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Xenophobia is not recognized as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). However, the idea that racism and prejudice should be recognized as a mental health problem has been part of psychology since the 1920s or so, when the view that psychologists should minister to a ‘sick society’ first emerged. George Makari's engaging and spirited Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia is agnostic on the question of whether xenophobia is a mental disorder, although his book could be enlisted in that project.
Makari, an esteemed historian of psychoanalysis, provides an overall survey of the meanings attached to xenophobia, along with a cluster of related concepts such as intolerance, prejudice, stereotyping, racism, and anti-Semitism. Among his most interesting discoveries is the origin of the term ‘xenophobia.’ According to Makari, ‘xenophobia’ was first applied to the anti-foreign - anti-imperialist - Boxer Uprising in China in 1898 and only later applied to racial and anti-immigrant prejudice. This inversion - the application of the term to the West instead of the Chinese - is the key to Makari's central thesis: the charge of xenophobia should be applied not to others, but to oneself. The heroes of his book are figures like Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566), who denounced in graphic detail the atrocities that the Spanish conquistadores inflicted upon the native Indians, or Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), for whom the imperialist Kurtz, not his Congolese victims, is the real barbarian.
It is a great accomplishment to bring the idea of xenophobia to our attention, but there are two problems to Makari's large-scale survey approach. First, he does not successfully historicize the problem of xenophobia, even in a preliminary manner. As he points out, although the term ‘xenophobia’ is Greek, the term does not appear in the ancient world. In its place, of course, is the Hellene/barbarian distinction, which Makari believes was at least