Tonight's subject represents one of the most complex, poorly understood, and puzzling problems in the lives of individuals in society and in psychoanalytic theory and therapy. The forces promoting, exaggerating, and perpetuating hostility are multi-faceted and interrelated. In our psychoanalytic thinking there exists a pervasive tendency to refer to hostility in an undifferentiated way, so that the term has become a catch-all, similar to for instance “psychopathic personality.”

In my discussion I shall use the term