Prejudiced people frame psychological distress as somatic, mechanical breakdown.

Evidence

Among the prejudiced subjects, even those who were patients at the Langley-Porter Psychiatric Clinic resisted psychological interpretations. In their initial interviews they stressed their somatic or physical symptoms—dizziness, tremor, fainting, breathlessness. As causes they favored particular external events—a death, an illness, a shock. They sometimes spoke of psychological illness as if it were a breakdown of a machine; as if some “part”—the nerves or the mind—had given way under external stress. Because the prejudiced man’s psychic equilibrium is founded heavily on repression one would expect him to avoid introspection and psychological inquiries. And so anti-intraceptiveness fits in with the total construction. The unprejudiced subjects tended to construe human life much in the manner of modern psychology. A man is his own fate. Very much of what happens to him is a consequence of his character. For those of us who have become addicted to psychological inquiry there seems to be a dimension missing from the prejudiced person; he lives his life but does not examine it. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 565

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how repression underlies the somatic-vs-introspective split in interviewing psychiatric patients.
• SEED: The line ‘he lives his life but does not examine it’ frames an essay on the clinical and political stakes of introspection — who can afford self-examination and who is denied it.
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that anti-intraceptiveness is not just a trait but a coherent defense structure — repression feeding a whole interpretive style — is genuinely dense.
• XREF: connects to: Privatized personal depression is being displaced by public political anger. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1506