Love and Hate

Psychoanalytic Perspectives

David Mann, David Mann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317763062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Love and hate seem to be the dominant emotions that make the world go round and are a central theme in psychotherapy. Love and Hate seeks to answer some important questions about these all consuming passions. Many patients seeking psychotherapy feel unlovable or full of rage and hate. What is it that interferes with the capacity to experience love? This book explores the origins of love and hate from infancy and how they develop through the life cycle. It brings together contemporary views about clinical practice on how psychotherapists and analysts work with and think about love and hate in the transference and countertransference and explores how different schools of thought deal with the subject. David Mann, together with an impressive array of international contributors represent a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic perspectives, including Kleinian, Jungian, Independent Group, and Lacanian, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists.
With emphasis on clinical illustration throughout, the writers show how different psychoanalytic schools think about and clinically work with the experience and passions of love and hate. It will be invaluable to practitioners and students of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and counselling.

Part I

More about love than hate

Chapter 1

In search of love and hate

David Mann

Psychoanalysis is nothing if not a special emotional relationship between analyst and analysand.

Lear (1990: 5)

Love and hate: ‘Now you see it, now you don’t’

In this chapter I wish to explore ideas about how much therapists love their patients and how much the therapeutic process is an act of love. To talk about love necessarily includes a consideration of hate which will also be addressed in this chapter.

Most therapists probably agree that love and hate are important in most therapies. After all it is a truism in psychoanalysis that most patients ‘fall in love’ to some extent with their therapists but, as time goes on, will experience some degree of hate as their wishes are frustrated. And inevitably every countertransference will be a mixture of positive (loving) and negative (hating) feelings. Winnicott (1954) saw love and hate built into the analytic setting itself: ‘The analyst expressed love by the positive interest taken, and hate in the strict start and finish and in the matter of fees. Love and hate were honestly expressed, that is to say not denied by the analyst’ (p. 285). Nevertheless, despite these assumptions about love and hate as inevitable transference and countertransference issues there is minimal discussion of either in the literature. As Gerrard (1996, 1999) notes, love in psychoanalytic work ‘has been much neglected’; Blum (1997) makes a similar observation about hate. In fact, although love and hate can be inferred in much psychoanalytic writing, description and discussion is hardly ever couched in such terms. Love and hate are not generally thought of in those words – they are usually avoided. In psychoanalysis, love and hate are passions that do not easily find a thinker. There is clearly a tension here: while there is a general acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of love and hate in psychoanalysis there is a marked under-reporting of either in seminars, conferences or the literature. It is not my intention here to explore the reason behind this discrepancy, although I do wish to draw attention to the level of ambiguity that love and hate have within psychoanalytic theory and practice.

The qualities of love are not easy to define. Love seems to be used to describe a wide variety of situations. The ancient Greeks had different concepts to describe this profusion: agape = brotherly love, eros = sexual love, and philein = love of truth or knowledge. Fromm (1957) makes similar distinctions and lists a whole variety of loves: that between parents and child, brotherly love, motherly love, erotic love, self-love and love of god. Suttie (1935) equated it with feelings of tenderness. Menninger (1942) had seen love as ‘experienced as a pleasure in proximity, a desire for fuller knowledge of one another, a yearning for mutual identification and personality fusion’ (p. 272). Freud (1915a) largely conflated love and sex and used the terms interchangeably. Bergmann (1988) proposes that Freud had three distinct theories of love: it originates in infantile prototypes; with narcissism the self can be taken as a model for a love object, the ego ideal is projected onto the love object and love is reciprocated; in Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915b) Freud tried to show how the sex drive becomes love after a synthesis of all the component instincts under the primacy of the genital and in the service of reproduction.

In previous publications (Mann 1997a, 1999) I have subsumed love under the general umbrella term of ‘erotic’. The very word ‘love’ spans a range of emotions from strong liking, to a maternal care and protectiveness (which has a strong appeal in psychoanalytic circles), to lust or spiritual agape (a love that transcends the merely sexual). Love is truly amorphous and allusive and resists specific definition. Yet the irony is that, though it is difficult to define, most of us somehow feel we recognise it when we see it in others – whether it is between parent and child, adult lovers or loyal friends. We know it when we see it but would be hard pressed to say exactly what it is we see. Some people, as I will elaborate below, do have trouble recognising love in others, and this is often connected to pathological disturbances in their capacity to feel or experience love.

