Sigmund Freud's Racial Vocabulary and Related Fragments from the Analyses of Clarence P. Oberndorf and Smiley Blanton

Abstract

Psychoanalysis is the product of a highly original and independent thinker from an historically marginalized minority with a perspective dedicated to plumbing the depths of our self-deceptions. Although the European anti-Semitism faced by Sigmund Freud was particularly relevant to his personal and professional identities, he was not unmindful of conflictual ''race, creed and color'' paradigms peculiar to the ''New World''. Fragments from the analyses of two American psychiatrists (whose formative years were centered in the post-Civil War South) reveal the confluence of such cross-currents in their autobiographical accounts of his inter- relationships with each of them.