“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.” Maya Angelou (poet)

It is a commonly heard social convention that Angelou’s view of hate represents a widespread noble ideal. The eradication of hate is reinforced with every image of violence in the media and by many iconic representatives of humanity. Nelson Mandela said, “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” This view was not echoed by a black psychologist in her paper to a local psychoanalytic conference recently, when she stated that a part of her “hates all fucking whites” (Mashigo, 2016) despite being of the generation self-referring as “born-frees” in South Africa, that is, those born into a post-Apartheid democratic society.

However, the view, whilst of great comfort to the human spirit that hate, and its representatives in manifest aggression, can be eradicated and replaced with unbridled love, appears to stand in contradiction to the basic representation of this mechanism in the human mind. This view, if fulfilled, would expose the mind to its own demise and leave it without a fundamental mechanism of adequate protection. To this end, I wish to state at the outset of this paper, that I hope to present a valid case for concluding that hate, and its derivatives in latent and manifest aggression, is, in its purest form, nothing more nor less than a mechanism of restoration. It has, I aim to argue, solved many a problem within the human mind, and without which it could not maintain sanity. To this end, the aggressive drive fulfils the mental function of the immune system of the body, its mental representative, whose aim is to recognise impingements that trigger disequilibrium and restore homeostasis to the psyche. In its normal state, aggression does not aim to ‘pick a fight’. It aims to rid itself of the source of disequilibrium and go back to a resting state. The forms of aggression that in their manifest state appear so destructive, represent perversions of this mechanism, whose effects become separated from their aim. In this paper, I hope to set out a thread of theory that will justify these claims.

Death Drive

Freud’s modified theory of the dual nature of the drives - sexuality and aggression - both competing and complimenting one the other, brought together the complex threads of his insights into psychic functioning. This brilliant theoretical unification, was not without its frustration, however, as Freud lamented his difficulty concretising a drive that for the most part operated by ‘stealth’, in a latent form. The apparently silent nature of the aggressive drive relegated it to the realm of the theoretical at the time, with empirical evidence of its mechanisms left either to conjecture or to its occasional combinations with the sexual drive in the form of sado-masochism, a fusion of the two drives.

The complicated nature of the aggressive drive rests in the divergence of it’s aims and effects, unlike the sexual drive which unifies both aims and effects. In the latter, eros aims to acquire an object for the purpose of discharge of the sexual drive, its aim in its pure form being unification with another for the purposes of co-creative and pro-creative fulfilment. There is no contradiction between its latent and manifest forms. The aggressive drive, however, which Freud for theoretical reasons termed the Death Drive, does not benefit from such convergence; rather, its latent form is one of quietude, of aversion to engagement, a preference for homeostasis in the mental system, no different from the immune system of the body remaining latent in the absence of impingements from pathogens that threaten to unsettle it. Whilst Freud himself did not connect the mental system of the death drive to the immune system of the body, his entire corpus of discovery into mental life is built upon the emergent properties of the mind from the experience of the soma. Mental ‘representatives’ emerge through bodily experience, the structure of mind itself carrying representations of the bodily relationship to the environment, such as the ego being the interface between the vast depths of the system Unconscious and the external environment, like “the crust of bread baked through”. Consciousness, says Freud, “emerges instead of a memory trace”, memory being the core substance that makes up the system Unconscious. It is a thin line, as it were, that separates consciousness, and the ego, from the vast depths of the Unconscious. Defensive systems too, albeit process driven, emerge through various developmental phases to give rise to mental representations of psycho-sexual foci at different times of developmental progression. As many authors have noted (e.g. Barratt) Freud stands at the head of a somatic psychology, a profound insight into the nature of emergent systems that in turn interface with, but cannot be reduced to, its somatic origins. If these observations are valid, it must be assumed also that aggression has emergent qualities that derive from, and come to act as representative of, some underlying somatic function. Whilst this may lend itself to the critique of a simple reductionism, it is plausible to make the case for many emergent systems that higher levels of complexity emerge from simpler ones, yet cannot be reduced back into them. A human being, with its infinite complexity, emerges from an egg and sperm, being a prime example of this principle.

It is probably fair to suggest that Freud never quite completed his theory of the function of the death drive and its aggressive derivatives, noting at the end of his brilliant work on Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that “Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken” (“what we cannot reach flying, we must reach limping.” (Freud, 1920, p.338), awaiting fresh methods of enquiry to guide our thinking. Recent decades’ research into the links between mind and body, seems to have corroborated much of Freud’s thinking but also, in my view, assisted in completing what felt for him a theory without evidence. For how can the paradox be resolved of trying to establish a proof for a drive that by definition ‘presents’ in a latent form. This point is how he ends his work, noting that, “the life instincts have so much more contact with our internal perception - emerging as breakers of the peace and constantly producing tensions whose release is felt as pleasure - while the death instincts seem to do their work unobtrusively.” (Freud, 1920, pp 337-338.).

Authors such as Mills (2006) have lamented the resistance within psychoanalysis to a proper engagement with this central and, in his view, an indispensable tenet of the mental anatomy, the “dialectical tension” between Eros and death, these drives remaining, he argues, “ontologically inseparable” (p.1). In fact, the downplaying of this theoretical tenet of the dual-model of mind, is to leave exposed, without explanation, the purpose and its manifestations of aggression, and the most prevalent of this in the world of hate in its many forms. Our exposure via the media to the vast and macabre forms of prejudice, violence, and ‘otherness’, finds little respite if our theoretical and clinical models are unable to map meaningfully the drivers of these perversions. Along with Solan (1999), I propose to consider narcissism and its preservation through aggression ‘as one of the psychic envelopes that function as the ‘immune system’ of our familiar sense of self while being permeable to excitations with the nonfamiliar other’ (p. 197). ‘Death-work for Freud (1933) was ultimately in the service of restoring or reinstating a previous state of undifferentiated internal being’ (p. 374), that being a state in which tension is reduced or eliminated. The death drive, in this reading, is not merely a force acting against arousal or pleasure but one which aims to restore quiescence when internal equilibrium is disturbed. As Mills writes, ‘Freud did not argue that death was the only aim of life, only that it maintained a dialectical tension in juxtaposition to a life principle under the ancient command of Eros, yet the two forces of mind remained ontologically inseparable’ (p. 374).

The death drive is, ultimately, according to Freud (1920) the ‘first drive’ (p. 38), since, although it appears to be a logical contradiction, the inanimate predates the animate, the quiescent state of non-being precedes being, and hence contains within it ‘a compulsion to return to an original inanimate state’ (p.38). In fact, Mills reminds us that Freud (1933) makes the point that the death drive ‘cannot fail to be present in every vital process’ (Freud, 1933 as cited in Mills, 2006, p. 376), since it is there from, and perhaps before, the beginning of life. As life emerges from the inanimate, it, therefore, carries with it the essence of a pull to stasis and restoration that acts in contest with the life drive.