The loving therapist

Summarising some of the literature, Gerrard (1996, 1999) notes that the patient needs to experience ‘the therapist as a loving mother’ (1999: 30). Such loving feelings would include qualities identified by Coltart (1992) as patience, endurance, humour, kindness and courage. To this list is added containment and reverie (Bion 1970) and ‘extreme tenderness’ (suggested by Suttie 1935). Gerrard emphasises that these loving feelings must emanate from the therapist’s authentic self. In emphasising this she wishes to avoid the suggestion of a sentimental idea about love. In my view, though, such a description of love devoid of incestuous and sensual pleasure, not to mention the conspicuous absence of hate, does not easily succeed in escaping the alluring idealisation of sentimentality. Winnicott (1947) draws attention to the function of the inevitable hate that a loving mother feels towards her child. What is absent from this description of a ‘loving mother’ is a mother with passions and desires. I would also add, and perhaps this is a particular objection that a male therapist would make, that it seems unhelpful to me to set the therapist up as a single parent. If there is love in the analytic setting it will surely also touch issues about ‘a loving father’ (to adapt Gerrard’s phrase), and would these feelings be any different from those ascribed to the ‘loving mother’? If a loving father and a loving mother are different, what distinction do we wish to make about such parental love? What we could say about this psychoanalytic construction of ‘the loving mother’ is that she is modelled on what psychoanalysis would consider to be the ideal analyst (I shall take up this point again in the discussion section, pp. 42–6). It seems to me that fortunately for most infants the ordinary, good enough, loving mother is not like the psychoanalytic construction but will have a more passionate relationship with her children. A mother, like everybody else, has an unconscious so therefore experiences a mix of erotic loving and hating feelings and fantasies. In my view, if psychoanalysis is going to take the mother and baby unit as its template then it needs to acknowledge the passions that both participants feel for each other.

The British object relations tradition (Klein, Fairbairn and Winnicott and their followers) has usually tended to take fright and flight from the Freudian concept of Eros. Freud is quite clear on this point: erotic attraction is the active ingredient in analysis and in the psychological development of the child. So, while Gerrard’s description of the loving mother usefully opens up the discussion about love in psychotherapy she does not avoid the pitfalls of a sanitised, sentimental love as a consequence of severing love from Eros. I would, therefore, broaden and build upon Gerrard’s description by reintroducing Eros. I would say the patient needs to experience the therapist as a loving mother and father who, in addition to possessing patience, endurance, humour, kindness, courage, reverie, containment and extreme tenderness will also allow for a full experience of the necessary life-enhancing passions and desires of love and hate. This is no prescription, nor simply an application of technique. Along with Gerrard, I would agree this must be authentically experienced as love and hate.

The depressive position

Gabbard (1996: 20–1) notes that Kleinian theory tends to overvalue the love in the depressive position, with the emphasis on integrating, guilt and concern. He points out that the love in the paranoid–schizoid position can have a distinctly creative quality: ‘what is integrated in the depressive position is broken up and created anew in the paranoid–schizoid position … The fragmentation inherent in paranoid–schizoid functioning springs from the lover’s reaction to momentary passions. With respect to staying in love, the stability of the relationship is informed, negated, and preserved by its spontaneity.’ Gabbard sees the rhythm between these alternating states as essential to love that does not stagnate: feelings of buoyant merger and intolerance of separation fuel love as much as guilt and concern.

If we stop to consider what ordinary loving mothers are like with their infants it does not take us long to see that they are not all patience, tenderness and thoughtfulness: mothers as well as infants move between paranoid–schizoid and depressive positions. At times, they will hate their babies; at other times the love is so intense they wish to gobble the infant up – and in fact pretending to do this is very pleasurable to both. But when the mother is angry and hates the infant what then? The infant must gradually come to realise that when the mother hates him or her it is not forever, nor is it hating everything about the child; also that the mother’s hatred does not lead her to annihilate the baby but that the excess of negative feelings will be contained and restrained. Essentially, the infant must come to realise that the momentary hate will be limited and does not overwhelm the mother’s love. In suggesting this, I am expanding the Kleinian view of the depressive position to contain not just the child’s awareness of ambivalence towards the parent but also the child’s awareness of the parent’s ambivalence to him or her. This ambivalence is not just a 50/50 split between love and hate. Rather, with the ordinary mother the positive loving feelings overwhelmingly dominate the hate, which enables both the mother and child to survive and thrive. Loving must always contain some ambivalent hate, but the love exceeds the hate. The child can come to feel secure in his or her mother’s love when her hate is experienced as managed and love-dominated. In this way, the movement from the paranoid–schizoid position to the depressive position is an intersubjective development – that is to say, a realisation of the relational connection between our mind and that of the other. Not only does the infant realise that the person that is hated is the same as the one that is loved but also that the mother who he or she has experienced as hating him or her is the same as the one they know loves them. I think this reformulates the depressive position in a more complete way by allowing inter-psychic as well as intra-psychic development; that is to say, the depressive position is essentially relational. And all the while, both the mother and child move back and forth from paranoid–schizoid to depressive loving and hating, integrating, disrupting, creating and stabilising love and hate anew.

