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As many of the World's nearly 200 nation-states, including the Western Democracies, tilt towards Nationalism and autocracies, any and all attempts to bring clarity to such matters as intergroup hatred must be appreciated. For those people whose Weltanschauungen include some notion of the equality of humankind and a sense, as in the founding documents of the 250-year-old U.S. experiment in egalitarian governance, that all God's children deserve Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, this creeping towards Nationalism is both threatening and frightening. At the very least, it threatens our therapeutic World View which includes notions of both the healthy individual and the health-promoting polity and simultaneously sends signals to our fear-centers that light up when we are ourselves designated “the Other.”
As Henri Parens (2004) has argued, there are both benign and malignant prejudices. Early sanguine development requires sequential preferencing of ourselves, our family, our extended family, perhaps, and our concentric circles of community into which we are born or that we adopt as we become contributing members of systems of mutual concern and interest. All this lies within the bounds of healthy development and, indeed, most any clinician would be concerned by a new patient who arrived with only disdain for themselves, their family, their ethnic and/or religious group, or their Country. Parens' benign prejudice is a developmental necessity. Strozier (2004), as a close-to-home example, documents Heinz Kohut's penchant for denying his Jewishness in both act and word and reasons about how it may or may not relate to his choice to focus on Narcissism and the manner in which he interacted with colleagues.
It bears pausing for a moment to reflect on the non-linear connection between prejudice and Narcissism. Healthy narcissism involves a balanced preference for one's own self and one's tribe while pathological narcissism is manifest in either an exclusive preference an