By 2016, xenophobia resurged internationally. Psychiatrist and historian George Makari chronicles the concept’s rise, from its popularization to its spread as an ethical principle in the wake of a series of calamities that culminated in the Holocaust, followed by its sudden reappearance in the 21st century. Synthesizing history, philosophy and psychology, Makari offers insights into ideas such as the conditioned response, the stereotype, projection, the authoritarian personality, the Other and institutional bias. In the end, he seeks to offer a unifying paradigm by which we might more clearly comprehend how irrational anxiety and contests over identity sweep up groups, leading to the dark headlines of division so prevalent today.
George Makari, M.D., is director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is guest professor at Rockefeller University and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. His book, Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Prejudice Award.
He is also the author of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, a 2015 Guardian Best Book of the Year. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Boston Globe. He is a graduate of Brown University, Cornell University Medical College, and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center.
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