Hatred of foreigners and purity--current aspects of an illusion. Social psychological and psychoanalytic considerations]

This study draws upon both Carlo Ginzburg's procedures for establishing and preserving (historical) evidence and Claude Lévi-Strauss' structuralist approach with its analysis of "primitive" mythologies to demonstrate that binary coding of the social domain is an all-pervasive structural principle. Heim's intention in this is to show that (present-day) xenophobia and racism are the products of a phantasm centering around the division of the world into pure and impure. The author brings into alignment collective fantasies about the homogeneity of the "body politic" with a form of primary narcissism which, if it is to preserve the illusion of original purity, is forced to externalize instinctual urges experienced as heterogeneous and unpleasurable and project them onto "foreigners" and things foreign.     

Mozambican immigrants to South Africa: Their xenophobia and discrimination experiences

We explored Mozambican immigrants’ lived experiences of xenophobia and discrimination in South Africa. Informants were 15 Mozambican immigrants (female = 7, male = 8) living in an informal settlement in Zandspruit, Gauteng Province. They completed open-ended written narratives on xenophobic and discriminatory experiences. Following thematic analysis, we identified three themes to characterise the Mozambican immigrants’ experiences of xenophobia and discrimination: (i) abusive attitudes, (ii) ethnic discrimination, and (iii) scapegoating. The Mozambican immigrants’ experiences of xenophobia and discrimination are consistent with findings from the extant international literature on ingroup/outgroup social strife with real or perceived scarcity of resources.     

Anti-semitism and Xenophobia*

This paper explores the link between anti-Semitism and xenophobia from a psychoanalytic prism. The author claims that anti-Semitism is a particular form of xenophobia directed against Jews, with some unique characteristics. She first introduces some basic notions about xenophobia, and then discusses the origins of anti-Semitism as they are viewed in early psychoanalytic thinking and in contemporary psychoanalysis. The article explores the nature of anti-Semitism in society today, and presents some reflections on the interplay between anti-Semitism and other kinds of xenophobia.     

Xenophobia and Tolerance Toward Immigrants in Adolescence: Cross-Influence Processes Within Friendships

To what extent do adolescents and their friends socialize each others’ attitudes toward immigrants? Can friends’ positive attitudes toward immigrants counter adolescents’ negative attitudes toward immigrants, and do friends’ negative attitudes decrease adolescents’ positive attitudes? These questions were examined by following a large (N?=?1,472) friendship network of adolescents (49.2 % girls; M _age?=?13.31 at first measurement) across three annual measurements. Selection and influence processes regarding tolerance and xenophobia were distinguished with longitudinal social network analyses, controlling for effects of age, gender, and immigrant background. Findings showed that friends’ tolerance predicted increases in adolescents’ tolerance and friends’ xenophobia predicted increases in adolescents’ xenophobia. Moreover, friends’ tolerance predicted a lower likelihood of adolescents’ xenophobia increasing. The current results suggest that interventions should distinguish between tolerance and xenophobia, as these appear to represent two separate dimensions that are each influenced in specific ways by friends’ tolerance and xenophobia.     

Understanding Evaluations of Foreigners in Modern South Africa: The Relationship Between Subjective Wellbeing and Xenophobia

Recent and recurrent violence against immigrants in South Africa highlight the prevalence of xenophobia in the country. Is there a relationship between attitudes towards immigrant sentiment and life satisfaction at the individual level in that nation? Life satisfaction could be a proxy for anxiety, social alienation or insecurity which may be driving xenophobic sentiment. Using data from the 2013 South African Social Attitudes Survey, this paper examines the relationship between attitudes towards immigrants and life satisfaction (measured using the Personal Wellbeing Index). The study focuses exclusively on the attitudes of the country’s Black African majority. Bivariate and multivariate analysis found that life satisfaction did not have a strong relationship with pro-immigrant sentiments. Objective measures of socio-economic status (such as educational attainment) did not have a significant relationship with attitudes towards immigrants. Although improving subjective wellbeing among Black Africans is a worthwhile policy goal in of itself, the findings of this study suggest that addressing xenophobia among this group will require focus on other areas. Intergroup contact, interracial attitudes and perceptions about the consequences of immigration were found to be stronger predictors of pro-immigrant sentiment than life satisfaction. There was some evidence of `outsider solidarity ‘in the study—isiTsonga speakers and members of the ethnolinguistic Black African minority were more pro-immigrant in sentiment than other groups. The implications of this finding on the study of pro-immigration attitudes are discussed in the conclusion.     

