Prologue: Politics and Hate

Several years ago, I attended a psychoanalytic reading group at the home of a fellow analyst. Walking up to the house, I saw on her front lawn what was then a common yard sign, proclaiming “Hate Does Not Live Here.” I found this enormously funny and upon entering the house shared my amusement with the host that she was likely the only psychoanalyst who believed that there was no hate in her house.

The humor (such as it was) stemmed from the juxtaposition of, and displacement between, two referents. There is, on the one side, the familiar political context, the particular forms of hate, that we know prompted these signs. On the other, there is hate as an ordinary and natural fact of psychic life. The displacement from one to the other depends on the acceptance of both. In this way, it is a joke, particularly for psychoanalysts. Within what we might call the dominant strands within our culture, there is no joke to be had (which is, in a way, funny). For we live in a culture that is characterized in part by the prevalence of rabid hate, and in part by the widespread denial of hate as a primary fact of human life. In our clinical work, we are reminded daily of how common is the denial of personal hate and how many are the defenses that are mustered against its acknowledgment. The identification of hate with its more perniciously destructive political forms can easily serve both as an additional defense – by equating hate just with those forms – and an additional motive for resistance by raising the psychic costs of identifying with one’s own hate. The uglier the hate outside, the greater the desire for being hate-free inside. If that is the hate that lives out there, “hate does not live here.”

For psychoanalysts, hate in the abstract is not a problem to be overcome. There are healthy forms of hate, just as there are unhealthy forms of love. The question is not whether hate, but what kind of hate: what is its particular character, what particular functions is it serving, w