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Celia Brickman's book Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind holds an unresolved tension that weaves in and out of Freud's foundational theory of the human psyche. On the one hand, Freud ‘attempted to transcend the racial taxonomies of his time by creating a model of the psyche as held in common by all humans’ (p. 9). On the other hand, this universal psyche emerges from an epistemology of modernity that could only posit the psyche along a developmental axis of ‘progress,’ proceeding from ‘primitivity’ to civilized. While Freud contended that the ‘primitive actually lived on in the structures of contemporary European subjectivity and institutions,’ Freud's term ‘primitivity,’ although affirming ‘the universal commonality of the psyche,’ was a ‘racially indexed term of derogation he used to discredit the pretensions of civilization’ (p. 5). Brickman carefully shows us that, no matter how meticulous Freud was to illustrate that ‘the universality of the primitive psyche was found in both primitive and civilized people alike,’ he inevitably ‘pressed into service the available colonialist constructions concerning primitive peoples’ (p. 119).
In chapter 1, Brickman tracks the appearance and interrelationship between racial terms such as ‘primitive,’ ‘savage,’ ‘barbarian,’ ‘heathen,’ and ‘infidel’ within Western Enlightenment thought and colonial anthropology. These terms were gradated within civilizational discourses that undergirded the preeminence of European selfhood in order to justify colonialism, imperialism, genocide, and enslavement. Brickman is concerned with the rise of ‘theories of the primitive mind’ as ‘both sites of European self-fashioning and the fashioning of the other […] in tandem with the development of the modern concept of civilization’ (p. 37). She shows how these terms were associated with biological determinism in the works of a series of influential nineteenth-century European philosopher-pseudoscientists such as Jean-Baptiste