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An intense religious prejudice erupted in the second year of an eight-year-old boy's analysis. It represented the conflict originating from externally exacerbated Oedipal conflict. He required treatment for continuous anxiety, numerous phobias, insomnia, nightmares, and intractable behavior. As the Oedipus complex emerged into consciousness, the wish to rob his father's penis for an incestuous relationship with his mother created such a fearful threat of castration that the entire conflict was projected onto God (the castrating father) and Jesus (the castrated son). He criticized God for doing what he himself wished to do. With insight he was able to accept and control his own wishes and fears and no longer needed to project them onto God and Jesus. The prejudice disappeared.
Psychoanalytic studies indicate that an unresolved Oedipus complex frequently underlies racial and religious intolerance (Cf.: Bird, Brian, The Etiology of Prejudice. J. Amer. Psa. Assn., V, 1957, pp. 490-513.). Such prejudice is manifestly an irrational fear that a racial or religious group will usurp one's own or his group's most cherished privileges and possessions, material or spiritual. This fear of losing something, be it money, status, prestige, or other, basically appears to be anxiety about being castrated. A suggestive confirmation of the sexual nature of prejudice is the ultimate cliché of racialism: 'Would you want your sister to marry one of them?'.