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The topics discussed by eight psychoanalysts in this book are both diverse and complex and include infant and child observation, gender differences, group psychology, sexual and physical abuse, the social transmission of hatred, severe character pathology, multiple personality, racial prejudice, ethnic hatred, and war. The major focus of the book, however, is clinical, and the principal purpose of the book is to help clinicians to understand better their patients' hatred, as well as their own responses (including anger and hatred) to their patients' aggression, rage, and hatred.
In a chapter on parents' hatred of their children, Selma Kramer points out that wars are planned and plotted by old men who send their healthiest young men to wage their wars. She believes that men who have suffered abuse (hostility, indifference, constant criticism, and physical abuse) from their own fathers are unable to relate to their sons in a different way, and she provides case studies to illustrate this familiar intergenerational dynamic.
Harold Blum contributes a well-written, authoritative chapter (“Sanctified Aggression, Hate and the Alteration of Standards and Values”) in which he examines the individual and group dynamics predisposing to and sanctifying aggression and hate. By identifying with their leaders' exhortations toward hatred and violence,