A Note on Variations in “Persistence” Test Score with Sex,Age, and Academic Level

Summary

Preferences for 10 foreign nations were assessed in 60 English children, and information about one nation (Germany) was elicited. Evaluations of the nations seemed largely more-or-less adequate approximations to a cultural standard, while information about Germany was sketchy and largely related to war. A previously reported curvilinear relationship between preference and knowledge was confirmed, significantly, among the Ss with the more reliable preference judgments.

The children were played a story set either in their own nation (England) or an unpopular nation (Germany), Their immediate apprehension of the story was unaffected by the setting. Recall after seven weeks, however, showed relative evaluative distortion, according to the national setting. It is suggested that such selective recall could occur in such a way as to provide apparent—but spurious—cognitive justification of early evaluative learning in the field of national attitudes.     

People,State and Civic Responses to Immigration,Xenophobia and Racism in the New South Africa

As a result of its political transformation, South Africa has become a victim of its own success, in that the shift in political power brought about a range of new discriminatory practices and victims. South Africa became a magnet for nationals from African countries who came to ‘the rainbow nation’ to share in the fruits of more stable governance and enjoy the benefits of a larger more dynamic economy, instead find themselves faced with xenophobia and racism. The aim of this paper is to analyse the development of immigration policy in post-apartheid South Africa in terms of the vulnerabilities and protections it has afforded migrants, as well as ways in which it has informed the behaviour of state officials from 1994 to 2008. It highlights trends and tensions surrounding immigration reform in the new South Africa and argues that legislation has made significant strides in informing the behaviour of high- and low-ranking officials in government and state departments but still has a long way to go.     

The illuminative function of the agent intellect

Thomas Aquinas argues that the agent intellect's function is to abstract an intelligible species from a phantasm. However, insofar as he claims that the intelligible species is not present in the phantasm, it is unclear how the agent intellect accomplishes this task. In this paper I explore two models of abstraction – the extraction model and the production model – suggesting that each fails to capture Aquinas’ understanding of abstraction. I then offer my own interpretation of the function of the agent intellect – the illumination model – by employing Aquinas’ comparison of the agent intellect to light. I argue that the agent intellect neither extracts nor produces an intelligible species, but rather makes the nature that is already present in the object intelligible by actualizing its passive power of intelligibility. This involves the co-actualization of partner powers in the intellect and in the intelligible object, and ultimately makes it possible to cognize a particular, material object in a universal way.     

Immigration as a Threat: Explaining the Changing Pattern of Xenophobia in Spain

Scenarios of economic crisis and rising unemployment have never been favourable to immigration. However, the desire to tighten up on immigration policy may also arise within the context of economic growth and a drop in the unemployment rate. This article aims to explain the changing pattern of xenophobia and immigration policy in Spain. Opinion polls run in Spain from 1993 to 2012 are analysed and supplemented with survey data from Eurobarometers and qualitative materials from the MEXEES and Living Together projects and the 2011 qualitative Eurobarometer. In line with Group Conflict Theory, the economic recession accentuates the image of immigration as an economic threat, with the consequent increase in xenophobia. However, economic booms in themselves do not determine the acceptance of immigrants. Longitudinal monitoring of public opinion data corroborates the fact that both the feeling of economic threat (Group Conflict Theory) and cultural threat (Social Identity Theory) depend on the perceived presence of immigrants, along with the image and attention paid to immigration in the media and political discourse.     

Exploring Perceptions of Xenophobia in a Sample of South African Employees

This brief report aimed to explore the perceptions of xenophobia within a sample of South African employees. Data on participants' views regarding xenophobia, related xenophobic violence and causes were collected from 127 respondents (males=43%, females=57%, with the majority of respondents being Afrikaans speaking=53% and white=68.5%). Responses were thematically analysed. Seventy-four percent of respondents did not approve of xenophobic behaviour. Only twenty percent of the respondents empathised with South Africans with xenophobia. Six percent of the respondents were indifferent to xenophobia. Participants considered having xenophobia to be related to unemployment, poverty, poor governance, a lack of education and involvement in crime.     

