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A “good news-bad news” sort-of communication is best started with the latter since doing so assures that matters will end on a cordial note. Allow me therefore
to begin with the weaknesses of Ron Aviram's book though, I must admit, wincing a bit since the author cites me quite affectionately. That said, I must proceed further. First among the weaknesses of Aviram's book is the ill-advised title of a chapter “The Relational Origins of Prejudice” in a book that is titled The Relational Origins of Prejudice. It makes the reader do the colloquial “double take” and wonder whether the other chapters are redundant. The next problem is Aviram's writing style, which has a peculiarly adhesive quality; a point that has been made is repeated over and over again.
His language also leaves much to be desired. An efficient copy-editor might have cleaned up things in this regard but it seems that Aviram lacked the benefit of such fine-tuning. As a result, one comes across grammatically sloppy sentences throughout his book. Aviram's declaration that “Freud's major statement about the relationship between the individual and the large group is written in his …” (p. 130, emphasis added), that “Erich Fromm was a colleague of Adorno and a part of the Frankfurt School …” (p. 17, emphasis added), and that “Kohut's perspective is not uncommon for clinicians who are oriented toward and expert with, individual and interpersonal dynamics …” (p. 89, emphasis added) constitute three examples. More can be readily given but the logically muddled prose of the following sentence should allay the need for any further evidence.
The founder of psychoanalysis, Freud, lived during a time in which individual prejudices associated with collective identities converged with societal conditions that unleashed the destructive consequences of nationalistic fervor during the First World War, and the hatred and aggression of prejudice as National Socialism emerged in Germany following that war. (p. 11)
Yet another