'A child is being eaten': Psychoanalysis in times of antiblackness

Róheim’s psychoanalytic, colonial archive is one of the few attempts to document the psychic life of subjects living under settler colonialism, by collecting accounts of dreams, child-rearing practices, myths, and rituals. Róheim’s psychoanalytic humanism has been well-established by historians of psychoanalysis (Robinson, 1972; Anderson, 2014; Bar-Haim, 2021; Bar-Haim, 2022; Damousi, 2011). Similarly, a lot of emphasis has been paid to Róheim’s contributions to the psychoanalytic study of aboriginal childhood (Morton, 2011), as well as his turn to the psychoanalytic exploration of maternal subjectivity. However, Róheim’s account of aboriginal motherhood as driven by the urge to merge with the child through devouring, needs more attention, as accusations of cannibalism often accompanied cruel colonial policies targeting aboriginal families. In this paper, I contextualise Géza Róheim’s psychoanalytic insights on the unconscious motives of cannibalism and infanticide amongst first nation Australian mothers and evaluate his paradoxical thesis that aboriginal mothers ate their babies, whilst the surviving children were not psychologically injured, but, actually, lacked anxiety. I argue that once we turn our focus to the totality of antiblack hatred during colonialism, Róheim’s quasi-forgiving view towards maternal cannibalism, exposes the limitations of the encounters between psychoanalysis and colonialism, which is crucial for our thinking about psychoanalysis, decolonially, today.