Abstract
As a small European democracy in Northern Europe, the Netherlands had achieved political and economic mastery of a large and lucrative colonial empire in Southeast Asia. During the decades before and after 1900, the Dutch empire in the Indonesian archipelago was “rounded off from Sabang to Merauke,” that is, from the Sabang harbor on the northwestern tip of Sumatra to the town of Merauke on the eastern-most border of Dutch-controlled territory on the island of (Papua) New Guinea. The Netherlands’ self-described role as gidsland (guiding force or guiding light) in colonial affairs — “a Cunning David amidst the Goliaths of Empire”1 — renders twentieth-century Dutch East Indies scholarship concerning ethnic cultural customs and conventions (adat), Islam and animist religions and the vagaries of the “native soul” particularly interesting. Because of a Dutch desire to project itself as international and a progressive pioneer in the proper management of European colonial power in Asia, its possession of the enormous Indonesian archipelago placated the “oversensitivity of a small nation with a heroic past” and substantiated its claim to be a mouse that could still roar.2
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Notes
The title of chapter 2 of Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), pp. 39–74.
P.M.B. Blaas, “De prikkelbaarheid van een kleine natie met een groot verleden: Fruin en Bloks nationale geschiedschrijving,” Theoretische geschiedenis, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1982), pp. 271–304; translated quote in Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas, p. 23.
Harry Stroeken, Freud in Nederland. Een eeuw psychoanalyse (Amsterdam: Boom, 1997), pp. 17–18.
Ilse N. Bulhof, Freud en Nederland (Baarn: Amboboeken, 1983), pp. 67–78.
See also Christine Brinkgreve, Psychoanalyse in Nederland: een vestigingsstrijd (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1984).
Frederik van Eeden, “De psychische geneeswijze,” De Nieuwe Gids, Vol. 3 (1888), pp. 383–433, quoted by Bulhof, Freud en Nederland, pp. 70–71.
H.W. van Tricht, ed., Dagboek, 1878–1923, IV volumes (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink-Noorduyn, 1971), vol. II, p. 1111, cited by Bulhof, Freud en Nederland, p. 94.
Bob Rooksby and Sybe Terwee, in “Freud, Van Eeden and Lucid Dreaming,” translate this statement as “a cynical coarse soul.” See www.spiritwatch.ca (accessed August 8, 2007).
J.H.F. Kohlbrugge, vergadering van januari 28, 1908, “Iets over de inlandsche geneeskundigen,” in Verslag van het Indisch Genootschap (The Hague: Indisch Genootschap, 1908), pp. 123–124.
J.H.F. Kohlbrugge, Een en ander over de psychologie van den Javaan (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1907), pp. 50–52.
J.C. van Eerde, “Omgang met inlanders,” in Koloniale Volkenkunde, mededelingen no.1 (1914; Amsterdam: J.H. de Bussy, 1928), p. 54.
Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture. Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom (1871; New York: Brentano, 1924), p. 6.
William Robertson Smith, Burnett Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1888–1889; London: Adam and Charles Black, 1894), pp. 1, 29–30.
See, among others, J.H.F. Kohlbrugge, Primitieve denkwijze I & primitieve denkwijze II: uitstralende krachten in de volkenkunde (Amsterdam: Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, 1920), vol. XXXVII, pp. 729–755; ‘S Menschen religie; inleiding tot the vergelijkende volkenkunde (Groningen: J.W. Wolters, 1932); Critiek der descendentietheorie (Utrecht: NV A.Oosthoek’s Uitg. Mij, 1936).
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913; New York: Barnes & Noble, new ed. 2005). Trans. A.A. Brill; Introduction by Aaron H. Esman, p. 1.
The quotations of Freud’s views on primitivity are based on discussions in the following sources: Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004);
Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003);
Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations of the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003);
Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London/New York: Verso, 2003);
Joseph H. Smith & Afaf M. Mahfouz, eds., Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Future of Gender (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994);
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York/London: W.W. Norton, 1988);
Edwin R. Wallace IV, Freud and Anthropology: A History and Reappraisal (New York: International Universities Press Inc., 1983);
Géza Róheim, ed., Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, 3 Volumes (New York: International Universities Press, 1947, 1949, 1951);
George B. Wilbur & Warner Muesterberger, eds., Psychoanalysis and Culture: Essays in Honor of Géza Róheim (New York: International Universities Press Inc., 1951).
Gustave le Bon, The Crowd (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910; originally published in French in 1896); Wilfred Trotter, “The Herd Instinct and its Bearing on the Psychology of Civilized Man,” part 1 and 2, Sociological Review (July 1908 and January 1909); The Herd Instinct in War and Peace (London, 1915; New York: MacMillan, 1919).
Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind. Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
See also Lucille B. Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
P.H.M. Travaglino, “Het karakter van den inlander,” Tijdschrift van de Politiek Economische Bond, Vol. 1 (1920–1921), pp. 342–343. See also, “De psychose van den inlander in verband met zijn karakter,” Geneeskundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië; (Batavia: Javasche Boekhandel and Drukkerij, 1920), LX, No. 2, pp. 99–111.
See the discussion in Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 13,
and Octave Mannoni, “Psychoanalysis and the Decolonization of Mankind,” in J. Miller, ed., Freud (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1972), pp. 86–95.
Ibid., p. 343, also quoted and discussed in great detail in Paul van Schilfgaarde, “De psyche van de Javaan,” Djawa, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1925), pp. 109–111.
F.D.E. van Ossenbruggen, “Het magisch denken van den inlander,” In George Nypels, ed., De Indische Gids (also the new series of Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië) (1926), vol. 48, No. I—VI, pp. 290–299. Lecture delivered to students of the Handelshoogeschool in Rotterdam, December 1, 1925.
Hans Pols, “The Development of Psychiatry in Indonesia: From Colonial to Modern Times,” International Review of Psychiatry, Vol. 18, No. 4 (August 2006), pp.363–369.
Ph.H. Coolhaas, “Ontstaan en groei,” in Wij gedenken. Gedenkboek van de Vereniging van ambtenaren bij het Binnenlands Bestuur in Nederlands-Indië (Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1956), pp. 62, 70–71. The Dutch words are kinderlijk and kinderachtig (translated as childlike).
Hendrik Colijn made the actual statement; see the discussion in Bernard Dahm, Soekarno en de strijd om Indonesië’s onafhankelijkheid (Meppel: Boom, 1964), p. 341.
For a detailed analysis of Van Wulfften Palthe’s writings, see the conference paper of Hans Pols, “The Hordes and the Disappeared Totem: A Psychoanalytic Commentary on the Indonesian Struggle for Independence,” University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004,
and Frances Gouda, “Languages of Gender and Neurosis in the Indonesian Struggle for Independence, 1945–1949,” in Indonesia (Cornell University Southeast Asia Publications), Vol. 64 (April 1997), pp. 45–76.
Tan Malaka, Tan Malaka, In Helen Jarvis, ed., From Jail to Jail, 3 Vols (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), Vol 1, p. 45. Helen Jarvis translates this comment as follows: “Every lazy good-for-nothing schlemiel who came to Deli from the Netherlands had hopes of becoming a Tuan Kecil, a prospective Deli capitalist.”
Soetan Sjahrir, Indonesische overpeinzingen (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 1945), p. 165.
P.M. van Wulfften Palthe, Psychological Aspects of the Indonesian Problem (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1949), pp. 39–40. For a Dutch-language publication on the same issues, see Over het bendewezen in Java (Amsterdam: F. van Rossen Uitgevers, 1949).
Van Wulfften Palthe, Psychological Aspects, p. 42. For the psychoanalytic background of Van Wulfften Palthe’s analysis, see Sigmund Freud, “Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process,” as discussed by Philip Rieff, ed., Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York, 1963), pp. 209–213. Freud had written in 1925 that in women such a derangement of the superego had different implications, because a woman’s “superego never becomes so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins” as a man’s, quoted by Gay, Freud, p. 516.
Benedict R. O’G Anderson, “The Language of Indonesian Politics,” in Language and Power. Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca/London, 1990), pp. 123, 139–140.
Piet Korthuys, In de ban van de tropen (Wageningen: Gebr. Zomer & Keuning, 1947), p. 204.
Van Wulfften Palthe, Psychological Aspects, pp. 3, 43–45; Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Virgin Mother, Beloved Other: The Erotics of Tamil Nationalism in Colonial and Post-Colonial India,” In Thamyris: Mythmaking from Past to Present (1997), elaborates on Ibu Pertiwi’s counterparts in India, embodied in Bharata Mata (Mother India) and regional emblems of what she calls “language/nation/mother,” such as Tamilttaay (Tamil Mother), vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 9–39.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Archaic Illusion,” In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 84–94 and 97.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View From Afar (1983; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 177.
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Gouda, F. (2009). Primitivity, Animism and Psychoanalysis: European Visions of the Native ‘Soul’ in the Dutch East Indies, 1900–1949. In: Damousi, J., Plotkin, M.B. (eds) The Transnational Unconscious. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582705_4
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