This work looks at what has been said about prejudice, and what has remained unsaid. It examines this phenomenon, from the offhand slight to the full-scale war, and searches for an understanding that might take some of the strain out of difference. Surveying the study of prejudice since World War II, Young-Bruehl finds a history riddled with assumptions, generalizations, and cliches. The bok proposes a fresh start, and suggests an approach that distinguishes between different types of prejudicss, the people who hold them, the social and political settings that promote them, and the human needs they fulfil. Young-Bruehl draws on theoretical and clinical, historical and empirical literatures to show us prejudices from a variety of angles: there are those that help protect a group's identity (ethnocentrisms) and those that protect a group identity (ideologies of desire); there are prejudices as socioeconomics phenomena, attitude toward governments, products of historical periods, social mechanisms of defence, sexual fantasy structures, and puberty rites. Among the many forms of prejudice, Young-Bruehl pays particular attention to four - antisemitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia - which she exposes in their distinctiveness and their similiarities. The text never loses sight of the specific reality of prejudice, as victims and perpetrators experience it. It concludes with a tour of the mid-1990s, with victims of prejudice testifying to its forms and its effects in immediate terms.