Identity, Home and Asylum: A Psycho-Social Perspective

This paper explores through a psychoanalytic perspective the construction of ‘whiteness ’ vis-à-vis Others in contemporary Britain. It is a tentative theoretical exploration of the subject of a three-year research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom. The nature of immigration and asylum has changed over the past decade and different forms of hostility have arisen. Hostility now seems to have shifted to access to welfare, rather than simply employment. Processes of racialisation are more locally contingent and have become more dependent on the perceived presence of asylum seekers and the intense projective identifications between individuals and groups. This runs hand in hand with a growing suspicion of the state. In this paper we explore the implications of this for contemporary identity construction, in particular the way in which ‘white ’ Europeans ‘other ’ other Europeans, and the way in new stereotypical discourses of racialisation are emerging which abound with projective identifications. So several strands of thought and questioning emerge in this research project. First, and this is the bigger research question, the way in which white identities ar