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Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has written a bold and important book of comprehensive scope, and she has done so with historical and psychoanalytic sophistication. She addresses a topic of utmost
concern to citizens of good will, and she treats this topic with full respect for its complexity.
For over 40 years Gordon Allport's (1954) classic work has been the definitive social psychological statement on prejudice. Mainstream social science has operated essentially within its outlines. Allport's main thesis, that prejudice is a singular social psychological structure with multiple roots and varied targets, is subjected to successful challenge by Young-Bruehl. Allport's prime examples, anti-Semitism and white racism, have both been subjects of extensive research and analysis, complementing, extending and filling in the Allportian thesis. Until recently, in the case of racism, however, African and African American perspectives were excluded. Such views now begin to provide a different outline (e.g., Gaines & Reed, 1995). Young-Bruehl reworks our understanding of anti-Semitism and racism but casts a wider net to cover sexism and homphobias (neither of which had even been defined at the time of the Allport opus).
Known to psychoanalytic readers for her definitive biography of Anna Freud, Young-Bruehl comes to this topic in the same progressive spirit as had Allport, Adorno and the Frankfurt school, and the social psychologists who followed them: social science is seen as having a meliorative mission, that is, one imbued with democratic values and aiming for progressive outcomes. It is clear to Young-Bruehl, as it must also be clear to us, that studies of prejudice have thus far failed to meliorate much. Black church burnings and incidents of gay bashing compete for headlines with rape and synagogue desecrations. The postwar American pragmatic resolve to erase prejudice has been reduced to rubble in the wake of the racially bifurcated reactions to the O. J. Simpson verdict and th