A decisive step in the construction of the child, hate expresses a destructiveness that overcomes the initial resistance to autonomy. Freud illustrates this with the Fort-Da wherein the child exercises, then overcomes, his controlling drive. And D. W. Winnicott insists on the crucial role of the mother during this step in which hate is redirected against her. For Freud as for D. W. Winnicott, hate is at the origin of thought: without hate, there would be no separation, and no construction of the psyche-body.
Hate as a sign of pubertary pictogram disfunction, in which the childhood identifier is dissociated from the pubertary identified. An excess of infantile control is the source of this primal affect, which belongs to the psychopathological level of Lauferian breakdown.
Looking at several field studies in West Africa and Southeast Asia, this article will attempt to show the feelings of shame and hate which can be such a hindrance when the subject, excluded from social links by political and social violence, is asked to find a new foundation in the threads of a dialogue in which the logic of legitimacy, affiliation and kinship could be reconfigured.
After having briefly evoked Freudian theories of hate and the three positions that I have suggested for study in adolescents, a clinical observation will allow us to gauge the impact of pubertary transformations stemming from childhood experiences in patients afflicted with grave somatic illnesses. These pathologies are not the expression of specific psychic conflicts; such traumatic disorders mobilize the resources of mental functioning in order to confront them better.
The issue of hate and adolescence is viewed as a play of mirrors: on the one hand, there the hate that the adolescent can feel and which may be hatred of the other or self-hatred; on the other hand, the hate that may be directed at the adolescent, hatred of adolescents.
Hatred is profoundly narcissistic. It bespeaks an archaic defense, an extreme form of protection against the threat of narcissistic and psychic breakdown. It may be inoffensive or, on the contrary, aggressive and destructive, seeking to destroy otherness. In adolescence, the affective movement of hatred appears necessary with regard to the parental objects and towards the environment in general, since the adolescent has the feeling of being “frowned upon”, passivated or feminized.
Adolescence, 2015, 33, 2, 277-288.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7