Antisemitism: A psychoanalytic theory

Abstract

Antisemitism has been a persistent and growing prejudice for millenniums against the Jewish people. This paper offers a general theory of group hatred appliable to antisemitism and other religious or racial prejudices. Theories of prejudice tend either to postulate an internal psychic template of hatred that is projected or postulate a social origin of hatred that is internalized. Rather there is a dialectic where there is a reciprocal movement between internal and external. The tendency to hate and project is a part of the human psyche, here called internal racism. Anxieties which cannot be contained internally can be stabilized by large-group identity. When internal racism cannot be contained or the external social groups are weak, the result is pathological large-group formations. A distinction can be made between personal antisemitism in which the hatred is projected onto a known person and impersonal antisemitism in which hatred is projected into groups. A fairy tale by the brother's Grimm, “The Jew among Thorns” is used to illustrate a number of personal antisemitic attitudes. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged document that appeared in pre-revolutionary Russia, is used to illustrate impersonal antisemitism.