Mills captures the broader notion of the death drive as restorative, arguing that the organism must have, as Freud conjectures, an intrinsic capacity to protect itself from powerful stimuli that create disequilibrium. This is done through a resistive process that operates internally and which is sensitive to intrusive encroachments from the outside, especially those that threaten it with potential destruction. In the body, the immune system appears to fulfil this function. The implication, as will be discussed below, is that the human mind is no exception to such a capacity, and itself has a mechanism to restore equilibrium through a restorative process. Mills makes the point that

Freud’s entire discourse is an economy of energetics designed to transform stimuli in the service of self-preservation, thus defending from both external and internal stimuli that create states of unpleasure. This example from embryology is extended to the psychical apparatus’ (p. 378, italics mine)

Mills, therefore, concludes that the aim of this mechanism is ultimately restorative, as Freud extends his hypothesis, ‘that all drives aim toward a restoration of earlier events or modes of being, namely unmodified quiescence’ (p. 378).

Perhaps some of the confusion to Freud’s notion of the death drive lies in the implication of the name since it seems to imply an innate tendency towards the destruction of the self, rather than, what is theoretically meant, as towards preservation of the self. The underlying aim of the death drive and its aggressive derivatives lie not in the destruction of the self but in ensuring the self is protected from impingements that threaten equilibrium. This reading of this drive is that aggression aims to act in the service of sustainability, of maintaining a trend towards balance and stasis, so that the organism, in its mental realm, remains viable. In the normal course, this function may be seen to act as the mental representation of the immune system of the body, whose aims are, in their purest form, modest. The immune system does not seek ‘conflict’ with pathogens that threaten the body, were they not to threaten the body. The immune system is, in its normal form, capable of a remarkable degree of differentiation, identifying friendly from hostile pathogens and attacking mercilessly those that threaten physiological integrity. Those that aid in the body’s health are allowed to do their work, such as friendly bacteria, whereas those identified as risky to health are attacked and destroyed.

It seems to me that much confusion has arisen around the interpretation that the death-drive aims for destruction. The underlying tenets of Freud’s identification of this drive do not rest on this - despite the name - since although the effects of the death drive may be destructive, its aims remain entirely benign. That is, the function of aggression and the aggressive drive, like the immune system, is to preserve homeostasis and to resist impingement that threatens it - its design is not in the reality of living, aiming towards destruction of the self, even if, theoretically, it’s ultimate aim is a circuitous path towards final homeostasis, which is, of course, death, a return from dust to dust. This conflation of its immediate function with its ultimate aim, is like accusing the somatic pain system of being anti-life because it disrupts homeostasis, rather than attempting to alert the system to pending damage that requires remedy. Pain is only a problem because you feel it - not because its aims are destructive. Without pain, survival would be compromised as no adequate mechanisms for internal communication of instability would be present.

The problem of this mental representative of the immune system lies in its apparent failure to be governed by objective signatures as to what constitutes risk to the organism. It’s ‘memory’, which the physical system can maintain via objective means, the foundation of why vaccines work, for example, does not apply in the mental realm. Memory, in the mental realm, is governed largely by the subjective, by what is perceived to threaten the integrity governing that individual mind. Subjectivity is immeasurable by any objective means, essentially, and relies on the subjectivity of the mind to discern risk from safe, that which heals from that which hurts. Associative processes govern this discrimination, the minutiae of early infantile experiences playing a disproportionally large role in the outcome of experience. Since threats to equilibrium in infancy can be felt to be an annihilating threat, their encoding into memory, or unconscious experience that registers as aversive, is greater. This makes aversive experience, from the point of view f the individual mind, encodable as if it were objective, since objectivity is really the criterion of the ‘real world’, rather than the metaphysical one, which for the individual, from the internal world of the individual, fulfils this criterion absolutely.

Subjectivity is only such from the vantage of the external object; aversive impingements that are encoded as noxious become, from the vantage point of the subject, entirely objective. Such mental pathogens, the stuff of psychic injury, have a signature to that mind which is recognisable through the mechanisms of Freud’s repetition compulsion, a form of memory that enables pathogenic stimuli to be recognised and remembered, forcing a cycle of recreation of experiences that require working though. The imprints of those impingements that were experienced as threatening to the organisms mental integrity, become encoded. To these memories, the mind returns repeatedly as a reminder of what has been experienced, and hence perceived to be, psychically pathogenic. From the point of view of the individual unconscious, this associative link is, in a manner of speaking, objectively determined, subjectivity being the perspective of the external object observing a reaction that may appear quite illogical or disproportionate to the stimuli itself. A borderline patient in a fit of rage, for example, because the therapist was one minute late, might seem to the outside observer to be disproportionate. But from the point of view of that patient, the annihilatory threat of abandonment might be a perfectly logical reason to fly into a self-protecting fury. This applies in the transference too, where enactments are the essence of the therapeutic process, bringing into actuality parental imagos that represent injuries to the mind, no matter how unintended they were. An infant who has reflux or colic, may feel persecuted by maternal affections, the breast, no matter how well-intended the breast may be.

The love in the hate of the mother may not correlate with the experience of the infant, whose internal world persecutes him for different reasons - such as an incompetent valve or spasms of the gut. Representations such as these, annihilatory as they may be from the perspective of the infant, require encoding into memory to protect the infant from states of disequilibrium so profound that psychic fragmentation results. The ability of the infant to fight back against these impingements, to attack the environment through its aggressive drive, escalating its cry as an inducement into the environment to force a remedy that restores equilibrium, returning the infant to a state of quiescence. From its perspective, the emotional reality represents a source of disequilibrium and threat that is as if it were objective. Cathexis of such aggression on internal representations enables its splitting off into perverse representations that have a life of their own, maintaining their character of an objective stimulus from the perspective of the individual.

Whilst often puzzling to the observer, including the clinician trying to understand why something apparently neutral, a facial expression or missed session during a holiday inducing transference enactments can be so dependent of subjective perceptions, but from the internal reality of the patient, entirely objective: “you did this to me!”, is not equivalent to a subjectivity. This ‘objective’ quality can be traced to its neurobiological roots, in the mechanism underlying the establishment of memory traces in response to aversive stimuli (Kandel, 2006). Once a neuroanatomical circuit is established, its encoding is, from the internal point of view, no less objective than the immune system’s recognition of a pathogen. Aversive stimuli, whether internal in the form of hunger or colic, or external in the form of a needle-stick or absent mother, will, if sufficiently prolonged, create memory circuits designed to protect the organism from future impingements of a similar sort.

