In the present paper, I will address some possibilities of the expression of hatred by making descriptions, for which I do not claim any historical, sociological, or anthropological status. My goal is mainly highlight a type of transformation of hatred into cruelty caused by the psychotic part of the personality (Bion, 1957; Chuster, 2014, 2018). Therefore, those descriptions should only be considered as images with a mythical-poetic-oneiric quality.
These images can be used as hypotheses during the analytical work. They have a quality of dream memories; or the quality of a metonym, which condense a series of analytical theories. They allow vertex observations and interpretations of the analytic link. The vertex I choose follows the Theory of Transformations (Bion, 1965).
As a general observation, the loss of boundaries produced by hatred transformed into cruelty by the psychotic part of the personality (Bion, 1957), does not distinguish sides, has no parties, no religion, nor specific culture. Hate and cruelty can manifest in everything and everyone, they may come with the most various justifications and titles but are always toxic and destructive to the human mind. Their presence produces states of mental confusion of multiple degrees, with equivalent degrees of psychic pain caused to oneself and others. I understand that analytical work should emphasize on these confusional processes and the meanings of the intense psychic pain they produce.
In the daily routine of the office, the psychoanalyst listens to all kinds of narratives coming from the social body. Indeed, they are brought about by unconscious desires, which moves a choice published to the analyst. The psychoanalyst can take as a starting point that the patient is talking about an aspect of himself/herself that he/she is unaware of to some degree. However, what is important is the analyst/analysand link, where one can work from the inside to outside and outside to inside perspectives of the "object" presented by those speeches. It can be from the public to the private, or vice versa.
Nowadays, a frequent narrative is the pamphleteering on social networks inciting hatred, distorting the initial goal of exchanges between people. The analysands, through their associations, publish to the analyst such narratives, in which they have somehow become involved. Many expect the analyst to deviate from his function and become involved, taking sides. Some want agreements, many of them cruel, for they imply in the analyst ceasing to be who he/she is to meet demands that always involve judgments, evaluations, and diagnoses.
In these publications, the narratives seem to subscribe to the biased militancy of their operators. Let us take the models of social environment, such as those conveyed by the official broadcasting. We can observe identifications with the powers that exceed in their role, at the service of the distortion of thinking to impose a point of view. Such exception unfolds in facets of tyranny and megalomania, malignant expressions of human narcissism operating with cruelty.
As a psychoanalyst, my scope is limited; my responsibility is restricted to my office while the patient is there. Still, I understand that the existence of unconscious feelings of guilt precipitates the proliferation of the capacity to lie and deceive, a quality that is somehow always contained in those narratives. There is always plenty of room opened up by hatred for corruption, dishonesty, and fraud in the social body. I think that the analyst should always propose to rescue thinking by pointing out that there is no thinking in hatred, and from there derives the pain of confusion.
When hatred manifests itself as scathing criticism, I can observe how cruelty tries to pass itself off as critical thinking. We can describe it as an envious and omniscient usurpation of thought, inhibiting thinking as an excellent growth-producing object.
Bion (1970) understand this inhibition as envy of any growth-producing object, hindering realizations in external life and the restorations necessary for the development of emotional life.
A macroscopic example of hatred, functioning as malignant exploitative envy, is found in Nazism, which could be either mental or political. The inevitable association of National Socialism with authoritarianism and megalomania created a totalitarian regime. Its leader, moved by mortal hatred, operated with flagrant distortion and manipulation of concepts about the human being. Far from knowing what a human being is, the hatred present in his speeches put spit on his trembling lips, letting glimpse the mixture of the hallucinatory pleasure of euphoria and grandiosity that defeats and despises enemies. The defeat of his premises was not acceptable to him, so, like the monstrous Sphinx in the Oedipus myth, he kills himself when he collapses what he had built to be eternal. It is no different from other totalitarian leaders. They always speak the same language.
