The delirious perception of migrants. Racism and mental illness

Abstract

In the face of an upsurge of xenophobic phenomena in Europe, the psychiatrist Massimo Fagioli analyses the historical and cultural roots of racism, as an expression of Western thinking based on reason and religion and develops the psychiatric interpretation of racism as a mental illness and “annulment drive”; stressing the necessity of courageous thinking able to face up to the irrational nature and the truth of human identity, as elaborated in his Birth Theory, in order to combat every form of racism.