Such internal recognition becomes the content of the Unconscious, the accumulation of memory built upon memory, or of associations that appear to have their own internal life, earlier memory traces influencing later memory traces, to create the illusion of subjectivity. That is, to an outsider, such as a therapist, the individual’s unique set of associations seem to be entirely of a subjective nature, often unrelated to, or at least disproportionately related to an external stimuli or impingement. But from an internal point of view, these memory imprints become entirely objective, mental representatives of an immune response to pathogenic stimuli of the sensorium and mental apparatus, and which when activated, evoke a mental response designed to neutralise the source of disequilibrium and return to quiescence.

This response, driven by aggression, identifies this source as if it were recognisable and objective, as pathogenic for the mental system, encoded neuroanatomically as pathogenic. This feature of how the mental system builds its identification of mental pathogens, assists in laying a conceptual foundation for the perversion of aggression, the manifestation of hate in forms that appear to have no basis, and no correlation to any identifiable triggers. It is this perverse form of hate that features so strongly in the dialogues of poets and ideologues, that lament the presence of hate in the world and postulate attractive fantasies of a utopian human discourse in which hate features no more and love becomes the eternal present, which “for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite”. But the reality of the nature of the human psyche is such that until a messianic age dawns in which the rules of nature are superseded by those more supernatural, hate will precede love and tower over it in its constant quest to undo the disequilibrium of mental life and in its stead restore stasis.

This paradoxical nature of the the aggressive drive, that its effects diverge so markedly from its aims, remains, ultimately, a key element of therapeutic and transference process: namely, that only through the working through of the injury, internal sources of disequilibrium based on historical injury, can the aggressive drive return to a latent state. It is aggression in its manifest forms, rather than its latent ones, that people universally express their disdain and abhorrence, and express the wish for a world in which hate is eradicated. It is a strange irony that it is not love that comes more naturally to the human heart, but hate, whose function is to maintain stasis before change. Whilst this would imply a regressive tendency that pulls against development in the normal course of life, it is fundamental to the human spirit that eros is tempered by the aggressive drive, the latter existing, as Freud points out, before the former. The inanimate, Freud points out, exists before the animate and must, therefore, carry in it the energetics of stasis (and its primitive foundational roots for aggression/ hate) from the moment life asserts itself.

From a meta-theoretical perspective, therefore, this suggests that hate comes more naturally, since it predates the energetics of eros and the life drive. In reality, this is perhaps less significant since the primary drives of eros and aggression are intertwining constantly and inextricably in a dialectic that cannot, even early on in life, be separated. The purpose of the death-drive is, in reality, not about destroying life so much as it is about preserving it, keeping stasis in the face of impingements, but whose roots are bound up in the inanimate state of quietude and rest that existed prior to life asserting itself. I concur with Solan’s (1999) point that, within the normal sphere of mental functioning, narcissism functions to maintain integrity of the core self in response to impingements that upset this equilibrium. Freud (1914) explained that narcissism is not simply about pathology or perversion ‘but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature’ (p. 74).

Preservation is, as mentioned earlier, subject to the vicissitudes of the perceptual apparatus, and the objective (from the intrapsychic point of view) encoding of what is pathogenic. More broadly, we might conjecture that such encoding as at the behest of an ‘immune’ system designed to recognise any threat to equilibrium, not only impingements that violate stasis though trigger mechanisms (such as pain) but any threat to the resources of the mental apparatus. That is to suggest that emotional supplies that come under the influence of threat, or loss of supplies that are part of normal emotional sustenance, would itself trigger an ‘immune response’ aimed at neutralising the source of such threat and restoring the source of supplies to its guaranteed place. Should, for example, the infant experience or perceive a threat of maternal loss, a rage response can be expected driven by this threat.

Competition for essential resources the absence of loss of the essential mother, or through competition for her supplies, may be perceived as annihilatory, setting off a cascade of rage against the perceived threat. At times, this may be the mother herself, or at least representation of the abandoning version of her, or a sibling that draws her resources away from the child. Sometimes, the hostility may target this source, this interloper threatening the exclusivity of access. It becomes apparent in clinical work, and tallies with these theoretical assumptions, that envy rears itself in both primitive infantile or more developed forms, as a mental representative of the threat of loss, a policeman against the perception of theft. Invariably, envy and aggression are linked, primitive envy and the insecurity associated with it, leading to attacks on the object to retrieve what is needed, or against the competition for these resources.

Murderous phantasies against siblings abound and often present in the threatened sibling forcing their way into the space in which the dyad is embraced, physically or mentally. The psychoanalytic assumption, argues Lawrence Josephs, (Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91:937–958), is that children in their later development are projecting their own romantic jealousy and retaliatory fury on to their oedipal rivals who have successfully poached the person with whom they deeply desire to mate. “The child is attributing to the oedipal rival the child’s own feelings of exclusion, jealousy, humiliation, and rage at being made into the ‘injured third party’ (Freud, 1910) in a love triangle.” Resources for the infant are immediate and annihilatory is threatened - the breast and maternal comforts - in later development about attachments and romantic phantasies of exclusive ownership of the romantic object as Joseph’s points out - but nonetheless are manifestations of a threat to resources, and which a rage/ immune response will likely be triggered.

Envy represents loss or the threat of loss, of actual or potential resources, which in the symbolic and emotional realm is bound to activate states of disequilibrium. Rivalry can reach murderous and macabre proportions in the mind of the child, morphing in later development into the common complaint amongst siblings that a parent loves the other child more, or presented in the often expressed question, “who do you love more?”, which is thinly disguised as a need for a guarantee of supplies that will not dwindle under the pressure of competition. Perceived rivals in love across every developmental age and stage represents an entirely abstract, yet fundamental source of both comfort and rage when these supply lines are under threat. It might need no mention that the degree of investment will be proportional to the threat of its loss, for a loss of investment, a libidinal de-cathexis born out of any cause, would make the threat of loss redundant. An ‘discarded’ ex-lover in the bed of another more often than not becomes irrelevant, provoking little envy or retribution, since in the process of decathecting, there is little left to threaten stasis.

Envy, and its aggressive attacks, are therefore only pertinent to an object imbued with value, that is, cathected with libido. The absence of such cathexis, defensive or through gradual attrition (which is not always defensive in nature but evolutionary), nullifies the threat of envious attacks, since loss is no longer mingled in with this particular object. It is this quality of envy that gives it the appearance of pure subjectivity, and of course, this is largely true. What one feels about someone, is after all, key to one’s libidinal investment in them. But once again, psychoanalytic researches teach us that through the associative mechanism meanings are attached to internal representations, imagos that from the frame of reference of the intrapsyche, are experienced as if they were objective realities, unshakeably persistent even in the face of the consequences and failures of enactments perpetrated under the influence of the repetition compulsion.