What the Sphinx poses, as an image, is the relationship that a subject has with their unconscious. The first hypothesis is that we can be totally "devoured" by the unconscious. But we have the option of establishing another relationship with it. This does not mean that we eliminate it and have specific answers that will make the Sphinx commit suicide. Still, we can realize the danger that lies in the unconscious, since the Sphinx that kills itself returns to Oedipus through Jocasta, producing a marriage without love, out of obligation and duty, and not out of desire. I can choose not to do this and have autonomy. But first, it is necessary to know oneself, to free the imagination.
The analysis allows of knowing oneself comes through another voice, of seeking another answer, which transcends the Oedipal drama of hatred and settles in the loving tragedy of the bonds of creation where another knowledge emerges: the knowledge about oneself.
Tragic knowledge is limited because it is stuck to images. These are expressions of original intuitions about a "perfection of truth" that poetry, myths, rate, religion, and science try to account for, but each in its own way, denouncing an incompleteness. These intuitions give truth a specific presence, attempting to understand something inaccessible.
In other words, there is no human being who has, let's say, an unconscious free of all the elements that the Oedipus myth describes. But through psychoanalysis, one can prevent this unconscious from passing into action. It is about acquiring a reflexive and deliberative subjectivity, a social autonomy, a state that never stops developing, on pain of psychic death.
In the immediate post-war period, the winners found themselves in a kind of dead-end facing a Germany morally and ethically ruined by the hatred promoted by National Socialism, which had been brought to political power before the war, it should be said, by democratic elections. What was the toxic element in democracy that allowed the poison spread all over the world?
Germany produced policies that culminated in deliberately genocidal actions, hitherto only seen in history during the Inquisition. Human rights were simply rendered non-existent by trivial decrees sanctioned by judges. One can see how minimal these rights are and how insufficient they are to stop the cruelty and hatred of individuals.
A process of "denazification" has been suggested. A strategy to deal with the hatred ingrained in the hearts and minds of a nation that had abolished human rights. This process should consider one of the most fundamental discoveries of psychoanalysis: archaic, very primitive mental states, detectable in the most civilized and educated people, can proliferate beneficially but can also proliferate in a cancerous way.
The process was led by the philosopher and psychoanalyst, Roger Money-Kyrle, who had served during the war in MI-5. It was about choosing in the new post-war reality people who could occupy public positions in a way that was detoxified from Nazi hatred.
Since the entire population was committed to Nazism, it was challenging to find a pure non-Nazi. The citizens of Germany, when they did not enthusiastically adhere to Nazism, somehow all conformed to the regime. How to know that the postulants were not just lying about their recent past full of hatred and cruelty?
The working group, led by the psychoanalyst, then created a test to differentiate authoritarian from non-authoritarian personalities. The idea was that authoritarianism, to prevent thinking was one of the primary generative sources of Nazism. It was thus an attempt to attack the source.
The test consisted in gathering in a projection room postulants for a particular position, where films of the atrocities of the concentration camps were shown. The reactions observed were of three types. Some watched impassively, without any signs of emotion; there were those who "protested,” claiming that it was a lie, and there were those who cried and felt terrible about what was "revealed.” From this last group, the postulants were chosen.
In the test author's conception, they were capable of reaching a depressive position, Melanie Klein's concept, of whom he was a disciple. The audacity was great, transforming a psychic idea into something of large-scale political application. Was there a misguided reductionism that broke the relationship between ontology and epistemology?
Indeed, on the individual level, we can translate one aspect of the concept of depressive position by a passage from Thomas Aquinas when he says that no being is so finite that it possesses nothing infinite. In other words, we should give humanistic credit by supposing that countless people can see their mistakes and try to open themselves up for repair by realizing their involvement with mental states that produce mental narrowness.
However, since mental narrowness is inseparable from cruelty, how can one explain that individuals who certainly did not have mental narrowness, such as Martin Heidegger, joined Nazism, not as an ideology, but with a compliant mental state? What about Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant physicist, author of the Uncertainty Principle, the interlocutor of Einstein and Niels Bohr, who went on to work for the Nazi regime? And Carl Jung, who agreed to be president of the Society for Psychotherapy of the Third Reich?
The problem with this kind of test resembles a fishing net, whose holes have a specific diameter, so we can never catch fish except those larger than these diameters. Small fish will escape from the trap. Can we say that because we have this net and that we catch these fish, this means that there are only fish of this size caught in the sea?
