Prejudice: Complicit and Implicit

Abstract:

Prejudice could be defined as an irrational sense of superiority, an ironic expression of an unconscious feeling of inferiority that claims paradoxically that one human identity is worthier than another. Implicit prejudice would suggest the unconscious nature of a bias within an individual, whereas complicit prejudice would suggest a shared bias within a family, or group, or even a whole society. The two (implicit and complicit) are intimately connected, of course, and how they influence each other can be explored. The cultural disease called prejudice has been with us forever and there is no cure in sight. Psychoanalysis itself is not immune to it, and “physician heal thyself” must be considered, even as the psychoanalyst puts pen to paper. Prejudice is an expression of hatred that the science of psychoanalysis tries to study on the most granular level, so that each individual human ego can understand, possess, and embrace its barbaric animal nature without disowning, and attacking in the other, what it dares not see in itself and call its own.