This article examines the phenomenon of spite as defined by the phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” Spite is viewed as originating in the patient's narcissistic exploitation of the child's wish to belong and to be of use to the parent. Out of a sense of shame, powerlessness, and resulting fatalism, the spiteful individual embarks on a life of reactive passivity rather than one of straightforward self-assertion. Drawing extensively on Dostoevsky's novella Notes From the Underground, I attempt to show how spite becomes a struggle to recapture one's individual dignity through an opposition to power on which one depends and by which one feels entrapped. I then discuss how the self-destructiveness of spite may have the purpose of arousing and punishing the conscience of the powerful, exploiting other.