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This complex book addresses an important topic for psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century. In an increasingly globalised world, how do we come to construe human beings different from ourselves in racialised categories which, in turn, justifies seeing them, and treating them, as sub-human? While such issues may at one time have been judged as beyond the clinical domain of psychoanalysis, this is increasingly being questioned. The Western metropolis—the psychoanalytic heartland—has become increasingly multicultural and multiracial, and patients from minority ethnic groups sometimes feel that their racial or cultural identity is overlooked, presumably for defensive reasons on the part of both patient and analyst (Hamer, 2002). At the very least this reflects a difficulty in engaging with the reality of racial or cultural difference, and the appearance of a work that boldly addresses this problem is thus timely.
The question that underpins Dalal's enquiry is this: if the category of race is indeed an empty one, how does it come to present itself so persuasively as a suitable container for hatred of the other? The thesis of the book is that the processes of racialisation of the other are complex and pervasive; they originate in the external world of power relations and are instituted in, and perpetuated by, racialised thinking in the mind. Manifestations of racism that appear to have an internal origin—say, as a specific instance of hatred of