A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Dehumanization1

To briefly address the vast and urgent topic of dehumanization, I will begin with an overview of work by David Livingstone Smith, a leading interdisciplinary scholar of dehumanization, and think about his ideas psychoanalytically. Smith's (2021, 2023) definition of dehumanization is the “attitude of conceiving of others as subhuman creatures” (2023, p. 757). This is a relatively narrow definition that makes dehumanization distinct from related phenomena, such as prejudice. In prejudice, psychological needs are met by imagining others as lesser humans. Smith's definition is an attitude of conceiving of others as subhuman creatures.

Working with this definition, we can start first with the word attitude. Smith (2021) emphasizes that dehumanization is a state of mind, not a set of behaviors.2 The focus here is on an interior disposition, something occurring in the internal world that is operating in the realm of unconscious process, producing a powerful fantasy that is reality denying. While our cognition knows that all people are indeed people, and all humans are equally human, we can be induced into an attitude that some people are not human. This induction process, for Smith, occurs because of factors in the external world.

From his interdisciplinary perspective, Smith says that psychological insight about internal processes is necessary to understand dehumanization, but it is also essential to consider the social factors that facilitate the emergence and amplification of this interior attitude. Dehumanization exists at the interface between the complexities of the internal world and those of the external world. All of us have the potential