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A welcome development in contemporary psychoanalysis has been inter-disciplinary engagement. There has been such engagement from the beginning of the field, Freud himself drawing on the humanities and the sciences in the development of his thought and practice. Recently, there has been increased reflectiveness within psychoanalysis about the philosophical underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory and practice as the influence of hermeneutic philosophy, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism have been felt within the field. This self-critical tendency has joined up with efforts on the part of analysts and non-analysts to make explicit and rethink psychoanalytic presumptions about gender, sexual orientation, social class, and race that may reflect and reinforce oppressive social prejudices. This movement has led analysts, who previously might have unreflectively privileged the intrapsychic level of analysis, to note that the understanding of the psychological world is often skewed when account is not taken of larger social realities. It has become clear that psychoanalysis needs sociology, philosophy, and many other disciplines in order to counter these skews. But inter-disciplinary conversations raise the question of how to integrate different levels of analysis without reductionism. Are sexism, racism, and homophobia psychological phenomena that play out on a social stage? Or are they socio-economic-politically organized phenomena that infiltrate the individual psyche? Is there some way to take account of the psychic and social level in a way that respects the integrity of each level of analysis without making one level primary, the other secondary?
Farhad Dalal's book is a clearly argued and very valuable effort to bring the social level of analysis of racism into focus for a psychoanalytic audience. Dalal believes that the various psychoanalytic analyses of racism are all incomplete. For example, a psychoanalytic explanation of racism might say that white people us