Lane, Christopher, ed. The Psychoanalysis of Race. New York:  Columbia University Press, 1998. Pp.  432

However “tarnished” the origins of psychoanalysis now seem to us by their interest in the “savage” and the “primitive,” to assume that this material's recovery releases the unconscious from inquiry is, I think, a grave mistake. It implies that prejudice operates according to conscious and rational precepts, and that we can reach a level of self- and group understanding that is free of psychic ambivalence. (13)

So writes Christopher Lane in his introduction to The Psychoanalysis of Race, an anthology of essays that attempts to bring a Freudian rigor to postcolonial and antiracist criticism. He certainly has his work cut out for him, but all those embarrassing references to savages in the Freudian oeuvre are the least of his problems. The importance of psychological inquiry into racism goes without saying, but Lane still has to contend with the dubious validity of psychoanalysis as a science, not to mention the tendency among theorists of postcolonialism to regard psychoanalysis as too apolitical and ahistorical to be of much use. One can see the polemical steam boiling out of this book's ears every time the word ahistorical is mentioned. In his own contribution to the volume, Tim Dean declares,