This paper is an attempt at compensating for the scarcity of Brazilian psychoanalytic papers on unconscious emotional conflicts resulting from the influence of African culture on the private life of Brazilian families, whose official culture is European.

Our history is characterized by the interaction between the two races. Erotic drives and repression, as well as the various sublimatory forms of them, become manifest in our customs, in our specific manifestations as carnival and in our language and literature. This is obvious in clinical practice, in which, sometimes, the analyst plays the role of the 'negro'.