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Most people will agree that the world of today is “full of hate and murder and bitterness and hunger and waste and pessimism and fear and sorrow.” We are determined that these evils shall not exist in our political and economic arrangements of the future, but too often we overlook the psychological factors in men's relationships. This book is an attempt to point the way towards solving human problems by a greater understanding of human nature. “The disease of the world is the disease of the individual personality.”
Dr. Menninger has written before of the innate destructive impulses which psychoanalysis has found to exist in all of us. He now offers some practical suggestions for controlling this aggressiveness and putting it to better use. Written for the average layman, “Love Against Hate” not only presents its theme clearly but also gives many interesting sidelights on psychoanalytic knowledge and human nature in general. The central point is that in our civilization we grow up with an incomplete capacity to love and with an overwhelming store of repressed hate. How does this happen, and what can be done about it ?
Science has made us familiar with the usual emotional traumas in the child's early life. The experience of birth; weanings from the breast and from milky foods; conforming to set rules for eating and excreting; renouncing many other forms of auto-erotic pleasure—all these may tend to stir up reactions of hostility against the outer world. In addition, his impulsive love for the parent of the opposite sex meets with curtailment and disappointment. Rivalry with the parent of the same sex is subject to fear and defeat.
Difficult as are all of these stages in emotional development, an intelligent and understanding parent can ease them considerably. It is less a matter of technique, however, than of attitudes and feelings. Too often we force the child into compliance; we sternly deny him harmless gratifications and exact obedience through fear and punishment. I