In 1947, Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott penned a now-famous paper called Hate in the Counter-Transference in which he describes the adoption of a young boy and the healing mechanism of revealing to the young boy how much he hated him (as a consequence of certain actions) as a form of therapeutic intervention. This was revolutionary for that time and I believe still is. Expressing and feeling how much you hate something (or someone) is still, in my opinion, a revelatory act of courage.
Psychoanalyst Glenn Gabbard, MD in the introduction states, “Children who have grown up with these developmental disturbances must experience being hated before they will be capable of believing that others can love them.” I argue that this is not just with psychotics, but humanity at large.
Winnicott, in order to successfully metabolize his murderous countertransference urges towards the psychotic boy, would punish the little boy by saying what has happened has made me hate you, which according to Winnicott, was easy to say because it was true. As punishment, the boy was sent to sit outside. When the little boy was ready to come back inside, he would ring a bell and there would be no further discussion, just forgiveness. The child was made aware of this deal. The idea behind this therapeutic intervention was that the child would only believe he could be loved, after he experienced being hated. Winnicott does not finish what happened to the boy as he only had a three month stay with the Winnicott’s, but this ushered in a radical new idea within the field of psychoanalysis — therapist self-disclosure.
Per usual, I will be connecting this concept of hate through my own digestive tract of processing hate and anger in my own life. Autoimmunity issues, especially in women, has been linked to repressed rage and anger and is an extremely difficult emotion to access and to feel. Where do you put it? Where does it go? Do I have permission to lash out at everything and everyone now?
Through my own evolutionary process, I have encountered enormous waves of grief, terror, sadness, envy, jealousy, depression, anxiety, abandonment, greed, lust, fear, scarcity and have felt and metabolized these emotional energy states. In other words, these are emotions I know I can feel. But hate, rage, and anger (and these are three very distinct energies) — these emotions have humbled me over the past 9 months. I found another achilles’ heel. It is difficult to feel them without feeling like you want to burn everything to the ground. And, we killed Jesus with hate. Hate is “bad.”
But is it? Or could it be: it is the hate that cures.
[Full disclosure, I stole this phrase from Evelyn Liegner’s book, The Hate that Cures, in which she recounts the full recovery of a patient with schizophrenia by way of successfully disclosing both transference and countertransference hate between patient and therapist. I have not read this book but it seems intriguing.]
Due to my own trauma and ancestral history, I understand why I have so much latent hate, rage and anger in my system. It is there for a reason and I am here to love and validate myself enough in the experience to transmute it.
But, if you were like me and forced to love someone you hated ie) forced to love an abusive parent or caretaker, that stuck rage needs to come out.
To be honest, I have straight yelled (lost my temper) at certain members of my family and things are better for it. The air is clearer. Their stuckness is less stuck. They are hoarding less because they aren’t holding onto things as a way to protect themselves from feeling. I feel less drawn to addictive behaviors that were keeping me ‘high’ above this hate. The channel is open. And, my gut is the healthiest it has been in decades. I have been getting it out.
Is it wrong to yell and lose your temper? I honestly don’t know. I do think there are certain messed up situations that warrant an equal energy to match or surpass it in order to clear it out.
[Hot take: I’m not sure I believe in nonviolent communication. Sometimes, I think you need to let it rip and deal with the apologies afterwards. And in my experience, the hate and rage always works itself out with the people who are meant to stay and the people who can’t take it are showing you the end.]
Hate in the Counter-Transference reveals several truths that we can take and expand upon today:
Some reactions are objective reactions to something that is indeed hate-able.
For example, “the Cleansing of the Temple” in the New Testament recounts the only time Jesus ever became rageful and overthrew the gambling tables in front of a temple of worship. In this instance, his rage and decisive action was “cleansing” out the sinful behavior of turning his father’s house into “a den of robbers.”
Psychoanalysis emphasizes the need for psychoanalysts to have had their own successful analysis so that they do not succumb to the following point:
Some hateful reactions are displaced or are a reaction formation from other unexamined situations/emotions.
For example, a father who feels unworthy and inadequate gets drunk and beats and blames his children for his failures. This is displaced self-hate. Another example, a woman hates her partner. Instead of breaking up with him, she keeps sleeping with him knowing he has a treatment-resistant STD. Reaction formation is doing the opposite of what you are actually feeling. In order for us to become useful and healing vessels, we must understand our own urges with absolute clarity so that we are not displacing our own unresolved issues onto our patients.
There do exist justified forms of hate, and the more we make way for feelings like this, we make more room for love to come in, especially for people with more primitive ego constructs, which I argue, is everyone, not just psychotics.
My update to Winnicott’s paper would be that this kind of primitive hate is not contained within just psychotics, borderlines, and those with severe personality disorders, but humanity writ large. There is a psychotic core of humanity that is being exposed right now and that can be experienced within the chaotic crevices of the mind and seen within the popularity of conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones, Candace Owens and David Icke. If what these three are reporting are true, their hate towards evil forces is justifiable. In other words, I believe humanity has a psychotic core and this gets mirrored or reflected back in the psyche of humans. Psychosis has its origins elsewhere, not just the human mind but at the core of humanity.
The article continues with the many instances in which a mother hates her infant — 18 to be exact. (The mother-infant relationship being Winnicott’s primary specialty as the thought at that time was psychoanalysis mimics that of the mother-child relationship).
I really can’t say I’ve mastered much when it comes to hate and what to do with it, but here are some things I’ve tried:
Pulling a towel and silent screaming to get the tension out
Writing it out - write out every disgusting, vile, murderous thought and feel the energy running onto the page as you do. Then burn or tear up this paper.
Yell it into the the void
Hand it to Jesus or God
Express it to your loved one framing it in an “I” statement.
I’ll close with these 4 points:
— If you truly love something, you know how to hate it too.
— Have you tried saying or yelling, I really hate it you when you act like that … It makes me hate you when … (only if this is the root of it and not a reaction formation or displacement of something else!)
— There are some energies in this world that are worthy of being hated.
— The love and light dictums of new age spirituality and religion promotes spiritual bypass and further buries the shadow, most especially those with primitive psychic structures.
What have you done to feel and express your hate and anger? Do you still find it to be a forbidden emotion? Comment below to add to the discussion.