Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism by Simon Clarke Houndmills, UK, and New York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2003,  198 pp.

Simon Clarke has attempted in this book to augment sociological approaches to the study of racism with selected applied and clinical writings in the psychoanalytic tradition. Studies of race and ethnicity, and racism and racial violence abound in sociology in which structural factors—economic, political, social, and cultural—figure prominently. As a result of the eruption of the “post-isms” into sociology in the last two decades, sociologists have turned their attention to what they call “systemic racism” or the (unstated) background assumptions that build racist practices into our social structure, even without conscious racist motivations or intentions—a kind of racism without racists—which exists in spite of the conscious anti-racism of the individuals operating within these institutional structures. There is, however, according to this author, something lacking in these sociological studies on racism: the “affective component of hatred.” Moreover, sociology has not been able to account for the rapidity with which racism and racial hatred can seize hold of a society (e.g., the recent disintegration of Yugoslavia). Psychoanalysis, Clarke suggests, provides the bridge between the inner and outer worlds, a bridge that is missing in sociology. Even the best sociological treatments of racism,