Such is its nature, that the repetition compulsion presents enigmatic challenges to the analyst: why would such a function be at all adaptive? It is well understood by now that under its influence, all manner of psychopathology is manifest and that is we were to distil the purpose of psychotherapy , it is to undo the compulsive nature of repetitive patterns from historical antecedents that continue to exert undue and often negative influence. In often destructive ways, the repetitions exert their influence relentlessly, a puzzling phenomenon that on the face it had no adaptive value for the individual. What possible benefit could accrue to a person repeating patterns in their life that bring loss, pain, or damage. Is nature this disingenuous? If some adaptive value is to be found, it must be for the evolutions of the species would be seriously compromised if the mind programmed by mindless repetition of no inherent value.

Natural economics suggests that there is no function in body or mind that is entirely superfluous to adaptive function. Repetition, in the mental sphere, is no exception to this rule - but why would it return to the very impingements that evoked disequilibrium to begin, and revisit them again and again, violating the inherent logic of any organism that will avoid impingements that threaten equilibrium. Part of the answer to this paradox lies in the theoretical assistance we get from Kandel (2006) and his work on memory, whose function is to encode neuroanatomically circuits that act to remind the organism of experiences that were aversive and threatening, beyond a critical valence. Minor aversive stimuli will trigger a response that is temporary. Prolonged exposure, beyond a critical threshold, appears to create circuits of encoded ideation, which able to recruit emotional centres of the brain can serve as immune identifiers in the mental realm. Memory is to the mind what the immune system is to the body, utilising aggression as its chief mechanism to neutralise sources of disequilibrium or the signature of a pathogenic trigger. In the somatic realm, “immunological memory” is the ability of the immune system to respond more rapidly and effectively to pathogens that have been encountered previously, and reflects the preexistence of a population of antigen-specific lymphocytes. This ability to identify potential pathogens in the somatic realm is mirrored in the mental one but in an apparently self-defeating way.

Memory lies at the heart of the repetition compulsion, a pattern to which the mind can return again and again as a mechanism aimed at encoding past ‘pathogenic triggers’, and alerting the individual to their risks at recreating disequilibrium. A symbolic activator of the past injury/ aversive event is likely to trigger an aggressive response because aggression is the mind’s mechanism whose aim is restoration. Memory is the mental representation of the body’s immunological memory, and aggression its means of defence. Nonetheless, it’s aim remains benign, merely the restoration of stasis. However far the reality of the destructive effects of such a response might be, proportional to the internal identification of the degree of threat it poses to the self, it’s aim is ultimately benign. Memory, the building blocks of the Unconscious, serves the function of recognition, ideation whose purpose is to identify pathogens that have previously incurred injury to that individual. Aggression is the response to such unconscious identification, aimed at eliminating the threat and returning to stasis. The peculiar characteristic of repetition, and the repetition compulsion identified by Freud, appears to be bound up with this function, of returning repeatedly to the memory of what is pathogenic, identifying signatures that trigger this memory, and then seeking to neutralise the threat. In this fashion, the unconscious silently gears itself towards scanning for and identifying threats and, when necessary, acting against them. In the somatic realm, this response had no effect on another person, but is murderous to pathogens venturing against it. But in the mental realm, the pathogenic trigger is invariable attachment-based, another person representing a pathogenic trigger, against which a response must be mounted.

Early object representations suffer projection, attributing to even neutral objects some of the experiences of early imagos. But it is also clinically obvious that not all objects are tarred with the same brush. Some associative elements must exist to remind the person of a familiar pathogen, and by such association, external objects, pathogenically neutral to the outside observer, become tainted with such internal representations. The age, gender, build, mannerisms of an external object must trigger by association a memory trace, which ideation will recruit affect to give expression to previous early experience. At times, a sensory stimulus, such as a smell or sound, appears to have the power to trigger a memory trace to life, even when such sensory memory is rooted in ancient personal history, long ‘forgotten’ to consciousness. At other times, such as in extreme trauma (violence, car accident), the density of experience in the process of the trauma leads to memory trying to encode the events, but in a situation of helplessness to effect outcomes.

Accordingly, the recruitment of all the senses into the inputting of memory facilitates unconscious identifiers being established for an ‘immune’ response which is immobilised - the aggressive response remaining ineffective at re-establishing equilibrium because it cannot be enacted. This may be either because one is helpless to effect outcomes or the threat of violence prevents any normal retaliatory response. This freezing of the immune response to an acute and annihilatory threat, may prove so overwhelming that a pathological post-traumatic response is effected, with all the symptom profile that is so familiar to clinicians working with post-traumatic effects. The link between somatic and mental responses should not, it is increasingly recognised, be separated, since the mind utilises neurochemistry to register its discontents and impingements, from which the encoding becomes unconscious memory, the reservoir of ideation that forms the foundation of mental immunity.

The effects of aggression on others is nonetheless perturbing - and in its manifest form often seems to develop an internal self-perpetuating life, separated from its internal roots. If the immune system of the body could manifestly attack the external environment too, this would be cause for concern. The mental realm does precisely such a thing - brings the perceived source of attack, invariably represented in and by external objects, into the realm of defence. Often, the original cause for this can no longer be found or recognised, at least not consciously. This form of perversion of the aggressive drive is not unlike perversion in sexuality - the splitting off into a self-perpetuating cycle a component of how libido has cathected, to an object, part object, or even ideation represented in phantasy into which displaced affects and strivings have been placed. However, because some people have foot fetishes, or enjoy being tied with rope in the sexual encounter, or commit acts of sexual violence, does not make sex bad. Whilst some for religious reasons may deem sexuality as inherently perverse, psychologists do not dismiss the fundamentals of sexuality as perverse because some people manifest perverse forms of it, nor deride the sexual drive as pathological because some people may recruit it into the service of pathological aims. Aggression too in its purer forms has aims that are essentially benign, even if at times some people represent it in malignant forms that violate rather than mitigate, in line with its aims.

I wish to digress into a review of some case material to assist in illustrating some of the mechanisms described above. The person in question is a man whose early years spent under the smothering protectiveness of an over-anxious mother, to whom he was exceptionally close and bonded. His home was dominated by his father, a threatening presence of a disciplinarian, against whose wrath the submissive mother was helpless to protect her offspring. The mother was described by his sister as a “very soft and tender person, a compensatory element between an almost too harsh father and the very lively children. Parents quarrelled mainly about the children, and he in particular challenged his father to extreme harshness and who got his sound thrashing everyday. His mother, however, caressed him, trying to obtain with her kindness what his father could not with his harshness”. According to the man, his father was prone to sudden bursts of temper and would then immediately hit out. He did not love his father but in fact feared him all the more. His poor beloved mother, he used to remark, to whom he was so attached, lived in constant concern about the beating he had to take, sometimes waiting outside the door as he was thrashed.

