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Anyone who has hated or who has worked with someone who has hated will find this book provocative and potentially useful. It is a difficult and intelligent collection of fourteen essays by various authors who the editor hopes will renew psychoanalysts' interest in some of our more common prejudices and social trends. The book is not about blaming a dysfunctional world; rather, its subject is the internal sources of hate that are abundantly reinforced by an external climate of toxicity that appears undiminished despite advances in many social assumptions and endeavors.
Affect regulation, once subsumed under the rubric of the autonomous ego functions, is now a topic of its own for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of many persuasions. Given our daily news, hate is an affect that could undoubtedly use more widespread regulation, but first it must be understood. It may not be easy to sit so long, reading so much about hate, but these essays place new emphasis on our aggressive impulses and devalued objects.
In the editor's introduction, Donald Moss, who has other essays in the collection, lays the groundwork for the hypothesis that a way of managing unbearable identifications and yearnings is essentially to renounce them by converting “I want” or “I fear” first into “I hate” and finally into “We hate.” The reader is thus challenged from the outset to