Racism, Hatred, and Discrimination through the Lens of Projective Identification

The Kleinian mechanism of projective identification can provide us with a more detailed understanding of how racism, hatred, and discrimination work. Traditional sociological explanation has failed to address some of the central issues surrounding racism: first, the ubiquity of forms of discrimination and the affective component of hatred; second, the rapidity, as in the case of the former Yugoslavia, with which communities that used to coexist can come to hate and destroy each other; and third, the embodied and visceral content of much of this discrimination. And finally, traditional explanation ignores any psychological structuring of discrimination; in other words, explanation is sought in social structures rather than in psychological mechanisms that may provide the impetus for people to hate each other. We believe that there is a complex interrelationship between socio-structural and psychological factors. Both need to be addressed in parallel if we are to understand the ubiquity of racism.

Our discussion has two parts. The first part explores mechanisms identified by psychoanalysts—in particular, projective identification—which, we argue can provide us with a more useful account of discrimination and hatred. The second part looks at the work of Frantz Fanon and Slavoj Zizek through the lens of projective identification.

Klein argues that in the paranoid schizoid position there is a splitting of good and bad objects, with the good being introjected and the bad being externalized and projected out into someone or something else. In the depressive position, good and bad are no longer split, difference is reconciled, and the individual attempts to make good, to make reparation for the damage that has been done or has been phantasied to have been done. These notions have been developed by Kleinians such as Bion in the context of individual and group psychoanalysis, but have rarely been applied to racism, hatred, and discrimination. We are particularly interested in o