ABSTRACT
Racist populist movements depict immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and so on as enemies who threaten an imagined sense of community, values and 'way of life'. This chapter suggests that phantasies are evident in both the current social/political climate and experiences in the consulting room with some of the patients when they are temporarily under the grip of this way of thinking and feeling. The narratives of race hate have unconscious recurring themes that are ignited through inflammatory rhetoric and imagery, driving some of the murderousness of racism that people often witness in the society. Some of the reactions of the patient have a certain resonance in how racist states of mind emerge in society. This patient's feelings of bewilderment were accompanied by a cocktail of feelings that included a feeling of being robbed of her therapeutic home as she left it before the break that resulted in a puncture of her narcissistic phantasy, resulting in an injury.
