ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the phenomenon of prejudice from a different angle. Using Winnicott’s understanding of “basic trust” transposed into a social context, it argues that a prominent characteristic of discrimination is that it undermines “basic trust”. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Fear Eats the Soul serves an illustration of how racism has an impact on the addressee’s fundamental relation to, and sense of, self and surrounding others, his or her orientation in the world. The chapter argues that prejudice and discrimination reveal the need to situate a moral phenomenology of trust in terms of the dynamics of power differentials between the representatives of different socially defined positions. It also argues that what is performed in racist assaults and discriminatory practices is an undermining of “basic trust” as conceived on a social level. This argument points towards a problem with regard to identification.
