Dynamics of Hostility

The subject for tonight's panel is a provocative one, but difficult to approach in a definitive manner. When I first thought about hostility and went to the dictionaries and the literature for definitions, I found myself at a loss.

There didn't seem to be clear distinctions among the meanings and usages that would differentiate the various categories of hard feelings and acts: hostility, aggressiveness, sadism, vindictiveness, rage, revenge, hate, coerciveness.

Meanings and usage often overlapped, and to add to the confusion the terms were used to describe both the feelings and the action taken on the basis of the feeling.

I was amused one day to read that the United Nations had similar difficulties and had abandoned its ten-year search for a definition of aggression.

While I was puzzling to find for my own clarification a meaning for hostility that would differentiate it from the other terms, I was helped in my thinking by the distinction made in the literature by Frank Brodman,¹ who said: “Aggression is the expression by word or set of a feeling of hostility.” I was reminded of a compulsive, assaultive patient who said, in a reflective mood, “Anger takes so many forms with me.” That rang a bell for me. This patient had just emerged from a lengthy siege in which she had run the whole gamut of the hard feelings and actions several times over, touching on all the variations and combinations, including, but not restricted to, vindictiveness, self-hate, rage, vengefulness, coerciveness, destructiveness, physical assault, and after a period of reflectiveness, which I was pleased and relieved to see, healthy assertiveness.

The hard feelings were directed primarily against herself, her husband, her daughter, and last but not least, me. Her self-hate was the result of an awareness that she was not living up to various aspects of her idealized image as the perfect woman, wife, mother, and analysand. Her vindictiveness, vengefulness, coerciveness, rage, and physical violence we