Anatomy Of Prejudices [Paperback]

In this deeply thoughtful book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl turns a critical lens on prejudice. Surveying the study of prejudice since World War II, Young-Bruehl suggests an approach that distinguishes between different types of prejudices, the people who hold them, the social and political settings that promote them, and the human needs they fulfill. Startling, challenging, and courageous, this work offers an unprecedented analysis of prejudice.Young-Bruehl argues that anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and homophobia differ in their internal logic (or illogic) and, more important, that they are deeply rooted in character structure and the unconscious. Accordingly, she finds the most convincing evidence about prejudices not in the questionnaires and projective tests favored by social scientists but in the writings of psychoanalysts, philosophers, novelists, critics and historians. Above all, she finds it in the writings of the victims of prejudice themselves...Her interpretations boast the familiar psychoanalytic virtues of richness, nuance and complexity: they probe to a psychological depth appropriate to the intensity and irrationality of the ideas in question...As an analysis of the sources of prejudice,The Anatomy of Prejudicesis bold and profound. Along with Theodor Adorno'sAuthoritarian Personality, Hannah Arendt'sOrigins of Totalitarianism, Gordon Allport'sNature of Prejudiceand Gavin Langmuir'sToward a Definition of Antisemitism, it is one of the rare studies to explore this vexed topic with the conceptual ambition and passion it deserves.Young-Bruehl is a perceptive observer. Her accounts of the preoccupations and qualities of psychological experiences that are revealed in different prejudices are useful and illuminating.No subject is of more importance than that of this book...[Young-Bruehl] wants us to concentrate on the plural of the word prejudice, as she does in her title; she wants us, thereby, to think of the different kindslƒ7