Anatomy of Prejudices

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was a psychotherapist at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. She was the author of two well-known biographies, one of Hannah Arendt and one of Anna Freud, as well as other works including Freud on Women, Creative Characters, Mind and the Body (a collection of essays), and a novel, Vigil.

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 Prejudices is bold and profound. Along with Theodor Adorno's Authoritarian Personality, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, Gordon Allport's Nature of Prejudice and Gavin Langmuir's Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, it is one of the rare studies to explore this vexed topic with the conceptual ambition and passion it deserves.