“They’re gonna come and corrupt our children”: A psychosocial reading of South African xenophobia

This paper is interested in how psychoanalysis might be employed to interrogate xenophobia in ways that do not reinforce a social-psychological dualism. In particular, drawing on a contemporary attachment theory framework, the authors offer a psychosocial reading of interview material on xenophobia in South Africa to interrogate how and why prejudice escalates in a particular research interview. The analysis leads to a conceptualisation of prejudice in relation to a complex model of subjectivity that is always already constituted by our socio-historical relations and by the social unconscious, the disavowal of what happened ‘then and there’. This is also a subjectivity that relies on the other to become a self, with relational contexts fostering or curtailing the capacity to hold the other in mind through the capacity for mentalization. The limits and extensions of the psychosocial use of the concept of mentalization are briefly discussed.