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In this volume, Ron Aviram has synthesized social cognitive psychology and our modern Relational psychoanalytic perspective so as to understand prejudice better. Examining an issue from more than one orientation is very close to the way I was trained in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard some 40 years ago. Aviram's scholarship once again demonstrates how such different areas of study can enrich our knowledge.
The author, beginning with a summary of the major themes of prejudice, presents the work of Freud, Adorno, Fromm, Brewer, Allport, Tajfel, and others. He makes sure that the reader can see the potential for overlap in these ideas, and his explications also set the historical context for the different viewpoints. It is also clear that Aviram is writing about the individual's experience of the large group and how important this is in understanding prejudice from a Relational perspective. For example, he criticizes Adorno's position that prejudice can be minimized by eliminating “the stereotypical ingroup-outgroup distinction and all that goes with it” (p. 148). Instead Aviram believes that one first identifies with the family, and then with the societal group, and that this is “necessary and unavoidable” (p. 16). Any individual can be placed on a continuum from overidentification to underidentification with the large group. Aviram's basic position is that “[p]rejudice occurs when there is a loss of optimal balance in the capacity to be an autonomous individual while experiencing belonging to the large group” (p. 5). He correctly credits Allport's