Internal Racism and the Outside World
Posted: 21/11/09
he showed how centrally projective processes were involved in the Nazi mindset. Fenichel’s method was that of applied psychoanalysis, and he could not adequately account for the power that these mechanisms came to exert over the mind. Drawing on John Steiner’s conceptualisation of the pathological organisation, I present a clinically derived model of internal racism that shows how a hidden relationship between self and socially sanctioned racial other exists in the mind. I illustrate this through case material, and suggest that the capacity to set up and use such internal racist mechanisms exists in us all, and may be mobilised in the face of intense anxiety. I present a developmental trajectory, and end by considering how the capacity to take refuge in an internal racist organisation may have been widely aroused as Islamophobia (or hatred of the West), thus complicating our attempts to investigate and understand the terrorism and/or fundamentalism that is felt to threaten us all.
Posted by: ama
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