Later in life this seemed to be associated with a rather patronising contempt for the submissiveness of women and his own thirst for success and dominance. He seemed to struggle forming deep personal relationships as a result and battled with alternating between self-hatred and marked narcissism. His adolescence was ‘very painful’, and marked by increasing tension with his father, who died suddenly when he was about 13 years, leaving him to step into the shoes of the man of the house, and perhaps increasing the closeness with his mother. After school, he was cosseted and looked after by his doting mother, her sister (his aunt) and his own little sister, who washed cleaned and cooked for him. He spent his time on the piano they had bought for him, drawing, painting, reading and writing poetry, and in the evening going to the opera or theatre, fantasising most of the time about himself and his future as a great artist.

A friendship he developed became part of his evening routine of theatre and opera, and this friendship helped this weedy young man to navigate his life, albeit a rather aimless one at this point, and perhaps gain some self-confidence. He became passionate about classical music, describing listening to Wagner as an almost religious experience, an example of supreme artistic genius that this (sensitive young man) wanted to emulate. This was effected later when his mother became ill with incurable cancer, and he became distracted by tending her during her illness and was anguished at the pain she suffered. This perhaps added to his resolve to become an artist and he made plans to apply and enter the Academy of Fine Arts. Armed with a thick pile of drawings he sat various entrance exams but did not succeed. His test drawing were described as “unsatisfactory”. He had been convinced he said, that passing the entrance exam would be ‘child’s play’. “I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue”. A double blow came in the form of his (young, at mid-forties) mother’s death, leaving the young man ‘prostrate with grief’ (according to his General Practitioner) and a ‘dreadful blow” (as he himself put it), leaving him feeling alone and bereft. The double loss in a four month period was a crushing blow to his already fragile sense of self and his fantasies of effortless path to success as an artist.

Nonetheless, he decided to try again and enter the academy but again admitted angrily, “they rejected me, they threw me out, they turned me down”. The blow to his self-esteem was profound and the bitterness showed, often through flaring up in an instant into boundless anger and violent denunciation of all he thought were persecuting him, including mankind in general who did not understand him, or appreciate him, and who left him feeling persecuted and cheated. These tirades of hate directed at everything and everybody were those of an apparently outsized ego desperately wanting acceptance and unable to come to terms with his personal insignificance with failure and mediocrity. This seemed to affect his sexuality too, in which he avoided contact with women, apparently repelled by homosexuality, and refrained from masturbation, although apparently was both horrified and fascinated by prostitution.

During this period he did not drink or smoke, preferring milk or fruit juice, became vegetarian, and in his struggled to survive economically, spend his small amount of money on opera or classical concerts. This second failure a year later to get into the Arts Academy left him bereft, his hopes of an artistic career now laying totally in ruins. He felt like a confirmed failure. Incidentally, these experiences also sensitised him to prejudice, which worried him and encountering it left him unsettled, perhaps understanding the experience of being marginalised. Once he came across an anti-Semitic pamphlet which disturbed him and left him saying: “it seemed to me so monstrous, the accusations so boundless, that tormented by the fear of doing injustice, I again became anxious and uncertain”.

This is the story of a sensitive and wounded young man, suffering narcissistic injuries from his father, narcissistic gratification from his mother, and later rejection of his dreams of great art - pained, anxious, feeble, weedy but as a young man, facing these failures and rejections, finding himself also increasingly enraged, aimless, angry, and emotionally isolated. We don’t normally associate such sensitivity, anxiety, artistic passion, love of music and so on with merciless cruelty. Yet presumably the narcissistic injury underlying this personality lent itself to human devastation unparalleled in the history of humankind.

This man became, directly and indirectly, responsible for more deaths in human history than any other person. The 50 million souls who lost their lives in the Second World War may not have, save for the personality of Adolf Hitler, the sensitive artist with aspirations for artistic greatness that so eluded him. The case is useful in assisting to demonstrate the link between underlying injury and aggression, forming itself into a perverse loop separated from its original traumas and links. Nonetheless, the aggression served to constantly expunge the defeated, undignified, humiliated person and nation that was Germany in the years between the Wars.

A reading of this case suggests that the inner world of Hitler was contorted by narcissistic injury and humiliation, betrayal and deflation. Beginning in his early parental relationships, his rage response to perceived injury created a volatile and thin-skinned character, becoming increasingly embittered at the perceived injustices of the world. Himself as a victim of these, he found a scaffolding on which to enact these bitter internal representations, finding, perhaps opportunistically in the political climate of the day, scapegoats upon which his projections could be manifest. The perverse form of his aggressive tirades does not eradicate the underlying perception of injury to the Self, provoking a response from his psychological ‘immune system’, aimed at restoring equilibrium and stasis.

Whilst the complexity of the contributing factors to the historical periods of the Wars and the environment in which Hitler arose are manifold, I use this case to illustrate one mechanism manifest by one man. In the couple system, manifest aggression is commonplace, and invariable its aims are as an antidote to perceived slights and injuries, since those closest and to whom investment is greatest, will threaten the self so much more than those distance or irrelevant. The opposite of love is not hate - but indifference. Love and hate are close allies in the reduction of emotional disequilibrium to injuries perceived. Without love, there is less likelihood of hate, since without love, the investment in an attachment, there is less likelihood of hurt. Without hurt, there is no disequilibrium, nor aggression in its wake assigned the task of restoring it.

So much of the aggression we see enacted in both our consulting rooms and the media, is suggestive of something quite other to what I am describing here. Perverse manifestations of aggression abound but these are perversions, technically, the separation of the (aggressive) response from its underlying drivers. The link to the unconscious becomes unknown to consciousness and what remains to consciousness is the manifest form of the response, attaching itself to other objects as if the internal objects are no longer represented. When a number of people bind themselves together around an ideological scaffolding onto which these perverse manifestations can be expressed, group violence becomes acceptable to the group and can freely manifest itself in this perverse form, separated from the internal impulse to personal object representations that may inhabit the internal world of the individual psyche. The recurring nature of emotional aggression in the consulting room between couples, indicates often as-if it were a response to something distant, a memory or associative cascade triggering affects that do not seem to belong fully in the present.

The aggressive cascade often seems to be an attempt to remove the perceived injury creating hurt by the partner’s omission or commission, and find a route to the restoration of emotional equilibrium. Loss if sexual interest, for example, may have nothing to do with the partner directly, yet can trigger significant hurt and rage because of the perception of injury. The intent of the mechanism remains benign. It’s manifestations to the external world may be quite malignant. Whilst Mandela’s point would be so wonderful, that people must learn to hate, and love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite, the psychic reality is that hate is as natural as love and that without it, without an aggressive response, the psyche would have no mechanism to restore equilibrium and protect itself from impingements. Love without hate might remain the purview of angels - but humans are not spared the struggles of ambivalence, especially to those nearest and dearest who have the capacity to create disequilibrium. In its purest form, the aggressive drive, and its manifestations in the feelings of hate, serve no other purpose than to maintain core functioning and integrity of the psyche. If it could achieve its aims silently, none of us would be any the wiser that it even existed.