Global identification,xenophobia and globalisation: A cross‐national exploration

This paper explores the ways in which globalisation influences social identity. Combining a psychological social‐identity framework with sociological considerations regarding the contextual impact of globalisation, it tests whether global identification—that is, people's identification as global citizens—constitutes an inclusive category, negatively linked to xenophobic attitudes towards immigrants across countries and whether the actual country level of globalisation moderates the relationship between global identification and xenophobia. Unlike most psychological studies of globalisation, it draws its data from 124 national samples across 86 countries, with 154,760 respondents overall, using three different cross‐national surveys. Study 1 (International Social Survey Program National Identity Module III 2013; N = 39,426, countries = 32) evinces that while global identification is in fact negatively linked to xenophobia, the correlation is moderated by the country level of globalisation, countries marked by higher levels of globalisation exhibiting a stronger negative relation between global identification and xenophobia than those characterised by a lower level of globalisation. Study 2 (European Values Study 2008; N = 53,083, countries = 44) and Study 3 (World Values Survey 6; N = 65,251, countries = 48) replicated these results across other countries employing dissimilar scales for global identification and xenophobia.     

Our Relations to Refugees: Between Compassion and Dehumanization*

After the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–2016 European reactions to foreigners had come to the fore and we are seeing xenophobic political and populist movements become increasingly mainstream. The massive rejection of refugees/asylum seekers taking place has made their conditions before, during and after flight, increasingly difficult and dangerous. This paper relates current xenophobia to historical attitudinal trends in Europe regarding Islam, and claims that a much more basic conflict is at work: the one between anti-modernism/traditionalism and modernism/globalization. Narratives on refugees often relate them to both the foreign (Islam) and to “trauma”. In an environment of insecurity and collective anxiety, refugees may represent something alien and frightening but also fascinating. I will argue that current concepts and theories about “trauma” or “the person with trauma” are insufficient to understand the complexity of the refugee predicament. Due to individual and collective countertransference reactions, the word “trauma” tends to lose its theoretical anchoring and becomes an object of projection for un-nameable anxieties. This disturbs relations to refugees at both societal and clinical levels and lays the groundwork for the poor conditions that they are currently experiencing. Historically, attitudes towards refugees fall somewhere along a continuum between compassion and rejection/dehumanization. At the moment, they seem much closer to the latter. I would argue that today’s xenophobia and/or xeno-racism reflect the fact that, both for individuals and for society, refugees have come to represent the Freudian Uncanny/das Unheimliche.     

National Identity,Instrumental Identifications,and the Caribbean's Culture of "Play"

The ability of West Indians to have multiple identifications, "to play the field" yet sustain a strong personal, participatory national identity shows that in their own way they have achieved freedom of the human condition. And, not trivially, this freedom is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it reverts to their personal benefits and through that to real benefits to their islands. Evidence of such benefits are the steady flow of remittances and the money-spending tourism to the "home" country. On the negative side is the continued insularity and parochialism that prevents broader alliances of an enduring political type. Although good at coalescing for specific tactical and strategic ends, each island remains a "nation." The hope for a "West Indian nation" is as remote as it ever was.     

Race Dialogues in Group Psychotherapy: Key Issues in Training and Practice

Growing racial and ethnic diversity in the United States and globally requires culturally competent mental health professionals who can address ongoing racial tensions and experiences of racism and xenophobia. Attending to racial and ethnic issues and infusing race and ethnic dialogues in group psychotherapy can play a major role in addressing mental health problems, promoting racial harmony, and healing deep psychological wounds and trauma that are the result of racial tensions. This article describes seven key issues necessary to effectively address race and ethnicity in group psychotherapy.     

Primo Levi's loneliness: psychoanalytic perspectives on suicide-nearness

To elucidate suicide-nearness, the perspectives of the death drive and narcissism are applied to the writings of Primo Levi. Emerging themes are Levi's struggle to maintain his self-regard from his year as a prisoner in Auschwitz and onward, and his observations on xenophobia, violence, and the need for love. The gradual increase of depressive content in Levi's work is noted, as are his identifications with others who succumbed in the Holocaust or took their lives after surviving it. The conflict between the wish for peace and the need for love is seen as impossible to resolve under the threat of extermination and as reemerging in the prevailing sense of loneliness that Levi described.     

