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In this revised edition of the book, originally published in 2003 as Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis, Ms Brickman, psychoanalyst and scholar-in-residence at the Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago, offers an illuminating and innovative deconstruction of the racial and colonial assumptions embedded in psychoanalytic theory. Equipped with a mastery of post-colonial theory, critical race theory, feminist critique and theories from religious studies, as well as a sophisticated understanding of psychoanalytic theory, she offers us a radical perspective on Freud's meta-psychological, cultural and clinical thought. Ms Brickman offers cogent summaries of Freud's writings and extrapolates numerous examples from a vast body of clinical and cultural texts demonstrating a deep familiarity with his oeuvre. Unlike many Freudian critiques, Ms Brickman deftly balances her call for reconstruction with a valorizing of the revolutionary and emancipatory aspects of Freud's thinking. In this book, she takes a meta-psychoanalytic approach and turns the psychoanalytic method toward psychoanalytic theory itself. In doing so, she guides us toward the creation of a reparative psychoanalytic perspective and approach that ultimately aims for greater inclusivity and liberation.
Ms. Brickman begins by charting a rigorously researched genealogy of the colonial and racist discourses upon which early anthropological and evolutionary theories were constructed, the very ideas that Freud utilized in developing his theories of the unconscious, psychic and libidinal development, and human civilization. In tracing the origins of the racialized subtext of psychoanalytic theory, she focuses on the concept of primitivity. She sees primitivity as a racially problematic construct that functions as the lynchpin of many of Freud's theories. She explicates this thesis through the use of numerous Freudian texts, placing considerable attention on Group Psychol