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IN THIS DISCUSSION I WILL COMMENT on two contributions in this volume: the theoretical paper by Shapard and Lichtenberg and the clinical presentation of Sister Mary by Lichtenberg. Shapard and Lichtenberg have questioned the traditional linkage between murderous hate and the aggressive drive. Their motivational systems view of development is one that eschews reductionism. The point of this model is that motivation, such as hating another person, is a complex phenomenon. A plethora of interacting forces contribute to the patient's behavior and experience. Their view is explicitly pluralistic in this regard and is in keeping with the fundamental psychoanalytic notion of multiple determination.
Freud himself had some serious doubts about the linkage of hate and the aggressive drive as well. In his 1915 paper “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” he noted, “The case of love and hate acquires a special interest from the circumstance that it refuses to be fitted into our scheme of the instincts” (p. 133). He noted that loving and hating were clearly not instinctual drives, but rather described attitudes that one person held toward another. Freud realized it was inappropriate to refer to an instinct as “hating” an object. To try to force his conceptualization into his theory, he concluded that it was the total ego that harbored feelings of hate toward objects. He postulated that the ego hated those objects that produced unpleasurable feelings.