For the first time in history, these situations were brought to trial, the famous Nuremberg trials, where the concept of the ethically intolerable was established. This concept made it clear that acts cannot be repaired or forgiven from the human point of view. That is to say, there are fish in the sea that are larger in diameter than our net and that do not depend on our net. These fish make the net obsolete. This is true for all the arguments that have been used. Complexity becomes the only way out to think if we want to have a future.
The writer Primo Levi talks about this in the book The Truce[1]. After being released from the Auschwitz concentration camp, he describes that his train stopped at the Frankfurt station on his way back to his home in Turin. He gets off and sees a former Nazi soldier, recognizable by his uncharacteristic uniform (they were called ghosts), working on the tracks. As he looks at the writer watching him, the soldier, at the sight of the prisoner's number tattooed on his arm, weeping, kneels and makes a sign with his clenched hands, as if asking for forgiveness. There the "denazification" was spontaneous by the simple revelation of the undeniable cruelty that had overpowered the human, by the indisputable evidence of Evil provided to a witness. However, this spontaneity of an individual did not eliminate what had been done. What was left for the victim was to continue living and express himself as a witness to the barbarity.
In essence, it was about recognizing that the disfigurement caused by the hatred conveyed by Nazism was not a coincidence, nor was it a process that could have been stopped. It was a historical process, where the violence of hatred led to the forgetting of Being and Truth; that is, it was the authoritarian denial of differences, and the brutal mistake of forgetting that thought constitutes the highest legacy that life can offer us.
In other words, we must not forget to Socratically admit our not-knowing, under penalty of becoming more Nazi than the Nazis themselves. Suppose human rights are to continue to be preserved. In that case, this must continue as an ongoing work of denunciation and alertness. Even the wisest of men can exhibit ignorance associated with archaic elements of the mind that manifest themselves in paranoid ways or need to place evil on someone different from them.
I will adopt the war model in continuity, emphasizing that I do not claim any status as a historical, sociological, or anthropological narrative for the model. It is about using images and myths to think, the confrontation between imaginative and rational conjectures, which might be helpful in a clinical description.
War is a confrontation derived from interests in dispute by two or more distinct groups of individuals, historically organized, using weapons to annihilate the enemy physically. War does not occur without hatred (H) and hypocrisy (-H), significantly when individuals are restricted to dealing with their hatred only through hypocrisy. Most often, hypocrisy means using a false premise governing moral logic. I add the vulgar cynicism so much to the taste of specific individuals who only profit when they are in institutional positions. Hypocrisy and cynicism are instruments of diplomacy and politics.
I use the model of the war situation to talk about several clinical cases where people wage particular "wars" with themselves or with others, moral wars, to prove the superiority of some to the detriment of the inferiority of others. In these battles, elements of risk of non-survival and imminent annihilation are present. These elements relate to the psychotic part of the personality (Bion, 1956).
The psychotic personality stems from a marked intolerance to frustration, which generates psychic pain; the pain breeds hatred which attacks the apparatus for linking internal and external reality, that is, the ability to think, producing a mental state where there is an inability to differentiate between internal and external validity. Hate also attacks the love bonds, transforming them into sadism.
This differentiation of realities, in turn, causes a feeling of intense vulnerability, which is exteriorized by a deep fear - the fear of imminent destruction - a fear without representation, terror without a name.
The defense for this hatred is a kind of failure of sensitivity. The individual can feel pain but not suffer it, thus losing the capacity to suffer pleasure in relationships (Bion, 1970). Without meaningful pain and pleasure, that is, without ethical and aesthetic sensibility, the individual ceases to care about the human, does not differentiate what is animate from what is inanimate. Relationships become liquid, rushed, but quickly evaporating without a trace.
The individual who goes to war needs to return to society after the skirmishes and battles. To achieve this, he needs to deal with a significant and impressive caesura in his day-to-day life in war. His psyche must be able to digest (alpha function) the experiences filled with primitive terrors; that is, he needs to have a psychic continent on which he trusts healthily to deliver the exercise of this task.