MORE POSTS

The Couple and its Instincts

The First Seduction: Exploring Resistance to the Acknowledgement of Maternal Sexual Abuse

The Phallic Container in the Post-Partum Couple

Till Death-Drive Us Apart: Associating Injury and Aggression in the Couple

The Immunizing Function of Aggression (in the Couple): an article for new therapists

The Curious Case of La Petite Mort

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.” Maya Angelou (poet)

It is a commonly heard social convention that Angelou’s view of hate represents a widespread noble ideal. The eradication of hate is reinforced with every image of violence in the media and by many iconic representatives of humanity. Nelson Mandela said, “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” This view was not echoed by a black psychologist in her paper to a local psychoanalytic conference recently, when she stated that a part of her “hates all fucking whites” (Mashigo, 2016) despite being of the generation self-referring as “born-frees” in South Africa, that is, those born into a post-Apartheid democratic society.

However, the view, whilst of great comfort to the human spirit that hate, and its representatives in manifest aggression, can be eradicated and replaced with unbridled love, appears to stand in contradiction to the basic representation of this mechanism in the human mind. This view, if fulfilled, would expose the mind to its own demise and leave it without a fundamental mechanism of adequate protection. To this end, I wish to state at the outset of this paper, that I hope to present a valid case for concluding that hate, and its derivatives in latent and manifest aggression, is, in its purest form, nothing more nor less than a mechanism of restoration. It has, I aim to argue, solved many a problem within the human mind, and without which it could not maintain sanity. To this end, the aggressive drive fulfils the mental function of the immune system of the body, its mental representative, whose aim is to recognise impingements that trigger disequilibrium and restore homeostasis to the psyche. In its normal state, aggression does not aim to ‘pick a fight’. It aims to rid itself of the source of disequilibrium and go back to a resting state. The forms of aggression that in their manifest state appear so destructive, represent perversions of this mechanism, whose effects become separated from their aim. In this paper, I hope to set out a thread of theory that will justify these claims.

Death Drive

Freud’s modified theory of the dual nature of the drives - sexuality and aggression - both competing and complimenting one the other, brought together the complex threads of his insights into psychic functioning. This brilliant theoretical unification, was not without its frustration, however, as Freud lamented his difficulty concretising a drive that for the most part operated by ‘stealth’, in a latent form. The apparently silent nature of the aggressive drive relegated it to the realm of the theoretical at the time, with empirical evidence of its mechanisms left either to conjecture or to its occasional combinations with the sexual drive in the form of sado-masochism, a fusion of the two drives.

The complicated nature of the aggressive drive rests in the divergence of it’s aims and effects, unlike the sexual drive which unifies both aims and effects. In the latter, eros aims to acquire an object for the purpose of discharge of the sexual drive, its aim in its pure form being unification with another for the purposes of co-creative and pro-creative fulfilment. There is no contradiction between its latent and manifest forms. The aggressive drive, however, which Freud for theoretical reasons termed the Death Drive, does not benefit from such convergence; rather, its latent form is one of quietude, of aversion to engagement, a preference for homeostasis in the mental system, no different from the immune system of the body remaining latent in the absence of impingements from pathogens that threaten to unsettle it. Whilst Freud himself did not connect the mental system of the death drive to the immune system of the body, his entire corpus of discovery into mental life is built upon the emergent properties of the mind from the experience of the soma. Mental ‘representatives’ emerge through bodily experience, the structure of mind itself carrying representations of the bodily relationship to the environment, such as the ego being the interface between the vast depths of the system Unconscious and the external environment, like “the crust of bread baked through”. Consciousness, says Freud, “emerges instead of a memory trace”, memory being the core substance that makes up the system Unconscious. It is a thin line, as it were, that separates consciousness, and the ego, from the vast depths of the Unconscious. Defensive systems too, albeit process driven, emerge through various developmental phases to give rise to mental representations of psycho-sexual foci at different times of developmental progression. As many authors have noted (e.g. Barratt) Freud stands at the head of a somatic psychology, a profound insight into the nature of emergent systems that in turn interface with, but cannot be reduced to, its somatic origins. If these observations are valid, it must be assumed also that aggression has emergent qualities that derive from, and come to act as representative of, some underlying somatic function. Whilst this may lend itself to the critique of a simple reductionism, it is plausible to make the case for many emergent systems that higher levels of complexity emerge from simpler ones, yet cannot be reduced back into them. A human being, with its infinite complexity, emerges from an egg and sperm, being a prime example of this principle.

It is probably fair to suggest that Freud never quite completed his theory of the function of the death drive and its aggressive derivatives, noting at the end of his brilliant work on Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that “Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken” (“what we cannot reach flying, we must reach limping.” (Freud, 1920, p.338), awaiting fresh methods of enquiry to guide our thinking. Recent decades’ research into the links between mind and body, seems to have corroborated much of Freud’s thinking but also, in my view, assisted in completing what felt for him a theory without evidence. For how can the paradox be resolved of trying to establish a proof for a drive that by definition ‘presents’ in a latent form. This point is how he ends his work, noting that, “the life instincts have so much more contact with our internal perception - emerging as breakers of the peace and constantly producing tensions whose release is felt as pleasure - while the death instincts seem to do their work unobtrusively.” (Freud, 1920, pp 337-338.).

Authors such as Mills (2006) have lamented the resistance within psychoanalysis to a proper engagement with this central and, in his view, an indispensable tenet of the mental anatomy, the “dialectical tension” between Eros and death, these drives remaining, he argues, “ontologically inseparable” (p.1). In fact, the downplaying of this theoretical tenet of the dual-model of mind, is to leave exposed, without explanation, the purpose and its manifestations of aggression, and the most prevalent of this in the world of hate in its many forms. Our exposure via the media to the vast and macabre forms of prejudice, violence, and ‘otherness’, finds little respite if our theoretical and clinical models are unable to map meaningfully the drivers of these perversions. Along with Solan (1999), I propose to consider narcissism and its preservation through aggression ‘as one of the psychic envelopes that function as the ‘immune system’ of our familiar sense of self while being permeable to excitations with the nonfamiliar other’ (p. 197). ‘Death-work for Freud (1933) was ultimately in the service of restoring or reinstating a previous state of undifferentiated internal being’ (p. 374), that being a state in which tension is reduced or eliminated. The death drive, in this reading, is not merely a force acting against arousal or pleasure but one which aims to restore quiescence when internal equilibrium is disturbed. As Mills writes, ‘Freud did not argue that death was the only aim of life, only that it maintained a dialectical tension in juxtaposition to a life principle under the ancient command of Eros, yet the two forces of mind remained ontologically inseparable’ (p. 374).

