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Racial and ethnic prejudice is not a simple phenomenon. It is the complex result of multiple factors—cultural, economic, group psychological, and individual psychological. The socioeconomic factors, by and large, are beyond the competence of a psychoanalyst to elucidate. Psychoanalytic investigation can provide observations, however, that can help shed light upon the psychological factors involved in generating antipathy toward a particular racial, ethnic, or religious group.
Ackerman and Jahoda (1948), Bird (1957), Zilboorg (1947), and others have addressed themselves cogently to the psychological factors involved in prejudice and bigotry. They have emphasized the importance of problems involving narcissism and narcissistic vulnerability, aggression, hatred and self-hatred, identifications, identification with the aggressor, castration anxiety, superego defects, symbolism, and the mechanisms of denial, exteriorization, projection, and displacement.
This communication is extracted from a longer, forthcoming paper on the connection between symbolic expression of unconscious emotional conflict and racial prejudice. A clinical vignette will be shared that illustrates the way in which chance dovetailing between certain attributes of a particular racial group and key aspects of highly charged, conscious and unconscious emotional conflicts can contribute to the development of racial or ethnic prejudice in a young child.
Cora was just under four years of age when she startled her parents, neighbors, and nursery school teachers by suddenly expressing intensely negative feelings about Chinese people. She could not tolerate the sight of an Oriental person, nor could she bear even to hear of anyone who was Chinese. Everyone