HATRED AND LOVE
Hatred and love seem diametrically opposed feelings. Yet there are many
cases when love masquerades as hatred and hatred as love.
Altho such hatred and such love are not genuine they may drive us at
times into acts of cruelty or self-sacrifice which to all appearances
seem to emanate from perfect love or from savage hatred.
Very exaggerated feelings should always be viewed suspiciously as
blinds for the opposite feelings. An extravagant display of affection
is generally a desperate attempt on the person indulging in that
display at repressing loathing and hatred. On the other hand, morbid
hostility toward one person is generally an attempt at repressing a
love which would be unjustifiable or detrimental for the personality.
A few illustrations from life will make my meaning clear.
=A Worried Wife.= One woman I analysed was thrown into hysterical
anxiety whenever her husband reached home a little late. She pictured
him dead, dismembered by a train or knocked down by robbers. When she
first called on me, she stressed the struggle going on in her heart.
She loved two men and her nobility of soul, her delicacy of feelings,
and many other qualities she bestowed on herself very liberally, were
making that double life unbearable for her. "I have wronged my dear,
dear, hubby," she kept repeating. "And he is so good, so kind, so
considerate."
The wife who never tires of singing her husband's praise is always
somebody else's mistress. It is generally her way of settling accounts
with her conscience.
In this case, the anxiety she felt over her husband's whereabouts and
health when he was late in reaching home, supplied the expiation which
neurotics seem to crave for their misdeeds.
But there was more in that anxiety than one of the manifestations of
her sense of sin. I asked her whether she had ever experienced the same
anxiety when her lover was late in coming to their trysting place.
"No," she said, "and this is what leads me to think that I don't love
him nearly as much as I do my husband." Her reaction to her lover's
lateness was simply one of anger. She felt herself slighted and she
suspected him of stopping somewhere to flirt with some woman. Even
once, when a wreck on a suburban line leading to his home town, had
prevented him from meeting her, she never imagined him the victim of
any accident.
Further questioning elicited the information that death wishes had
crossed her mind on several occasions in relation to her husband. She
finally came to see that those repressed wishes were simply finding an
outlet in her wish fulfilment fears. She was constantly visualizing the
tragedy which would have given her her freedom.
=The Test of Love.= In other words, her unconscious wished her husband
dead. The repression of that wish compelled it to masquerade as a
hysterical concern for his health. The thought of her lover, however,
never suggested to her any death scenes.
During the war a woman patient who had two sons at the front, was
tortured every night by a nightmare in which she saw her older son
killed in action. She very naturally interpreted those dreams to
herself as convincing evidence of her greater fondness for that boy
than for his brother. In the course of our conversations, however, she
gradually admitted that her elder son was a gambler and drunkard and
had found himself in many an unpleasant complication.
She had thought several times, altho she had at once repressed the
thought, that death would be preferable to his life of embarrassment
and degradation. Those repressed death wishes found an outlet in
nightmares accompanied by a great display of emotion consciously felt
as love and grief.
Parents who continually warn their children against accidents "likely"
to happen to them, who grow panicky when some street commotion takes
place and imagine that their child has been hurt or killed, are not
quite as loving as they imagine.
In such unjustified fears, as in death dreams, there lurks an ill
concealed desire to be freed from the thraldom of parenthood and to
regain the selfish happiness of the childless state.
A young woman fainted several times when she heard shouts on the street
where her young child had been taken by the maid. She "knew" something
must have happened to her boy. Her dreams would with alarming frequency
picture accidents befalling the child. After I made her realise the
way in which her child had interfered with her social activities, with
her attending dances, theatrical performances, etc., a change became
noticeable in her dreams. Instead of visualising her child dead she
saw him in her day and night dreams as an adolescent, no longer in her
way, no longer a handicap to her in her pursuit of pleasure. Her panics
disappeared about the same time.
More elusive at times are cases of hatred which analysis reduces to a
struggle of the personality against an inacceptable love.
=Sour Grapes.= A man, unduly attracted to a woman who socially,
intellectually or financially, is or should remain outside of his
reach, and would probably make an impossible mate, is likely to
manifest violent hostility to her, to disparage her or even slander her.
Every analyst has seen in his office the middle aged woman who "breaks
down" soon after her daughter's marriage to a man whom she "despises."
Either a family scene or a campaign of nagging and disparagement has
caused a break between her and her daughter and son-in-law.