The death drive is, ultimately, according to Freud (1920) the ‘first drive’ (p. 38), since, although it appears to be a logical contradiction, the inanimate predates the animate, the quiescent state of non-being precedes being, and hence contains within it ‘a compulsion to return to an original inanimate state’ (p.38). In fact, Mills reminds us that Freud (1933) makes the point that the death drive ‘cannot fail to be present in every vital process’ (Freud, 1933 as cited in Mills, 2006, p. 376), since it is there from, and perhaps before, the beginning of life. As life emerges from the inanimate, it, therefore, carries with it the essence of a pull to stasis and restoration that acts in contest with the life drive.

Mills captures the broader notion of the death drive as restorative, arguing that the organism must have, as Freud conjectures, an intrinsic capacity to protect itself from powerful stimuli that create disequilibrium. This is done through a resistive process that operates internally and which is sensitive to intrusive encroachments from the outside, especially those that threaten it with potential destruction. In the body, the immune system appears to fulfil this function. The implication, as will be discussed below, is that the human mind is no exception to such a capacity, and itself has a mechanism to restore equilibrium through a restorative process. Mills makes the point that

Freud’s entire discourse is an economy of energetics designed to transform stimuli in the service of self-preservation, thus defending from both external and internal stimuli that create states of unpleasure. This example from embryology is extended to the psychical apparatus’ (p. 378, italics mine)

Mills, therefore, concludes that the aim of this mechanism is ultimately restorative, as Freud extends his hypothesis, ‘that all drives aim toward a restoration of earlier events or modes of being, namely unmodified quiescence’ (p. 378).

Perhaps some of the confusion to Freud’s notion of the death drive lies in the implication of the name since it seems to imply an innate tendency towards the destruction of the self, rather than, what is theoretically meant, as towards preservation of the self. The underlying aim of the death drive and its aggressive derivatives lie not in the destruction of the self but in ensuring the self is protected from impingements that threaten equilibrium. This reading of this drive is that aggression aims to act in the service of sustainability, of maintaining a trend towards balance and stasis, so that the organism, in its mental realm, remains viable. In the normal course, this function may be seen to act as the mental representation of the immune system of the body, whose aims are, in their purest form, modest. The immune system does not seek ‘conflict’ with pathogens that threaten the body, were they not to threaten the body. The immune system is, in its normal form, capable of a remarkable degree of differentiation, identifying friendly from hostile pathogens and attacking mercilessly those that threaten physiological integrity. Those that aid in the body’s health are allowed to do their work, such as friendly bacteria, whereas those identified as risky to health are attacked and destroyed.

It seems to me that much confusion has arisen around the interpretation that the death-drive aims for destruction. The underlying tenets of Freud’s identification of this drive do not rest on this - despite the name - since although the effects of the death drive may be destructive, its aims remain entirely benign. That is, the function of aggression and the aggressive drive, like the immune system, is to preserve homeostasis and to resist impingement that threatens it - its design is not in the reality of living, aiming towards destruction of the self, even if, theoretically, it’s ultimate aim is a circuitous path towards final homeostasis, which is, of course, death, a return from dust to dust. This conflation of its immediate function with its ultimate aim, is like accusing the somatic pain system of being anti-life because it disrupts homeostasis, rather than attempting to alert the system to pending damage that requires remedy. Pain is only a problem because you feel it - not because its aims are destructive. Without pain, survival would be compromised as no adequate mechanisms for internal communication of instability would be present.

The problem of this mental representative of the immune system lies in its apparent failure to be governed by objective signatures as to what constitutes risk to the organism. It’s ‘memory’, which the physical system can maintain via objective means, the foundation of why vaccines work, for example, does not apply in the mental realm. Memory, in the mental realm, is governed largely by the subjective, by what is perceived to threaten the integrity governing that individual mind. Subjectivity is immeasurable by any objective means, essentially, and relies on the subjectivity of the mind to discern risk from safe, that which heals from that which hurts. Associative processes govern this discrimination, the minutiae of early infantile experiences playing a disproportionally large role in the outcome of experience. Since threats to equilibrium in infancy can be felt to be an annihilating threat, their encoding into memory, or unconscious experience that registers as aversive, is greater. This makes aversive experience, from the point of view f the individual mind, encodable as if it were objective, since objectivity is really the criterion of the ‘real world’, rather than the metaphysical one, which for the individual, from the internal world of the individual, fulfils this criterion absolutely.

Subjectivity is only such from the vantage of the external object; aversive impingements that are encoded as noxious become, from the vantage point of the subject, entirely objective. Such mental pathogens, the stuff of psychic injury, have a signature to that mind which is recognisable through the mechanisms of Freud’s repetition compulsion, a form of memory that enables pathogenic stimuli to be recognised and remembered, forcing a cycle of recreation of experiences that require working though. The imprints of those impingements that were experienced as threatening to the organisms mental integrity, become encoded. To these memories, the mind returns repeatedly as a reminder of what has been experienced, and hence perceived to be, psychically pathogenic. From the point of view of the individual unconscious, this associative link is, in a manner of speaking, objectively determined, subjectivity being the perspective of the external object observing a reaction that may appear quite illogical or disproportionate to the stimuli itself. A borderline patient in a fit of rage, for example, because the therapist was one minute late, might seem to the outside observer to be disproportionate. But from the point of view of that patient, the annihilatory threat of abandonment might be a perfectly logical reason to fly into a self-protecting fury. This applies in the transference too, where enactments are the essence of the therapeutic process, bringing into actuality parental imagos that represent injuries to the mind, no matter how unintended they were. An infant who has reflux or colic, may feel persecuted by maternal affections, the breast, no matter how well-intended the breast may be.

The love in the hate of the mother may not correlate with the experience of the infant, whose internal world persecutes him for different reasons - such as an incompetent valve or spasms of the gut. Representations such as these, annihilatory as they may be from the perspective of the infant, require encoding into memory to protect the infant from states of disequilibrium so profound that psychic fragmentation results. The ability of the infant to fight back against these impingements, to attack the environment through its aggressive drive, escalating its cry as an inducement into the environment to force a remedy that restores equilibrium, returning the infant to a state of quiescence. From its perspective, the emotional reality represents a source of disequilibrium and threat that is as if it were objective. Cathexis of such aggression on internal representations enables its splitting off into perverse representations that have a life of their own, maintaining their character of an objective stimulus from the perspective of the individual.

