Savage Science: Primitives, War Neurotics, and Freud's Uncanny Method

Freud's pronouncements about the "savage" in Totem and Taboo have been viewed at best as gorgeous nonsense and at worst as evidence of his underlying imperial and racist intent. Yet critics rarely look closely at the text. This essay begins by doing that, albeit not to examine what Freud says about savages (this is well known) but to investigate what he does not say—specifically, what he says and then takes back. This recanting appears in a series of remarkable footnotes that expose an explosive internal conflict, which, I argue, elevates Totem and Taboo to one of psychoanalysis's foundational texts. This is not because it solves major ethnological problems (as Freud claimed) or because it uncritically repeats colonial power relations in the consulting room (as his critics argue). Rather, Totem and Taboo introduces a process of bold speculation and self-deconstruction that becomes a model for Freud's later writing, especially The Uncanny, where psychoanalysis reflects critically upon itself. Totem and Taboo's structural ambivalence reveals the "savage" element within psychoanalysis that, as becomes explicit in The Uncanny, simultaneously undermines psychoanalysis and bolsters it: giving it a self-reflective methodological advantage over its competing "science of man," anthropology. Only by becoming savage can the psychoanalyst begin to "feel his way" into the other "modes of thinking" that Freud outlines in Totem and Taboo, including those of the prototypical modern savage—the war neurotic—who haunts The Uncanny's subtext. This strategy of "feeling one's way" is always only partly successful, but this half-failure, in which the subject wavers between a 'scientific' first-person and a 'primitive' third-person, ultimately reveals how psychoanalysis invents itself as a uniquely "uncanny" science.