In a quest for the central trigger of self-torment and vengeance on objects, melancholy, and compulsive neurosis, the author of “The Memory of Resentment and the Memory of Pain” homes in not on the conflict between love and hate, but on the ambivalent relationship between hate and resentment. Whereas hate is an essential component in separation and individuation and an important factor in the mourning process, presentment interrupts confrontation in the conflict of generations and inhibits mourning. This has repercussions both on the affected individual's subjective experience of time and on the configuration of the respective object relations. A central role is played here by retributional identification, in which the subject becomes the bearer of parental revenge impulses.