The patient, the analyst and love

Why do patients usually seek psychotherapy? Now this is clearly a complex question and no general explanation applies to all. It is not true for all patients, but is probably true for most, that generally a person seeks psychotherapy because they experience problems in their intimate relationships and are having difficulties with loving and/or feeling lovable (Mann 1997a). In this respect, most psychotherapy is usually concerned with developing the relational capacity for intimacy and love. Again, Freud is quite explicit here: ‘Every psychoanalytic treatment is an attempt at liberating repressed love which has found a meagre outlet in the compromise of a symptom’ (1907: 90). Generally, when beginning therapy patients (and quite a number of therapists) do not feel lovable. They may feel either that they are empty, with no love inside them, or that their relationships are false, or, alternatively, they may feel full of negative experiences and badness (hate). Other patients might have a notion of love but find it difficult to express it. Of course, this inarticulation or inhibition is itself the habitual way the patient expresses their love. Predictably the patient’s problems with love find expression in the transference. Love and hate come to dominate the transference in all their manifestations, including erotic expression (Mann 1989, 1994, 1995, 1997a, 1997b, 1999, 2001; Green 1997). If it is a truism that patients fall in love with their therapists then the difficulties with love will emerge in how they love the therapist. In the same passage just cited Freud goes on to write: ‘that in the analytic psychotherapy too the re-awakened passion, whether it is love or hate, invariably chooses as its object the figure of the doctor’. But the therapy is also an opportunity for a new transformational object (Mann 1997a) so the repetition is never an exact replica of the past but becomes infused with the therapist’s capacity to be different.

Love can seem a risky business. Fairbairn (1940) makes the point that love can feel too threatening. Love can close down psychological distance between individuals and, therefore, can be experienced as a threat to a fragile sense of self. Hate, on the other hand, creates more distance and erects barriers against the potentially destructive nature of intimate contact with the other. I would elaborate this further and say that hate also enables the individual to maintain contact with others since it still maintains a passionate connection. However, the advantage of creating distance is that this enables a connection, a relationship, that does not threaten to smother the self. Schizoid traits in the personality may leave the individual feeling more comfortable inducing hate rather than love in libidinal objects. Dealing with hatred and aggression can, in this sense, be much safer than the intimacy of love. Describing sexual passion, Kernberg (1995) also points to a significant feature of mature love: that it implies an act of hope in our own goodness and the goodness of the other, that giving and receiving love will not do harm either to ourselves or the other. We trust that if somebody is inside us they will not do harm and that if we are inside them they will neither harm us nor be harmed. Love implies a mastery of ambivalence: that tenderness and concern will contain and detoxify aggression. This hope in the goodness of ourselves and the other will need to survive the vulnerable position that love places us in: when in love the individual runs the risk of severe hurt as the loved object may be lost, may die or reject us. Love thus forces the individual to face his or her dependency on the object that is needed. This has been poetically put by Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis: ‘If I love thee I thy death should fear.’ For these reasons love is a much more difficult emotion to tolerate and manage than hate. The ability to give and receive mature love requires suficient ego strength and a capacity to not be threatened by emotional proximity and distance, and a trust that tender intimacy will not result in aggression. A therapeutic issue from this is that most patients on entering psychotherapy do not have a trust in the hope that they and the therapist will survive the expected mutual aggression, that the intimacy of therapy could be loving rather than aggressively hateful. For therapy to achieve its optimal efficacy both the patient and the therapist will gradually need to acquire a sense that the other will not harm them.

Just because the patient experiences him or herself as unloving and unlovable this does not, of course, mean they are unlovable. Any individual can subjectively feel they are unlovable or unintelligent or unattractive or lacking a sense of humour whereas an observer might realistically perceive that individual to be quite lovable, bright, attractive or humorous. The point is that others might not experience us as we experience ourselves. On the other hand, though, if we do feel unlovable the repetitions of the transference in our relationships will often bring about enactment in the other leaving them feeling we are intrinsically unlovable, which then confirms our subjective experience of ourselves. Characteristically, what the patient initially brings in the transference is their dysfunctional way of loving (and hating). In that sense, the transference is how the patient loves the therapist. That is to say, they will love and hate the therapist the way they have loved and hated significant others from the past. This is the problem posed by the transference when somebody who feels themselves to be unlovable or unloving seeks therapy. The transference will often make it difficult for the therapist to have an authentic loving feeling towards them. In that sense, the patient makes him or herself unlovable and, through enactments, the therapist is likely to experience the patient in that way, thereby confirming the patient’s worst fears. The picture is further complicated when we introduce the therapist into the equation. As Gabbard notes:

However, the other person in the room, the analyst, also brings characteristic patterns of loving into the relationship. The love that each of them feels is in part a reaction to the specific nature of the other’s individuality so that the ‘love’ experienced by both patient and analyst is jointly constructed to some extent.

(Gabbard 1996: 110)

Though this chapter is essentially about love this cannot be addressed without reference to hate. There are plenty of thoroughly reasonable grounds why it is possible to hate somebody in a healthy way; indeed where hating is the only healthy response (see Chapter 9). In psychotherapy, just as a patient (and therapist) will bring a dysfunctional form of loving with varying degrees of incapacity to love, so too will they bring a more pathological, dysfunctional hate which disturbs this relationship. The importance of hate is that, like love, it is a passionate connection to an object and, therefore, locates the patient and therapist in intimate issues of aggression concerning fusion and differentiation: how each may destructively get inside the other or fight to remain separate. To establish a relationship with what is unlovable (hateful) in the patient might be the first stage in the therapist making authentic contact with him or her. Being aware of what the patient does to make us hate them or what it is about our own erotic subjectivity ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The desire for love and hate (by way of a poetic polemic)
• Part I More about love than hate
• Part II More about hate than love
• Index