Epilogue

READING THE ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE, we are privileged to experience new ways of thinking about the many shapes of hate and hatred that plague the therapeutic process. The authors represented here have sanitized the intense affects surrounding hate, via various clinical, behavioral, and literary explorations into the early root systems found in instinctual, neuorobiological, intrapsychic, and interpersonal life, as did Kohut and his followers for narcissism and its emotional satellites. By focussing on the rewards and adaptive benefits of hatred, we see, regardless of the author's particular theoretical orientation, how affective bonds fueled by hatred may prove stronger and more resistant to therapeutic dilution that those attachments based on affectionate strivings.

Have we found an answer to why, as analysts, our hateful feelings appear more problematic than say our sexual, competitive, envious, maternal, guilty, or even dependent countertransference responses Winnicott refers to the detable proposition of “objective and justified hatred” and wonders how the analyst should manage this emotion, whether to bear it silently or find a way to communicate it to the patient. Again, why is our hatred any different from other seemingly negative or unfriendly feelings?

We are surprised when our patients assault us with claims about our unheimlich procedures and surroundings, the very same conditions that we so conscientiously invested with heimlich intent, assuming with minimal self-deception, that our goal was to create a safe, holding environment. In his paper on the “incanny,” Freud (1919) discusses this German term, heimlich, loosely translated as homely, familiar, native, as well as its opposite, unheimlich, which can be experienced as strange, foreign, uneasy, even sinister, or uncanny. Thus the analytic setting creates a stage on which scenarios from the earliest object worlds of both participants play out