Typical Forms of Transference Among West Africans1

The authors analysed thirteen normal adult members of the Dogon people in Mali2, applying the usual psycho-analytic technique. The first aim was to get information about the psychodynamics and structure of these personalities. A secondary aim was to check how far psychoanalytic technique and theory are appropriate to enable one to understand their inner life.

In this context it should be mentioned that some characteristics of the 'normal' ego would not be compatible with clinical normality among Europeans. These characteristics depend upon the vicissitudes of the instinctual drives of the oral phase which reach a level of extraordinary differentiation. Furthermore, the ego, in contrast with the Western world, is able to turn the differentiated oral tendencies to its advantage. In the analytic process all subjects showed good capacity for transference which aroused instinctual demands stemming from different levels without showing fear, inhibition, or disintegration. Their ego oscillated between one form of relationship and another or even functioned simultaneously on different levels. This flexibility did not prevent their having a rich repertory of well-established identificatory mechanisms. They entered freely into different forms of identificatory relationship to the analyst and emerged from them again—as they did with objects in their own surroundings.

The appearance of a white man among a closed group like the Dogon, a Negro people of West Africa, came as an obvious disturbance and the subjects reacted to this disturbing factor in characteristic ways. They tended to distribute libidinal cathexes among a number of objects and tried by all possible means to avoid any internalization of relations to a single person such as the psycho-analyst. This defence was not directed against the object itself nor against specific inner dangers (instinctual drives) but against the emergence of isolated relations to a second person. It was very curious to observe that