Dynamics of Hostility: A Panel Discussion

Our view of the dynamics of hostility is changing. The change reflects the basic transformation our concept of human nature has undergone in the first part of this century. Psychoanalysis for a long time saw hostility as an innate aspect of human nature, first, as accompanying certain phases in the development of the libido in the form of oral or anal sadism; later, after the first World War, Freud described “the tendency to aggression as an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man.”¹ Directed against others or the self, it was considered the expression of the ubiquitous death instinct.

Libido and the death instinct were seen as co-existing in a state of “fusion.” When was aggression and hostility released or—to use instinctivistic terminology—when did the “defusion” take place? The answer to this question brought a new factor into the foreground of psychoanalytic thought: frustration. This meant a step forward because frustration put beside the factor of the innate that of the environment with which the individual interacts and made it possible to conceive of hostility as a reactive, a secondary phenomenon. But what was seen as being frustrated? Libido. Energy is transferred from libido to the aggressive drive. Thus a preconceived theory limited the potential value of the new formulation.

In the holistic view of modern biology (Kurt Goldstein, Julian Huxley), man is more than a bundle of instincts; he is a living whole that interacts with the whole of the environment. In the dynamics of hostility are involved not only his relationship to the environment, to others, but also his relationship to himself. Only if we include in our consideration the intrapsychic, the motivation behind the phenomenon, can we avoid a confusion which, in my opinion, has up to now interfered with most attempts to clarify the dynamics of hostility.

The confusion, I believe, is based on two misleading equations. The first one is: hostility equals aggression. But hostility is by no me