M. Fakhry Davids is a London-based psychoanalyst who maintains that negative feelings toward members of a different race are actually feelings of revulsion against disavowed aspects of the self that are so unbearable that they have been displaced or "projected" onto others and thereby hidden from conscious awareness. Davids designates the recipients of these projections "racial others," a term that he acknowledges to be "arbitrary and inacccurate since social stereotyping is not confined to race alone," but which he prefers to use rather than invent a new term. He thus uses the term "racism" to encompass religious, class, and other strains of social stereotyping because it "evokes a plethora of meanings" that he considers necessary to remain in the foreground throughout his analysis.
Because racial others are so frequently the targets of such projections, Davids suggests that this unconscious social stereotyping may be a universal strategy that begins at a specific developmental stage in order to cope with internal conflicts of a specific type. Davids holds that this unconscious stereotyping is a special case of a defensive strategy known in psychoanalytic theory as "projective identification."
Projective identification is a concept first put forth by child psychoanalyst and theorist Melanie Klein (1882-1960). Klein believed in the primacy of early breastfeeding experience as an influence on personality development due to the intensity of the feelings evoked in the infant, from security and wholeness following an uninterrupted feed to panic and rage when the infant's desire to nurse is unsatisfied. According to Klein, in the beginning the infant does not have a mental representation of the mother as a whole being but instead conceives of her in terms of her constituent parts, with the most salient part being the breast. Klein believed that the infant retaliates against the mother for withholding the breast with both physical attacks, such as biting and "'vampire-like' sucking" and imaginary attacks, including the desire "to fill her body with the bad substances and parts of the self which are split off and projected into her." Klein held that one of the earliest developmental tasks for the infant is to "split" this internal representation of the mother in two: a "good," gratifying one and a "bad," withholding one. By "severing love from hate" the infant can keep the now-idealized "good" maternal object away from the attacks on the now-excessively hated "bad" maternal object.
There is a price to pay, however, for the release afforded by these attacks. The infant now dreads retaliation from "the object into whom badness (the bad self) has been projected," and which has now become "the persecutor
par excellence, because it has been endowed with all of the bad qualities of the subject." This cycle of distress, projection, and fear of retaliation by an other filled with one's own projected bad qualities forms the basic structure of projective identification, a process that eventually becomes unconscious, while others ultimately come to take the place of the mother in the scenario.
When the other who is enlisted to perform this function is a member of a racial "out" group, racist attitudes take hold and, Davids believes, an internal racist organization eventually becomes fixed in the personality. This dynamic of over-idealizing and protecting the "good" from a vilified and feared "bad" is evident in racism and is one of the features that distinguishes it from mere "competition for resources" or fear of the unfamiliar and lends support to Davids's contention that projective identification fuels racism. Why, then, does the unconscious seem to gravitate to racial others as its target?
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