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VENGEFUL FEELINGS ARE COMMON ENOUGH. The many who have been hurt by others know all about them. And dramatists and novelists have scrutinized them incisively. There are more than fifty expressions of vengeance in about twenty of Shakespeare's plays. Usually they're characterized in analytic literature as a less than admirable form of retaliatory hostility, and as part of rage. In our modern age of enlightenment, with our popular expectation of loving connectedness, we seem to be embarrassed by their rise to consciousness. Perhaps the primitivity of the feeling accounts for its being so down-played pejoratively. We even have the Lord saying, "Vengeance is mine." To some, that kind of justice is too long-term for satisfaction. To others, for the short-term there is supposed to be a system for justice, which includes the police and the courts. But too often the judicial system is found wanting. As admonition, however, the quote from St. Paul suggests how uncomfortable we are with it.
Fromm (1964) comments that while rage results from wounded narcissism (p. 75), vengefulness is in inverse proportion to productiveness, and that the very process of being productive makes us relegate injuries of the past to the dustbin (p. 27). We do seem to feel more content when we assume its appearance is attributed to the more disturbed. Nevertheless, our vengefulness, like our shadow, is there, as any violation against children abruptly reminds us, and, in fact, we know it colors all our discussions of capital punishment.
Among the several references in Freud's writing, one (1918) mentions vengefulness as having remained unconscious in certain women who
still cling to their first husbands in a state of bondage, but no longer through affection. They cannot get away from them, because they have not