Pragmatism, Psychoanalysis, and Prejudice: Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's The Anatomy of Prejudices

The Anatomy of Prejudices. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pp. 632. $35.00 h.c. 0-674-03190-3; $18.95 pbk. 0-674-03191-1.

The word "prejudices" in the title of this richly provocative book concisely captures its main claim: that prejudices (in the plural), such as sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism, are not the same thing. Young-Bruehl does not deny that they have commonalities (1996, 4), but she argues that they have been misunderstood by the majority of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and others who have assumed that prejudices can be unified into a single, root form of prejudice. This misunderstanding has prevented people from seeing how different prejudices fulfill different psychosocial desires and needs. This, in turn, has hindered attempts to eliminate prejudice, which require something other than a one-size-fits-all approach to be effective. As Young-Bruehl explains, "[a]ppreciating the differences allows the diagnoses--the differential diagnoses--without which there can be no cures" (5).

The Anatomy of Prejudices is divided into three parts. The first part, "A Critique of Pure Overgeneralization," provides a history of the treatment of prejudices in the social sciences in the United States, chiefly sociology and social psychology. The second part, "Starting Again: Prejudices--in the Plural," presents Young-Bruehl's typology of prejudices, focusing on anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism (and addressing, to a lesser degree, homophobia). Finally, the third part, "Current Ideologies: The Victims Speak," explores the effects of different prejudices on its victims, which Young-Bruehl claims have been either homogenized or ignored in most social scientific studies.

Young-Bruehl's typology makes a crucial distinction between ethnocentrism and what she calls "ideologies of desire." In her view, both are prejudices, but ethnocentrism is a group-sustaining, ready-made approach in which one values one's own group (however it is defined) over that of others, while ideologies of desire are tailor-made to create new groups on the basis of satisfying individuals' desires (1996, 167, 185, 562 n.17). Young-Bruehl implies that ethnocentrism tends to operate on a more conscious, or potentially conscious, level than do ideologies of desire, which involve "layers of feeling . . . that are deeper" than those of ethnocentrism (97). Perhaps because of its relative existence on the surface, ethnocentrism is more rationally grounded in reality than ideologies of desire, according to Young-Bruehl. It "is expressed in xenophobic assertions that have at least a tangential relation to the characteristics of real groups or subgroups, especially to those living separately" (77). Ideologies of desire, on the other hand, "are expressed in 'chimerias,' or fantasies that have irrational reference to [supposedly] real, observable, or verifiable characteristics of a group or marks of difference" (77).

In Young-Bruehl's view, the mistake made by most theories of prejudice is to take ethnocentrism as the universal model of all prejudice, when most modern forms of prejudice are ideologies of desire instead. I am not sure that a sharp distinction between the two models of prejudice will hold--from a pragmatist perspective, neither the difference between real and fantastic characteristics that produce rational and irrational references to them, nor the distinction between consciousness and the unconscious, can be considered absolute (on the latter point, see Colapietro 1995, 489). Even so, Young-Bruehl rightly insists that theorists explicitly recognize the role that unconscious desires and fantasies play in prejudice, rather than elide that role by treating all prejudice as a function of interchangeable in-groups and indistinguishable out-groups (1996, 17).

Young-Bruehl makes clear that the reason it is important not to collapse ideologies of desire into ethnocentrism is not a mania for proper categorization. Rather, it is important because different strategies for eliminating prejudices will be appropriate depending on whether the prejudice in question is ethnocentric or not. Assuming that all prejudices are ethnocentric has led to the...