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.
The author attempts to delineate the nature of the negative in the course of the building of the love object at adolescence. Resting on the concept of a negative narcissism revealing the alteration of the functional value of the object, numerous clinical examples are here described in order to illustrate such an object misery, i.e. situations in which the object love becomes significant of a reversal on oneself within hate and shame.
Transference love is love. Its clinical approach is however different according to whether one deals with adolescents or adults. Differences most probably come from the developmental demands, e.g. in particular the imperative urging one to renounce the satisfaction of parricidal and incestuous wishes that are so close at hand. The so-called transference love at adolescence is much closer to a love passion with all the risks at stake, including to lose one’s self within it.
Reversely from aggressiveness, which aims at hurting the other person, hate attacks the other person’s very existence as a differenciated object. Yet it should not be mistaken for destructiveness since it stands surety for an unfailing bond between patient and therapist. It is indeed difficult to be tolerated within the counter-transference-transference relationship but it does not all the same represent a major threat for the outcome of a therapeutic process.
According to wounding and frustrating emotional experiences they have met, adolescents at risk will leave behind the field of an object scene in which the haineous experience, warrant as it was of a bond with the object is still liable, in order to slide, regressively, towards the destruction of an object bond and a narcissistic decathexis. Part of the adolescent task is located within the slide hence taking place between the polarities of hate and destructiveness. Psychoanalytic care must be endeavoured in order to keep the liable rehandlings open.
Mr V. was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward and we met him in the context of an open consultation in the department which receives patients with corporal complaints, whatever the diagnosis. The overwhelming event in Mr V’s life ( his first name means life in FRENCH), stems from a dentist’s root canal operation on his healthy teeth. In the aftermath of this shattering event, an encounter with a man during the same year that Mr V became the father of a son, his words led us in the direction of what could have engendered the psychic conflict and caused the failure of his repression of a homosexuality that the subject could neither represent or integrate. His homosexual passion, unknown and repressed, had led him to a physical and psychic decline as well as to catastrophic complaints contributing to an impasse in a life, up to that moment, without problems. In the staging of his words, the events of the encounter took on a sense, informing him about the homosexuality evoked by paternal words and the failure of his repression.
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