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How can we understand the fact that racism is as prevalent as ever even though there have been so many attempts, historically and culturally, to minimise or eliminate it? This is the question Dr Stanley Gold asks himself in his book Unthinkable Evil: Understanding Racism.
I would like to thank Gold for contributing to the discussion of how we can understand racism from a systems psychodynamic point of view and for raising the question of humanism in relation to racism. In this review I will present his main arguments in the book but also try to bridge the discussion he raises about the challenges of humanism in the light of racism with the Bulgarian French psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva's thoughts on the necessity and possibilities of developing a new humanism that will take our relation to the other as its point of reference.
Gold's answer to the question why racism is as prevalent as ever is that racism and xenophobia are individual and social attempts to deal with what Gold, in line with Melanie Klein's psychoanalytical thinking, believes is our primary feeling, anxiety. As he states, “there seems to be credible evidence that racial and similar attitudes indicate more than preference and more than can be understood purely on the basis of environment” (p. 81).
The topic of racism in relation to the psychoanalytical understanding of the other has been something Gold has been concerned about since his 1985 article in the International Review of Psychoanalysis, “Frankenstein and other monsters”. The book Unthinkable Evil is a summary of how he has come to understand how we think about racism. In the book he concludes that racism is a cultural phenomenon that is closely related to the earliest development of the human mind and by this almost escapes our ability to think. Drawing on Kleinian developmental theories he argues that racism and xenophobia stem from our primary imaginary inner world. The aggressive feelings as we experience them in