ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the obstacles in the path of developing an effective strategy for understanding and combating prejudice more generally, and attempts to answer the question why prejudice remains such a serious social problem and a threat to civil peace within many countries and regions of the world. The large psychoanalytic literature on the topic of prejudice and related matters provides analysts with an armamentarium in confronting prejudice in their clinical work, and in their understanding of its psychodynamic causes and development. The chapter suggests that the origins of prejudice from the multi-trends theory of aggression to the foundational relationship between mother and child, the formation of identity, and the generation of "stranger anxiety". Zionism was fuelled by a number of European influences, in addition to its roots deep within Jewish culture: there were Tolstoyan and Nietzschean impulses, Romantic and Enlightenment streams, Marxism and other forms of socialism, and psychoanalytic thinking.
