Politics of Fear versus Global Anxiety: A Critical Analysis of Recent US Anti-Immigration Policies from Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

Applying selected psychoanalytic constructs from Freud and Klein to recent pervasive rhetoric around anti-immigration in the United States, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of media and policy representations of immigrants in recent news coverage in the United States regarding the Trump Administration's response to (1) asylum claims related to domestic violence and gang violence and (2) undocumented immigrants. We illustrate how feared bad object/immigrants are constructed alongside the imagined good object/nationalism, as exemplified by Trump's motto – "Make America Great Again" (MAGA). We argue how this paranoid-schizoid position reifies racism veiled under nationalism and discuss how social workers could work together toward the depressive position re-imagining America-as-the-whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]