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“They’re gonna come and corrupt our children”: A psychosocial reading of South African xenophobia

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Abstract

This paper is interested in how psychoanalysis might be employed to interrogate xenophobia in ways that do not reinforce a social-psychological dualism. In particular, drawing on a contemporary attachment theory framework, the authors offer a psychosocial reading of interview material on xenophobia in South Africa to interrogate how and why prejudice escalates in a particular research interview. The analysis leads to a conceptualisation of prejudice in relation to a complex model of subjectivity that is always already constituted by our socio-historical relations and by the social unconscious, the disavowal of what happened ‘then and there’. This is also a subjectivity that relies on the other to become a self, with relational contexts fostering or curtailing the capacity to hold the other in mind through the capacity for mentalization. The limits and extensions of the psychosocial use of the concept of mentalization are briefly discussed.

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Notes

  1. While we acknowledge the socially constructed nature of ‘race’ and hence use single quotation marks to connote this, we continue to use such signifiers due to the way that much of South African society is still largely structured by racial categories.

  2. This name is a pseudonym.

  3. The racial classification ‘coloured’ in South Africa refers to someone of mixed racial descent.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the first submission of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Rhodes University, P.O. Box 94, Grahamstown, 6140, South Africa

    Lisa Saville Young & Nicola Jearey-Graham

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  1. Lisa Saville Young
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  2. Nicola Jearey-Graham
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Correspondence to Lisa Saville Young.

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Young, L., Jearey-Graham, N. “They’re gonna come and corrupt our children”: A psychosocial reading of South African xenophobia. Psychoanal Cult Soc 20, 395–413 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2015.47

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