In other words, soldiers who go to war deal all the time with death and hatred. They are trained to take the lives of other human beings. This is usually the role that is assigned to the Gods. Asking young soldiers to play this "divine" role leads to severe consequences because there always comes a moment when they have to cross the caesura between the world where they act as gods to the world where they have to return to acting in an ordinary societal role. They go from the omnipotence of the warrior to the helplessness of the citizen of a society that sent them to die. If they die, it is not because of society, which in theory should protect them, but because of their incompetence in not having been gods. Society makes them a suspect and untrustworthy continent, generating hatred for society. We can place the story in that part of the Oedipus myth where there is a clash of generations, the crossroads of Daulios and Delphi.
Killing someone constitutes an act that is outside the human scope. However, it is present in criminal killers and some notorious politicians. I see no difference between a serial killer, a politician who steals healthcare resources, and the judges who issue habeas corpus to these people.
Killing is something that soldiers do for society, exposing themselves to being killed. They are put to sacrifice themselves in some way. But when they come back home, they come into contact with the deep splitting that has occurred in their minds, as they return to an environment where this is not permissible. They carry this weight through life, struggling to integrate the experiences of having killed someone, trying to put together the parts of their personality that were disassociated when they killed human beings. Most soldiers are left to their own devices to do this. They don't have the appropriate instruments on their back, so all kinds of conflicts from their history emerge. It is no different in what happens with abused children, in the acts of rape, in the abandonment of minors.
War as a bond of hatred (H) and a bond of hypocrisy (-H) is the antithesis of the most fundamental ethical rule we have learned - don't do to others what you don't want to be done to yourself. When called to war, soldiers are called upon to violate codes of civilized behavior. To survive psychically in the area of the god Mars, it is necessary to find a way to set aside the conventional rules of moral conduct. This requires suspending guilt in killing and maiming people. It requires being cruel. Reconciling the ethical conduct we are taught from childhood, with brutal actions of war, has been a problem for good-natured soldiers since the dawn of humanity (Marlantes, 2011).
While participating in World War I and facing cruel battles for four years, Bion referred to this painful experience by quoting Mahabharata’s Hindu epic. An experience that took him many years to talk about. In his work, we apply the metaphor of war (1979 and 1997 b).
In the Hindu epic, we have at its core in the Baghavad Gita, the confrontation between Arjuna, the warrior, and Krishna, the God incarnate in human form, as the driver of Arjuna's chariot. Note that when we refer to a ruthless and violent individual, we usually say that he is only in human form as if he had disguised himself as a human being. In mythology, many gods do this to relate to humans. The results of these encounters are most often odes to cruelty.
Arjuna is led by Krishna to the enemy hosts. The battle is imminent. He sees many of his relatives and friends on the enemies’ side. No one wishes to fight against friends and relatives. He casts his gaze on the battlefield. He sees the heroes ready to fight the monster? Why betray Aeneas with the disappointing breeze, especially me who has so often been let down by the clear sky?".
Palinurus ties himself to the helm and keeps his gaze on the stars. But despite all caution, the God swings his wet branch with the drops of the river Lethes, soporific with the power of Styx[2], and throws them at the eyelids of the helmsman, who falls asleep and is helpless. It throws him overboard, breaking his rudder and part of his bow. Palinurus wakes up drowned in the waters and tries to call his companions, while God reveals himself, raises his wings, and flies away.
A short time later, Aeneas wakes up and realizes that his ship is adrift, his helmsman missing in the sea. He takes the helm in his hands, sighing profoundly, and his heart aches for the fate of his friend, "Oh, Palinurus, because you believed so much in the sea and the calm air, now you lie naked and dead, in an unknown place, on the white sands of the bottom of the Mediterranean."
The brief exchange of words between Somnus and Palinurus is carefully composed by Virgil. The Latin is stunning and musical. Each of the lines is four lines long, but their tone is deep and intensely poetic. As in a song, Somnus begins delicately by calling Palinurus by name and patronymic as a sign of respect. Then he reinforces his message with sound effects and rhythm: aequera... aequaetate... Aurae... hora quieti... The sea is calm. There are no breezes.
