The Other

A meditation on how psychoanalysis, as the "only real discipline of the excessive," has an indispensable contribution to make in fathoming the "causeless hatred" of racism and bigotry that continues to plague the human species. Frosh cites both Lacan and Melanie Klein as theorists whose ideas seem so "breathtakingly mad" that their "continuing existence" can be explained only "as a sign or emblem of the wildness within," but he draws particularly on the work of Jean Laplanche and Judith Butler to propose that the other is formative of the subject, and hence should be accorded primacy both psychologically and ethically. Intriguingly, Frosh utilizes what might appear to be a relational premise to make a postmodernist argument that the consequent "ex-centric" location of psychic life enriches the subject but also-most notably under conditions of insecurity, oppression, and violence-creates an intense internal disturbance in which hatred of the other, felt to be entwined with the self, has a propensity to emerge