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In this well-written and timely paper, Yasser Ad-Dab′bagh offers some psychoanalytic insights regarding Islamophobia. Ad-Dab′bagh is uniquely qualified for such an undertaking. He was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and spent a long period of time in Canada, where he trained to become a psychoanalyst. He has had the opportunity to see our literal and ideological globe from many sides: as a member of an ethno-religious majority and minority, as a foreigner and a citizen, as a linguistically distinct and linguistically syntonic person, and so on. The breadth of his vision is impressive and so is the scope of his psychoanalytic oeuvre. He cites analytic contributors from North America (Volkan, Akhtar), UK (Winnicott, Bick), and France (Chasseguet-Smirgel, Anzieu) with comparable ease and in a seamless blending of heuristic proposals. Ad-Dab′bagh′s ideas can be summarized in the following bullet points:
A “psychological skin” is created during formative years. It serves to create the sense of separateness from the generic Other.
In addition to this “containment function”, such skin also acts as a “cultural border” that establishes the sense of distinction from the cultural Other.
The former (self-sustaining) function evolves through the interaction of the early libidinal ministrations by the mother and the child′s ego-instinct based striving for coherence. The latter (self-defining) function evolves through the interaction of the father′s gaze and the child′s fantasies about him, his lineage, and his affiliations.
The “containment function” results in the clarity of “me” and the “cultural border” in the establishment of “we”.
Remarks and behavior that reflect racial and religious prejudice puncture the skin of the self and are experienced as attacks not so much on the “me” but the “we” aspect of the self.
Large-group psychology derived notions such as “ethnic tent” (Volkan, 1997) have limited applicability to dispersed, diverse, and leader-less minorities.
Under attack, the di