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There are many factors that cause people to look for a scape-goat, for someone to hate and blame; there are social and economic pressures, threatening and problem situations of any sort, and beyond all these there is the demagogic technique of organizing hatred against a minority group for some ulterior purpose. All these, I assume, are external factors with which psychoanalysis does not especially concern itself. On the other hand, the internal factors—the inferiorities, frustrations, hates, guilts and projections which people use as unrealistic solutions of their troubles and which make them hospitable to demagogic devices—these are matters of psychoanalytic cognizance, but while they are the ground in which anti-Semitism grows, I should not suppose that they present any very special features in connection with anti-Semitism. They fall into the general category of attitudes toward “other people,” and the more “other” (i.e. strange, alien) any group may be, the more readily they may be made the target for these attitudes.
I assume, therefore, that any psychoanalytic investigation of anti-Semitism would concern itself primarily with two questions:
What, as of now, does “Jew” mean in the unconscious of the non-Jew which makes the Jew specially available as the object of so much (and presumably overdetermined) hostility; and
What the the historical elements in the current culture which cause the Jew to have that meaning in the non-Jewish unconscious.
Presumably, a directly and positively psychoanalytic research would use, as data, only material produced in analysis by anti-Semitic individuals. But unless a great deal of that material is available, any study will presumably have to be largely speculative and interpretative.
I start with the suggestion that there is some correspondence between anti-Semitic and anti-Negro attitudes. On reading Dollard's “Caste and Class” I was struck by a point which I recall he made rather insistently but (so far as I remember) without his g