In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Hypatia 16.1 (2001) 108-111



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

The Anatomy of Prejudices


The Anatomy of Prejudices. By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

In The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996), Elisabeth Young-Bruehl critiques and synthesizes many approaches to understanding prejudices, thinking always for herself but also, interestingly, in the company of the two women whose biographies she has written--Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud. In quite Arendtian fashion, Young-Bruehl conducts politically focused historical analyses [End Page 108] of antisemitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. She also does a historical/political analysis of earlier studies of prejudice, showing them often caught in the same tangles as their subject. Informed by psychoanalysis, she proposes as the centerpiece of this work "spectrums or continuums of three sorts" of character types (207): obsessionals, hysterics, and narcissists.

Young-Bruehl rejects the common idea that prejudice is a symptom of a unitary psychological phenomenon that adventitiously selects multiple objects. She writes, "Our cliched public discourse about prejudice virtually forbids . . . differentiation and nuance. Consequently, it virtually forbids inquiry into the different needs that different prejudices fulfill for different types of people in different social conditions" (4). Her own contextualized psychoanalytical method makes possible an articulation of intrapsychic development (within which she emphasizes adolescence) with political situations that provide opportunities for the externalization of adult psyche-driven needs. The bulk of the book then explores variants of the prejudices in relation to her characterological types, producing a highly nuanced and complex "map" (39) which Young-Bruehl invites us to use, but also to keep adjusting as we explore the specificities of real situations no schematism can adequately capture.

Engaging Prejudice Studies literature, she broadly distinguishes two large categories of prejudices, "ethnocentrisms" and "ideologies of desire," the latter of which she names "orecticisms," from the Greek orektikos, "desirous or pertaining to the desires." Ethnocentrisms she defines as defenses of identities that re-create real groups of people as "others," "not me," "not us." These prejudices, commonly conflated into an essence of prejudice, are not Young-Bruehl's focus. Her interest is the orecticisms in which defensive needs of psyches come together with particular circumstances and pre-existent ethnocentrisms to produce the most virulent (and psychologically complex) of the prejudices--for example, as racial thinking is transmuted into essentialized racism, or anti-Judaism into antisemitism (199). Prejudices in general, she says, are, "unfortunately," "produced by normal people," whom "they often help. . . . control their impulses, regulate themselves, balance the conflicting agencies of their psyches," and so are available to "psychotic people [for whom] prejudices are part of the psychosis" (209). The point seems to be, then, not solely whether a psyche is in touch with reality as it is "normally" experienced at a particular time and place--since prejudices are part of the fabric of social meanings people can acquiesce in--but what the psyche does with such realities and to what extremes of redefining them it goes. The ethnocentrisms, while akin to the orecticisms, are more passive: "ready-made, off-the-rack" (167), such as sexist stereotypes, while the orecticisms are more actively creative (distorting): "rough cut [prejudices] that people tailor to their own configurations as they look for kindred spirits" (167), such as religious views of sinful homosexuality transmuted into an organizational ideology depicting [End Page 109] "queers" as a powerful cultural cabal. Thus, however primal and of the unconscious, orecticisms, too, engage with particular historical conditions and frames of meaning. Those that have been so deadly in modern times, Young-Bruehl argues, "presuppose specific modern conditions" (28): centrally vast and "ferocious" economic changes; "pseudoscientific tools" that rationalized and justified hatreds; laws and other institutionalizations of pre-existent discrimination.

This bridging of individual, social, and political analyses is both a remarkable achievement and productive of genuinely useful insights into recurrent patterns we desperately need to be swifter at recognizing and opposing. Nevertheless, evidence of expressions of prejudices (which can be checked against multiple records), and descriptions of the character types (which are theoretical constructs within the discourse of psychoanalysis), may coincide here too neatly. I am not convinced that coincidence constitutes proof...

pdf

Share