Prologue

IT IS ENTIRELY FITTING that this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, one of the first appearing in the 21st century, should deal with hatred and its significance in human development. The 20th century saw two world wars and many minor wars, no less venal for their nationalistic aims and political rationales, which have bruised, wounded and/or exterminated countless individuals and devalued groups. Even though hapless victims of war and interpersonal violence suffer impoverishment of the personality and depletion of the spirit, the thirst for power, mastery, and revenge lives on in the minds and behavior of the winning aggressors and those who must take their only comfort in surrender.

As one of the emotions usually associated with aggression, hatred fascinates, alarms, and repels us. We hesitate to acknowledge it in ourselves, yet are surrounded by its aura in our daily lives. Who has escaped the pain inflicted by a child's hurled assault, “I hate you, Mom (Dad)!” And who has not felt the shame of feeling such a base impulse toward a colicky infant. What about the revulsion we experience at reading about the teenaged boy who murdered his accomplished sister, burned down the family home with his mother in it, and then blithely set off to return to college? President Clinton, in September 1998, remorsefully spoke of the effects of hatred, “The anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the desire for recrimination against people you believe have wronged you, they harden the heart and deaden the spirit, and lead to self-inflicted wounds.” And, those who loved to hate this last president of the century, would have claimed he spoke guilefully, without remorse.

The precursors of hatred arise from the infant's response to what William James (1890) called the “booming buzzing confusion” that assaults the infant's sensorium at perception's birth. The “stranger anxiety” evident as early as eight months indicates that the mental capacity to perceive differences in objects and organize