The first speech orders Palinurus to take his tired eyes off the helm, and God offers to take his place. Palinurus responds in a very different tone with three rhetorical and indignant questions. His indignation stems from the idea that he might be negligent in the duty delegated to him by his captain Aeneas. Devotion to his office would allow Aeneas to pursue his sacred task. But he does not ask for help, even though he perceives the "pressure.”
In a particular vertex, Palinurus is the sacrificial victim, the scapegoat: "the victim (the lamb) who will save many,” and who constitutes the most terrible fantasy of all, as Leclaire (1975) showed in the essay Killing a Child[3]. For him, the psychoanalytic practice consists in making manifest the constant work of the death drive: which consists in killing the wonderful (or terrifying) child that, from generation to generation, testifies about the parents' dreams and desires; there is life only at this price, through the death of the first image, strange, in which the birth of each one is inscribed. Unrealizable death is necessary because there is no life possible, no life of desire, no life of creation if we stop killing the wonderful child (the primary narcissistic representation) that is always reborn.
Palinurus is the "child" sacrificed to allow Aeneas' journey to success. There is a message from Greek civilization to the Romans: we are better than you. Our work and sacrifice allowed you Romans to be what you are. Everything you possess, you owe us: our thriving civilization.
Notice in the message that someone is better and someone is worse. Logic denies the difference so that it exists again in moral form. The inferior is condemned.
This apex of rivalry can be placed on the individual level and is part of the realm Bion (1965) calls transformation into hallucinosis. The theory of changes has the advantage of showing a spectral model in which several elements such as rivalry, superego cruelty, suffering on task, lies, feeling of superiority versus the feeling of inferiority, moral logic, and false premises that generate cycles of defensive arguments where omnipotence and helplessness can be confronted. The hypothesis of a content overwhelmed by moral impulse and with significant loss of attunement with the continent is another perspective that can be mentioned. The space of dissonance between continent and content is filled with lies.
The death of Palinurus as equivalent to the sacrificial death of the child, driven by hatred of growth, or what can grow and be good, is a source of deep terrors.
On the other hand, the passage from the Aeneid can generate several questions:
Somnus, the omnipotence, has been narcissistically wounded by Palinurus' rebuttal. His hatred spreads, and he asks: Who is this arrogant human who challenges a God with a different logic? Isn't that what fundamentalism does? To have raged against those who think?
An analyst who is "tied" to a theory can represent the helpless Palinurus. It can make interventions of the nature of a transformation into hallucinosis (Bion, 1965), which symbolically can represent the hatred that symbolically kills the analyte through not listening.
Drugged by the God of Sleep, Palinurus is thrown into the sea with fury and noise. Aeneas, the fleet captain, wakes up and puts on himself the helmet of a helmsman taking on the task. Unaware of the influence of the god Somnus, he accuses Palinurus of complacency and neglect. The same can happen with the analyst who uses memory, desire, and the need for understanding. How dopey can we get with these elements when they are expressions of various kinds of hatred?
_____________________________________________________________________
[1] Levi, P., The Truce, Companhia de Bolso, 2010.
[2] Styx personifies in mythology hatred, the border between heaven and hell. In the center of the underworld, the inferns, the lower regions, a great swamp like a sad and somber place where the other rivers converged; among them the river Lethes, of forgetfulness, the Aqueron, the river of misfortune, the Cocytus the river of lamentations, the Phlegelon where the violent were immersed, and the river Styx where the choleric and ill-tempered were taken, so that they could drown and fight eternally.
[3] The representation used by Leclaire is very useful to situate in a mythical-lyrical way, as a psychoanalytic construction, that the pulses never appear in a pure form, but are mixed or fused in varied degrees. At this point, the analogy with Freud's work A Child is Beaten (1924) makes much more sense if we consider the question of moral masochism described by him in the following way: Thus moral masochism becomes a classic piece of the indication of pulsional fusion: its danger lies in its origin in the death drive and represents part of it that has escaped deflection on the external world in the form of a destruction drive.
Comments