Analysis reveals that she is love with her son-in-law, a situation more
frequent than the layman imagines. This infatuation which she cannot
accept as a fact is repressed savagely. To protect herself against
overt acts which would make her sinful or ridiculous, she exaggerates
every defect of the man she loves. She pursues him with a stubbornness
which cannot deceive a psychologist. His name is constantly on her
lips, coupled, of course, with abusive remarks, but the fact remains
that she is constantly speaking, if not dreaming of him.
Her peace of mind is only restored to her when she accepts as a fact
a situation which need not be translated into a transgression of the
ethical laws.
For, in spite of what puritanical critics of psychoanalysis repeat,
a conscious sex craving is more easily controlled and less likely to
overthrow our willpower than an unconscious one.
=Brothers and Sisters.= A similar complication is frequently found, as
I stated in Chapter V, in the history of neurotic brothers and sisters.
A brother and sister may to all appearance be irreconcilable enemies.
Investigate their childhood and you will find memories of actual or
attempted incestuous indiscretions which, after a while, were repressed
either by punishment or voluntary restraint. In later years, fear
of a possible recurrence of tabooed incidents may express itself in
the shape of hatred leading at times to acute family conflicts, the
brother or sister running away, the sister becoming a prostitute, etc.
When hatred is unmasked and revealed as one of the avatars of
inacceptable love, it dies off and is replaced by protective measures
of a less objectionable nature, reserve or distance.
=A Negro Hater.= A hysterical patient of mine who had always been a
terrific negro hater and advocate of lynching, was disturbed at night
by symbolic sexual dreams in which negroes took an active part. She
could not help feeling uneasy in the presence of a colored man. "Those
beasts" was her favorite designation for colored people.
What drove her into my office was that on one occasion she had behaved
in a, to her, inconceivable way to a colored janitor's helper who had
come to her apartment to inspect the radiator.
The presence of that man had aroused her so powerfully that for a
few minutes she had been on the point of making advances to him. She
fortunately came to her senses and fled from what had always been to
her an unconscious temptation.
Such incidents as that make one wonder how many lynchings have been
precipitated by the hysterical actions of neurotic women.
It may be stated broadly that every exaggerated attempt at protecting
ourselves against a danger or a temptation is a confession on our part
that the danger or the temptation is very fascinating to us.
=Reformers.= Many "bold" reformers are merely very weak individuals
struggling against sexual temptation and hating some vice which holds
them in its power. The biography of Anthony Comstock which I have
reviewed in detail in "Psychoanalysis and Behavior" proves that the
obscenity he was so stubbornly ferreting held a strange fascination for
him.
I must not create the absurd impression, however, that all reformers
are abnormal and moved by neurotic impulses. But between the scientist
who warns people of venereal disease and combats it whenever possible
and the so called "syphilophobiac" who sees everywhere chances for
infection and would jail every prostitute, there is a great difference.
=The Syphilophobiac= is always a weak, oversexed individual, whose
only protection against his promiscuous cravings is the fear of disease
and the absurd assumption that every woman is infected.
The syphilophobiac hates prostitutes because he would love them too
well but for the protection he erects between their body and his
desire. The feverish energy displayed by many prohibition enthusiasts
is at bottom the hurrying away from a temptation to which they know
they would have to yield. The great prohibitionists crave alcohol and
could not, without a terrible struggle, protect themselves against the
lure of drunkenness if strong beverages were available.
The stage has pictured many times the crusty old bachelor who is a
ferocious woman hater. In the end he succumbs to the wiles of the
ingénue, who is generally the first woman he ever associated with.
The poor devil realised too well all his life the irresistible charm
of women as well as his overwhelming craving for love and the joys of
the flesh. Some neurotic incest fear, or craving for selfish pleasures,
or money complex, however, caused him to avoid women and to protect
himself against them by a display of hostility. The first time,
however, when fate forces him into close contact with temptation he has
to yield.
=Deluded Martyrs.= In every social upheaval there are martyrs who
sacrifice themselves for apparently very noble causes but whose
unconscious reasons for their acts are much less sublime. Stupid
bomb throwers who wreck a building or kill an individual, (acts most
unlikely to change a social system to which they object), profess
to be moved by their love for the people. Their actual motive is
father hatred. Brutus and others who delivered the "people" from some
"tyrant," in reality gratified an unconscious grudge and sought their
own liberation from some form of authority made loathsome by infantile
complexes.
The most grotesque example of it was the destruction of the Bastille
on July 14, 1789 by a French mob which imagined that it was thereby
freeing crowds of innocent prisoners and abolishing arbitrary death
sentences. There were less than a dozen people in the fortress at that
time. The mob venting its wrath on a symbol of authority pretended to
be animated by a love of freedom and a desire to benefit others.