The Freud Conference

The Stranger Within:
Identity, Otherness and the Dynamics of Hate
Every national and social identity is built partly through exclusion — through the
groups and qualities a majority casts outside itself in order to feel innocent,
coherent and secure. This year's conference asks how that process of 'othering'
begins, what it does to both the excluder and the excluded, and what might allow a
community to take responsibility for what it has assigned to the stranger. Our
keynote speakers bring clinical, cultural and civic perspectives to this question.