[Psychoanalysis of historically foreign phenomena--exemplified by Sinti and Roma]

The xenophobia directed at Gypsies has received little attention from the psychoanalytic vantage. The author approaches the subject by drawing upon Freud's work on the uncanny and Fenichel's on anti-semitism in order to analyse the transformation of fear of the foreign into hatred of the foreign. With reference to the difference in significance between anti-semitism and hostility towards Gypsies as operative factors in the process of western civilization, the author argues that, like anti-semitism, antagonism towards Gypsies is based in the projection of unacceptable aspects of the self onto others, but whereas the anti-semite's unconscious fantasies of Oedipal hatred are directed at the world of Jewish fathers and father-sons representing civilizational progress, unconscious hatred of Gypsies is levelled at the mother-sons symbolising the archaic world, with their adherence to the pleasure principle of matriarchy and their corresponding evasion of the constraints of patriarchy.