ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that prejudice and violence are often linked with self-disgust reactions, which operate both on an individual level and also on a broader social level. It examines this using the psychoanalytic concepts of splitting, projection, and introjection, which are defences concerned with the interplay between the deepest, most primitive parts of the mind and experience of, and enactment within, the internal world. At its primitive level, Shand saw disgust as a physical impulse rather than an emotion; indeed, when the physical sensations are strongest, they tend to dominate the attention and any subjectively felt emotion may be absent. Unlike disgust, shame has received a great deal of attention within the psychoanalytic literature over the end of the twentieth century. Rather than just a primitive physiological response, shame can also be seen as a complex emotion, linked to the superego and operating as a dynamic, inhibiting the impulses of the id through the production of emotional pain.