Bias and ignorance in demographic perception

When it comes to knowledge of demographic facts, misinformation appears to be the norm. Americans massively overestimate the proportions of their fellow citizens who are immigrants, Muslim, LGBTQ, and Latino, but underestimate those who are White or Christian. Previous explanations of these estimation errors have invoked topic-specific mechanisms such as xenophobia or media bias. We reconsidered this pattern of errors in the light of more than 30 years of research on the psychological processes involved in proportion estimation and decision-making under uncertainty. In two publicly available datasets featuring demographic estimates from 14 countries, we found that proportion estimates of national demographics correspond closely to what is found in laboratory studies of quantitative estimates more generally. Biases in demographic estimation, therefore, are part of a very general pattern of human psychology—independent of the particular topic or demographic under consideration—that explains most of the error in estimates of the size of politically salient populations. By situating demographic estimates within a broader understanding of general quantity estimation, these results demand reevaluation of both topic-specific misinformation about demographic facts and topic-specific explanations of demographic ignorance, such as media bias and xenophobia.     

Effects of country size and language similarity on international attitudes: a six-nation study

Linguistically similar neighbouring nations that differ in size are often asymmetrical in their attitudinal relations towards each other: Citizens of smaller nations tend to see larger nations as less likeable and less similar than vice versa. We hypothesized that the smaller nations' reaction is the consequence of a threatened identity due to its relative size combined with too much similarity on a vital part of its identity, namely language. To test this hypothesis, 832 high‐school students from six different ethnic/national entities (France, Germany, Austria, the French‐ and German‐speaking parts of Switzerland, the French‐ and Dutch‐speaking parts of Belgium, and The Netherlands) completed a questionnaire on liking and similarity ratings. The results—to a large extent—showed that differences in size, in combination with linguistic similarity with another nation, pose a threat to the identity of the smaller nation or ethnic group. Differences in size, in combination with linguistic similarity, were associated with asymmetries in mutual liking on one hand and asymmetrical perceptions of similarity to the other country on the other hand. The conclusions of this study are consistent with findings of earlier research and stress the importance of language for a nation's identity. Moreover, the findings support social identity theory as a useful theory for understanding intergroup and international relations.     

Emigration,Nationalism and Church Identity in Europe: The Legacy of the German St Raphael Society in International Catholic Migration Assistance

At the very time that historians have pin-pointed a turn to hyper-nationalism in Germany, a nationalist German Catholic association for emigrant care (St Raphael Society) started its gradual transformation into an international support network. Migration as concept and reality reminded the German Catholic nationalists that a) the nation resides outside its political borders and b) one must show empathy for all strangers in strange lands. The article situates the Society within the context of the German Caritas Association and International Catholic Migration Commission.     

Incorporating Muslim migrants in western nation states – a comparison of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany

This article analyses how nation states respond to religious diversity produced by migration. Drawing on research results from a comparative macro-sociological study on the incorporation of Muslims in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, it is argued that both the claims of recognition and the modes of symbolic and organizational incorporation are shaped by varying institutional arrangements of political organization, collective identity, and religion. Yet recent convergences in the development of multicultural forms of incorporation and the inclusion of religion as a legitimate category of identity in the public sphere suggest that these institutional arrangements are equally transformed under the influence of transnational discourses of human rights.     

Forming Canada 's Ethnoracial Identity: Psychiatry and the History of Immigration Practices

Although most Canadians agree that theirs is not a perfect society, they see it as capable of perfection and take comfort in knowing that it is certainly better than most. The conservative implications of such a position are quite clear, and this is the basis on which we describe Canada as a nation in denial. It is a denial based on the myth of classlessness and general refusal to acknowledge the existence of systemic or structured inequalities along gender, racial, and many other lines. Our principal focus is the issue of racial inequality in the history of Canada 's immigration policies and practices, and we contend that denial is an intrinsic aspect of the national mythology of Canada as a benign, innocent country comprising the Great White North. We take a critical look at immigration entry restrictions that were aimed at ensuring a certain racial and ethnic purity in the new nation, what we call sanitization. To this end both the profession of psychiatry and psychiatric practitioners were enlisted. Thus, it was common to find that "lunacy and idiocy "were invoked as justifications for eliminating certain categories of potential immigrants. To this end psychiatry, eugenics, and "sanitary science "were closely connected, and their collective effect was to intensify boundaries of nation, citizen, and health. Social issues were transformed into personal defects associated with entire races through the use of terms like feeble-mindedness and degeneration. The seemingly unconscious infiltration of religious, color or moral polarities in the theories of the "new sciences "likewise became embedded in racist government policies, which served to inform the emerging national identity.