Hoe vreemd zijn ons onze superioriteitsgevoelens? Notities bij het boek Fremde und Zivilisierung van Hans-Peter Waldhoff

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How Foreign to Us Are Our Feelings of Superiority? Notes on the Book Civilization and the Foreign by Hans-Peter Waldhoff. Hans-Peter Waldhoff's Fremde und Zivilisierung ([Civilization and the Foreign] 1995) illustrates several social and psychological processes central to the idea of the state, and addresses the differences between one's perception of the foreignness of others and one's self-alienation in terms of repression, pretense, and other forms of anxieties. Most of Waldhoff's research deals with interethnic relations between natives and Turkish immigrants in the Federal Republic of Germany. He demonstrates that authoritarian personalities dominated by a superego use psychological mechanisms in dealing with the category of alienation within one's self, which are analogous to patterns used to cope with the concept of the alien in social processes. His most important contribution is his distinction between two levels of civilization: the discipline and the informalization phases. Implications for immigration policy in advanced Western countries are discussed. 9 References. M. Meeks