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Every community and those who constitute them define themselves in terms of their own symbolic register and against what they perceive as its antithesis. Sigmund Freud in his “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921) outlined his take on this after World War I. British psychotherapists, including some of his English followers such as Wilfried Trotter, appropriated a psychology of difference popularized by Gustave Le Bon to define the valorous “Tommy” crusading against the inherently evil “Boche.” And Freud was in those terms, indeed, a “Boche.” Freud, as was his want throughout his career, saw this antithesis as a universal rather than a national problem, as a psychological rather than a political one: “We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured” (1921, p. 100).
In his 1921 essay, Freud began with the claim concerning collective behavior that had long been established in the psychological literature of the late 19th century—that “a group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it.” But what he adds is that collectives “think in images, which call one another up by association (just as they arise with individuals in states of free imagination), and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable agency” (p. 68). For Freud this concretization of the crowd's fears is a problem to be overcome, but for him the irrationality of the fear of the Other is not “unnatural.” Is xenophobia an aberration or a natural phenomenon? Is it a problem that defines individual aberration or collective belief and action?
In the 1980s I argued (and I was not the first) that such splitting mirrors the process of individuation that the infant manifests, defining the “good” caregiver (our community) and the “bad” (the Others)