The, Future of Prejudice: Psychoanalysis and the Prevention of Prejudice. Edited by Henri Parens, Afaf Mahfouz, Stuart Twemlow, and David Scharff. New York:  Guilford Press, 2005,  256 pp., $70.00.

This book, which promises much, has six strong chapters: clearly written, they present innovative ideas or studies, advance our knowledge of the field, show an understanding of psychoanalysis, and raise additional questions to be pursued. Regarding the remaining ten chapters, I invoke the words of Martin Bergmann (2007), in his introduction to the IPA's collection of critical essays on “Mourning and Melancholia”: “These … do not read easily. … the reader has to carry a greater burden.”

Let us imagine that this manuscript had been sent to a psychoanalytic journal for a special issue. What might the journal's editor have said to the four editors of this collection?

Let us start with the strengths. These chapters include Fonagy and Higgit's application of attachment theory to the ubiquity of prejudice; Young-Bruehl's update of her ideas about prejudice studies and her framework of character types; Brenner's history of the development of anti-Semitism and its resurgence; Knowlton's observations on Mormon/non-Mormon relations; Twemlow and Sacco's field trials on diminishing prejudice in school systems; and Parens's observations about benign versus malignant prejudice in early childhood.

Fonagy and Higget begin with a classical psychoanalytic construct of prejudice: disavowal of aggression and sexuality, the need to manage the anxiety occasioned by these impulses, and the use of the defense mechanisms of displacement, projection, and projective identification. They cite Bettelheim's 1943 article on prejudice as a “precursor of acted-out aggression,” commenting that much that “seems to us current in psychoanalytic thought was already familiar to psychoanalysts between the wars” (p. 64). Ironically, neither they nor the other contributors cite the joint psychoanalytic/sociological study of prejudice in returning American G.I.'s by Bettelheim and Janowitz (1964), in which they identified four levels of prejudice in some 40 percent of returning “grunts,” the most severely prejud