Xenophobia, War, and the Problem of Social Disorder: Keynote of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Rapaport-Klein Study Group

In Of Fear and Strangers, George Makari, MD, considered how different psychological models – behaviorist, cognitive, phenomenological – accounted for xenophobia, and in the end, considered psychoanalytic theories of projection to most clearly define the most intractable form of this problem. With ethnonationalism and militarism on the rise around the world, Dr. Makari wanted to explore the social conditions that fostered such projected hatred. For that, he turned to Einstein and Freud’s 1932 exchange, “Why War?”. In Freud’s brief letter, he proposed a model for collectives, in which the problem of self-defense and the risk of social disintegration were central. How, we might ask, does this model apply to our present?