In Freud’s early theory of instincts, love and hate were conceived of as noniden-tical twins. Love aimed to acquire pleasure and pleasurable objects, and hate expelled the unpleasurable into the outside world. ‘The ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are a source of unpleasurable feeling for it,’ wrote Freud, equating hate with destruction. After a partial reworking of his instinct theory in ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ (1920), Freud incorporated love among the life instincts and placed hate in the service of the death instinct. At this point, therefore, hate had two potential functions: it could serve a mnemic purpose (‘to restore an earlier state of things’) if considered a facet of the death instinct, or it could fulfil a purely expulsive-destructive function if conceived according to the earlier instinct theory
Psychoanalytic theory is not shy of references to destructive hate. Indeed, if we consider hate in object-relations theory, we assume a complex process whereby an internal object is damaged or destroyed and the ego is faced with the exceedingly daunting task of renegotiating internal reality in the wake of such hate. An internal object that is damaged by hate may lead to phobic withdrawal from the external representations of the object, or it may lead to an addictively depressive state that is a compromise formation between the wish to damage the object further and the dread of being attacked from within for such destructiveness. If the internal object is psychologically destroyed, it may be expelled into fragmented objects which assume a bizarre quality
When a person hates, is it always true to say that he wishes to destroy? I am sure that most clinicians can find an exception to the rule of destructive hate in their clinical work, and I will examine certain nondestructive forms of hate. It is my view that in some cases a person hates an object not in order to destroy it, but to do precisely the opposite: to conserve the object. Such hate is fundamentally nondestructive in intent and, although it may have destructive consequences, its aim may be to act out an unconscious form of love. I am inclined to term this ‘loving hate’, by which I mean a situation where an individual preserves a relationship by sustaining a passionate negative cathexis of it. If the person cannot do so by hating the object, he may accomplish this passionate cathexis by being hateful and inspiring the Other to hate him. A state of reciprocal hate may prevail, but in the persons whom I shall be describing, such hate is singular, not genuinely mutual
The subject finds that only through hating or being hateful can he compel an object into passionate relating. Therefore, although two people in such circumstances may seem to have accomplished a reciprocity of hate, it is illusory, as the object is never assumed to be capable of genuine mutual action: even one of hating
Viewed this way, hate is not the opposite of but a substitute for love. A person who hates with loving passion does not dread retaliation by the object; on the contrary, he welcomes it. What he does live in fear of is indifference, of not being noticed or seen by the Other. Passionate hate is generated as an alternative to love, which is assumed to be unavailable
The literature on the positive function of hate, or fundamentally nondestructive hate, is sparse. In Europe, Winnicott was one of the first analysts to emphasize its positive functions. In an early paper on aggression, he argues that ‘aggression is part of the primitive expression of love’; he further stresses that, in the course of his ruthlessness, an infant ‘does not appreciate the fact that what he destroys when excited is the same as that which he values in quiet inter-vals between excitements. His excited love includes an imaginative attack on the mother’s body. Here is aggression as a part of love’. Winnicott always saw aggression as a positive factor in human growth, frequently equating it with motility, and he would never have made it equivalent to hate. But in his work on the transitional object, he makes it possible for us to imagine a form of hate which is positive; that intensely concentrated, aggressive use of a transitional object, which is founded on the infant’s knowledge and gratitude that the object will survive. The infant needs the object of his hate to survive attacks against it, and this object, which is itself the trace of the mother’s capacity to survive the infant’s attack, is carefully and jealously guarded by the infant against true destruction (against loss or actual change of state). Winnicott realized that each child needs to hate a safe object, since in so doing he can see the total experience of a certain kind of hate through to its completion. In attacking the object, the infant brings to bear, in reality, a self state which up to that point has been primarily internal, and as the object allows for this misuse of it, its capacity to survive is appreciated by the infant, who needs to externalize and to actualize his hate
In 1940 Fairbairn wrote a profoundly insightful paper about the schizoid individual who, because of his early experiences as an infant in relation to a particular kind of mother, regarded his love as destructive. Some schizoid defences therefore aimed to isolate the individual from Others; more significantly, they were developed to prevent the schizoid person from either loving or being loved. Such an individual ‘may quarrel with people, be objectionable, be rude. In so doing, he not only substitutes hate for love in his relationships with his objects, but also induces them to hate, instead of loving him’. By using hate in this manner, the schizoid acts in a curiously ‘moral’ manner. According to Fairbairn, ‘the moral motive is determined by the consideration that, if loving involves destroying, it is better to destroy by hate, which is overtly destructive and bad, than to destroy by love, which is by rights creative and good’
Balint (1951) regarded hate as a defence against primitive object love and archaic dependence, and Searles (1956) argued that vengefulness was both a defence against repressed grief and a covert means of maintaining an object tie. Pao (1965) said that one of the ‘ego syntonic uses of hatred’ is that it allows the person to feel something, so that eventually ‘hatred may become an essential element from which one derives a sense of self-sameness and upon which one formulates one’s identity’. Stolorow (1972) added that there are certain patients who use hate as a defence against the ‘possibility of forgiveness’ because to forgive would be to destabilize the person’s object world, one presumably constructed through hate
Other analysts indicate in their work a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which hate serves specific, and potentially positive, functions of the self. But I do not want to review the literature, I am only suggesting the outline of a tradition of looking at hate in a different way: associating hate more closely with love rather than assuming it to be the direct opposite
There is no one particular family idiom that sponsors a loving hate. I do not claim that the pathological family situations that I shall discuss are the only pathways to loving hate: I am sure there are many. Furthermore, it is worth bearing in mind that a discussion of pathology often precludes consideration of more ‘ordinary’ forms of a phenomenon. In the natural course of affairs, children hate their parents with a passion, lasting a few minutes or even hours, and this hate aims to conserve the parental object, not to destroy it, so that the child can have the full course of pleasure in hating. There is an ordinary need to hate the loved object, one essential to the child’s cumulative expression of self states that further enables him to feel a sense of personal reality in his lived life