In clinical practice, hatred appears not only as a discrete affect but as a force capable of organizing an entire psychic reality. It is precisely this force that we encounter in the most severe forms of destructiveness—murder, suicide, radical devaluation of the object, the symbolic annihilation of everything valuable within a relationship. Yet hatred does not always look so extreme. Often it manifests in quieter, though no less destructive, forms: sadistic tendencies; the wish to make another suffer; the drive to dominate, humiliate, or control; and sometimes a persistent attack on one’s own self and bodily integrity.
This is why hatred is so often confused with rage, anger, or an acute aggressive reaction.
Otto Kernberg, MD, describes hatred as a complex aggressive affect. In contrast to the acuteness of rage reactions and the easily varying cognitive aspects of anger and rage, the cognitive aspect of hatred is chronic and stable. Hatred also presents with characterological anchoring that includes powerful rationalizations and corresponding distortions of ego and superego functioning.
According to Dr. Otto Kernberg, the primary aim of one consumed by hatred is to destroy its object, a specific object of unconscious fantasy, and this object's conscious derivatives; the object is at bottom both needed and desired, and its destruction is equally needed and desired. Understanding this paradox is at the center of the psychoanalytic investigation of this affect.
Hatred is not always pathological: as a response to an objective, real danger of physical or psychological destruction, a threat to the survival of oneself and those one loves, hatred is a normal elaboration of rage aimed to eliminate that danger. But unconscious motivations usually enter and intensify hatred, as in the search for revenge. When it is a chronic characterological predisposition, hatred always reflects the psychopathology of aggression. Here, hatred ceases to function as a reaction to a specific threat. It begins to exist independently of actual events, persisting even when the original object or situation has long since lost its relevance.
An extreme form of hatred demands the physical elimination of the object and may be expressed in murder or in a radical devaluation of the object that may generalize in the form of a symbolic destruction of all objects-that is, all potential relationships with significant othersas is clinically observable in antisocial personality structures. This form of hatred is sometimes expressed in suicide, where the self is identified with the hated object and self-elimination is the only way to destroy the object as well.
These dynamics become most clearly observable in clinical work with patients for whom hatred is no longer an episodic experience but a structuring force that shapes both character and relationships.
According to Dr. Otto Kernberg, clinically, some patients with the syndrome of malignant narcissism (narcissistic personality, ego-syntonic aggression, paranoid and antisocial tendencies) and "psychopathic" transferences (deceptiveness as a dominant transference feature) may consistently attempt to exploit, destroy, symbolically castrate, or dehumanize significant others, including the therapist-to an extent that defies the therapist's efforts to protect or recapture some island of an idealized primitive, ail-good object relationship.
At the same time, the transference may appear to be remarkably free from overt aggression; chronic deceptiveness and the search for a primitive ail-good self state that eliminates all objects-by means of alcohol or drugs, for example, and by unconscious and conscious efforts to coopt the therapist in the exploitation or destruction of others-dominate the scene.
The therapist's efforts to stand up against this diffuse, generalized destruction or corruption of everything valuable may be experienced by the patient (by projective mechanisms) as a brutal attack, which leads to the emergence of direct rage and hatred in the transference; we witness the transformation of a "psychopathic" into a "paranoid" transference. Paradoxically, this transformation offers a glimmer of hope for these patients.
A less severe degree of hatred is expressed in sadistic tendencies and wishes; the patient has an unconscious or conscious desire to make the object suffer, with a sense of profound conscious or unconscious enjoyment of that suffering. Sadism may take the form of a sexual perversion with actual physical damaging of the object, or it may be part of the syndrome of malignant narcissism, sadomasochistic personality structure, or, sometimes, a rationalized, intellectualized form of cruelty that includes wishes to humiliate the object. In contrast to the earlier, more encompassing form of hatred, sadism is characterized by the wish not to eliminate but to maintain the relationship with the hated object in an enactment of an object relationship between a sadistic agent and a paralyzed victim. The desire to inflict pain and pleasure in doing so are central here, representing an implicit condensation of aggression and libidinal excitement in inducing such suffering. In clinical practice, this may manifest not only as overt cruelty but also in more subtle forms of humiliation, control, or the “educational” infliction of pain that is presented as care or necessity.
A still milder form of hatred centers around the desire to dominate the object, a search for power over it that may include sadistic components but in which attacks on the object tend to be self-limited by the object's submission and its implied reconfirmation of the subject's freedom and autonomy. Anal-sadistic components predominate over the more primitive oral-aggressive ones found in the more severe forms of hatred; the assertion of hierarchical superiority and "territoriality" in social interactions and the aggressive aspects of regressive small- and large-group processes are the most frequent manifestations of this milder level of hatred.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy