A Psychosocial Approach to Racism and Ethnic Hatred

I am prompted to write this article as many social scientists become disillusioned with their discipline and look toward new ways of knowing at the start of the 21st century. Because of the failure of sociology to explain outbreaks of violence and ethnic hatred around the world, there is a growing interest in psychosocial studies amongst the academic community in Britain. For example, after the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, how was it possible to end the 20th century with the horror that was Kosovo and the brutality in Sierra Leone? This paper discusses how we might start thinking about ethnic hatred and racism—psychosocially.

Structure and affect, society and psyche are inseparable in terms of the explanation of social phenomena. The psychosocial method links structure and affect in a way that sociology, psychology, and social psychology have been unable to separately. In psychosocial research there is an emphasis on the psychodynamic—individual, group, and societal—with a focus on the psychological mechanisms that we use to “think about,” “make sense of,” and “exist in the world.” The psychosocial approach is therefore about the way in which the historical, political, and social interact with the psychological. Psychosocial studies are, or should be, truly interdisciplinary.

It was a second or third reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1983) that stimulated in me an interest in psychoanalytic theory. Initially, Conrad’s work seemed an adventure which unfurled into a critique of the cruelty, greed, and senseless barbarity of colonialism in which “white” is the root of all evil in the colonial darkness. A further reading revealed a very different journey, a journey into the unconscious, the unknown, the heart of darkness. A place of imaginary fears and enemies, of fantasy. It is a journey into our psychological pre-history.

In the Introduction to this edition of Heart of Darkness, it is argued that “the darkness is a deeply suppressed inner anarchy which is impossible to comprehend, or explain, and better not to imagine.” I disagree, and feel that it is because of this rejection of the inner world that sociology has failed to explain racism satisfactorily. Indeed, it fails to address three of the central issues surrounding racism. First, the ubiquity and the affective component of hatred. Second, the way in which people, as in the former Yugoslavia, who used to co-exist in communities can come to hate and destroy each other so rapidly. And, finally, the fact that sociological explanation ignores any psychological structuring of racism. I believe there is a complex interrelationship between socio-structural and psychological factors that provides the impetus for people to hate each other.

In a previous paper (“Racism, Hatred, and Discrimination Through the Lens of Projective Identification,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 4(2), 1999, pp. 158-161), I outlined how I thought that the Kleinian concept of “projective identification” can give us a better understanding of the psychodynamics of racism—how we “think” about others, “feel” about others, and, most importantly, how we “make others feel.” Whereas projection per se can be a relatively harm-

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less process, projective identification involves a deep split, a ridding of unpalatable parts of the self onto some other, forcing the other to feel the way we feel about them. I often quote from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1968) as an example: “The white man has woven me out of a thousand details. I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, [and] slave ships” (p. 112). The black person lives the projections of the white construction of “otherness,” trapped by projected fantasy on one hand and by historical, economic, and political processes on the other.

A starker example of the fusion of structural and psychological factors can be seen in Paul Hoggett’s “A Place for Experience: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Boundary, Identity, and Culture” (1992), a study of white people’s resentment of Bangladeshi communities in London. Tower Hamlets is a multiracial area in London that has suffered massive social dislocation and poor housing. A series of stabbings led to tension between the white working class and Bangladeshi communities. The improvement of homes by the introduction of double glazing and central heating led to a cockroach infestation. Despite clear evidence that the infestation was due to the improvements made—an increase in temperature favorable to cockroach breeding and miles of conduit enabling the roaches to reinfest treated housing—it was attributed to the target of the projection and the cockroach came to symbolize the Bangladeshi community.

These are but two examples of a growing literature and interest in psychoanalytic or psychosocial explanation. Racism and ethnic hatred can only be understood in terms of both structural and psychological factors. This, of course, is a rather simplistic hypothesis. The dynamic is more complex, an interrelation between outer and inner worlds, between historical, political, and social circumstances and that deep, raw emotion that is the heart of darkness. Racism is a particular form of “otherness,” imputed in biologic/racial inferiority and based in fantasy.

Fantasy has been played out and legitimized by pseudo-science in the form of Social Darwinism: because science is a form of containment, if we can classify “otherness,” we can contain it, control it, and use it. Crucially, psychoanalysis can help us understand why we feel this need to hold, contain, persecute, filter, and cleanse difference. “Race” is a socially constructed container through which we project our “inner” world onto others. Others are a psychological manifestation of our fear of difference and psychic disorder.

It is the communicative aspect of psychoanalysis that interests me as a sociologist. In particular, the work of Melanie Klein and the object relations school can help us explain the way we think and feel about others, and, crucially, the way we make others feel. The concepts of splitting, fantasy, and projective communication can help us understand the motivation behind racist or discriminatory behavior. I place a considerable emphasis on projective identification and argue that it is a significant communicative dynamic which lies at the heart of racism and ethnic hatred. It is in this area that the current sociological literature is sadly lacking in explanatory power. Psychosocial research can provide insights into the affective mechanisms at work in society and fill in many of the gaps left by sociological explanation.

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