The Revenge Motive: A Developmental Perspective on the Life Cycle and the Treatment Process*

… a long time ago, as now in the transference, there was a greed so great as to fail securely to metamorphose into appetite. Had it done so, such satisfactions as are available to the appetites might have consoled even compensated for the loss of the “other” breast. But in failing to give over into appetite, the greed in its very nature insatiable and unsatisfiable, left a sequence of consequences that the analysis has somehow to put right.

There is a surprising dearth of psychoanalytic literature devoted to the topic of revenge.1 Early analytic writers subsumed the wish for revenge, vengefulness, vindictiveness, and vengeance under broader categories such as “the aggressive drive,” “hostility,” “anger,” and “rage.” Freud's introduction of the death instinct (1920) promoted this tendency to place all negative behavior, including sadism, vindictiveness, and authoritarianism under the rubric of “hostility,” viewed as various manifestations of the death instinct.

Karen Homey (1948) differentiated the vindictive patient from other hostile patients in her description of the “arrogant-vindictive” character. She felt the arrogant-vindictive person often had experienced a malevolent child-rearing environment. She said, “Sheer brutality, humiliations, derision, neglect, and flagrant hypocrisy, all have assailed a child of especially great sensitivity” (Horney, 1950). Convinced that love doesn't exist, the child scorns it and hardens