughout the world. The resulting dominant ideology, predominantly Eurocentric, tended to be dismissive of other cultures as intrinsically inferior. As a psychiatrist I was intrigued to learn in Freud and the Non-European of the scientific view held by a Professor Porot who diagnosed indigenous Algerians as possessing ‘… no cortex; or, more precisely, [the Algerian] is