Stereotypes and Projective Mechanisms: Forging Links Between Psyche and Culture

Abstract

In his introductory essay to Difference and Pathology, Sander Gilman writes: The models we employ to shape the stereotype are themselves protean. As we seek to project the source of our anxiety on the objects in the world, we select models from the social world in which we function. The stereotypes are thus neither ‘random’ nor ‘archetypal’. It is evident that stereotypes are not random or personal; nor is there some universal soul, a black box that generates these categories of difference. Every social group has a set vocabulary of images for this externalised Other. These images are the product of history and of a culture that perpetuates them. None is random; none is isolated from the historical context.1