Whilst often puzzling to the observer, including the clinician trying to understand why something apparently neutral, a facial expression or missed session during a holiday inducing transference enactments can be so dependent of subjective perceptions, but from the internal reality of the patient, entirely objective: “you did this to me!”, is not equivalent to a subjectivity. This ‘objective’ quality can be traced to its neurobiological roots, in the mechanism underlying the establishment of memory traces in response to aversive stimuli (Kandel, 2006). Once a neuroanatomical circuit is established, its encoding is, from the internal point of view, no less objective than the immune system’s recognition of a pathogen. Aversive stimuli, whether internal in the form of hunger or colic, or external in the form of a needle-stick or absent mother, will, if sufficiently prolonged, create memory circuits designed to protect the organism from future impingements of a similar sort.

Such internal recognition becomes the content of the Unconscious, the accumulation of memory built upon memory, or of associations that appear to have their own internal life, earlier memory traces influencing later memory traces, to create the illusion of subjectivity. That is, to an outsider, such as a therapist, the individual’s unique set of associations seem to be entirely of a subjective nature, often unrelated to, or at least disproportionately related to an external stimuli or impingement. But from an internal point of view, these memory imprints become entirely objective, mental representatives of an immune response to pathogenic stimuli of the sensorium and mental apparatus, and which when activated, evoke a mental response designed to neutralise the source of disequilibrium and return to quiescence.

This response, driven by aggression, identifies this source as if it were recognisable and objective, as pathogenic for the mental system, encoded neuroanatomically as pathogenic. This feature of how the mental system builds its identification of mental pathogens, assists in laying a conceptual foundation for the perversion of aggression, the manifestation of hate in forms that appear to have no basis, and no correlation to any identifiable triggers. It is this perverse form of hate that features so strongly in the dialogues of poets and ideologues, that lament the presence of hate in the world and postulate attractive fantasies of a utopian human discourse in which hate features no more and love becomes the eternal present, which “for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite”. But the reality of the nature of the human psyche is such that until a messianic age dawns in which the rules of nature are superseded by those more supernatural, hate will precede love and tower over it in its constant quest to undo the disequilibrium of mental life and in its stead restore stasis.

This paradoxical nature of the the aggressive drive, that its effects diverge so markedly from its aims, remains, ultimately, a key element of therapeutic and transference process: namely, that only through the working through of the injury, internal sources of disequilibrium based on historical injury, can the aggressive drive return to a latent state. It is aggression in its manifest forms, rather than its latent ones, that people universally express their disdain and abhorrence, and express the wish for a world in which hate is eradicated. It is a strange irony that it is not love that comes more naturally to the human heart, but hate, whose function is to maintain stasis before change. Whilst this would imply a regressive tendency that pulls against development in the normal course of life, it is fundamental to the human spirit that eros is tempered by the aggressive drive, the latter existing, as Freud points out, before the former. The inanimate, Freud points out, exists before the animate and must, therefore, carry in it the energetics of stasis (and its primitive foundational roots for aggression/ hate) from the moment life asserts itself.

From a meta-theoretical perspective, therefore, this suggests that hate comes more naturally, since it predates the energetics of eros and the life drive. In reality, this is perhaps less significant since the primary drives of eros and aggression are intertwining constantly and inextricably in a dialectic that cannot, even early on in life, be separated. The purpose of the death-drive is, in reality, not about destroying life so much as it is about preserving it, keeping stasis in the face of impingements, but whose roots are bound up in the inanimate state of quietude and rest that existed prior to life asserting itself. I concur with Solan’s (1999) point that, within the normal sphere of mental functioning, narcissism functions to maintain integrity of the core self in response to impingements that upset this equilibrium. Freud (1914) explained that narcissism is not simply about pathology or perversion ‘but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature’ (p. 74).

Preservation is, as mentioned earlier, subject to the vicissitudes of the perceptual apparatus, and the objective (from the intrapsychic point of view) encoding of what is pathogenic. More broadly, we might conjecture that such encoding as at the behest of an ‘immune’ system designed to recognise any threat to equilibrium, not only impingements that violate stasis though trigger mechanisms (such as pain) but any threat to the resources of the mental apparatus. That is to suggest that emotional supplies that come under the influence of threat, or loss of supplies that are part of normal emotional sustenance, would itself trigger an ‘immune response’ aimed at neutralising the source of such threat and restoring the source of supplies to its guaranteed place. Should, for example, the infant experience or perceive a threat of maternal loss, a rage response can be expected driven by this threat.

Competition for essential resources the absence of loss of the essential mother, or through competition for her supplies, may be perceived as annihilatory, setting off a cascade of rage against the perceived threat. At times, this may be the mother herself, or at least representation of the abandoning version of her, or a sibling that draws her resources away from the child. Sometimes, the hostility may target this source, this interloper threatening the exclusivity of access. It becomes apparent in clinical work, and tallies with these theoretical assumptions, that envy rears itself in both primitive infantile or more developed forms, as a mental representative of the threat of loss, a policeman against the perception of theft. Invariably, envy and aggression are linked, primitive envy and the insecurity associated with it, leading to attacks on the object to retrieve what is needed, or against the competition for these resources.

Murderous phantasies against siblings abound and often present in the threatened sibling forcing their way into the space in which the dyad is embraced, physically or mentally. The psychoanalytic assumption, argues Lawrence Josephs, (Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91:937–958), is that children in their later development are projecting their own romantic jealousy and retaliatory fury on to their oedipal rivals who have successfully poached the person with whom they deeply desire to mate. “The child is attributing to the oedipal rival the child’s own feelings of exclusion, jealousy, humiliation, and rage at being made into the ‘injured third party’ (Freud, 1910) in a love triangle.” Resources for the infant are immediate and annihilatory is threatened - the breast and maternal comforts - in later development about attachments and romantic phantasies of exclusive ownership of the romantic object as Joseph’s points out - but nonetheless are manifestations of a threat to resources, and which a rage/ immune response will likely be triggered.

Envy represents loss or the threat of loss, of actual or potential resources, which in the symbolic and emotional realm is bound to activate states of disequilibrium. Rivalry can reach murderous and macabre proportions in the mind of the child, morphing in later development into the common complaint amongst siblings that a parent loves the other child more, or presented in the often expressed question, “who do you love more?”, which is thinly disguised as a need for a guarantee of supplies that will not dwindle under the pressure of competition. Perceived rivals in love across every developmental age and stage represents an entirely abstract, yet fundamental source of both comfort and rage when these supply lines are under threat. It might need no mention that the degree of investment will be proportional to the threat of its loss, for a loss of investment, a libidinal de-cathexis born out of any cause, would make the threat of loss redundant. An ‘discarded’ ex-lover in the bed of another more often than not becomes irrelevant, provoking little envy or retribution, since in the process of decathecting, there is little left to threaten stasis.

Envy, and its aggressive attacks, are therefore only pertinent to an object imbued with value, that is, cathected with libido. The absence of such cathexis, defensive or through gradual attrition (which is not always defensive in nature but evolutionary), nullifies the threat of envious attacks, since loss is no longer mingled in with this particular object. It is this quality of envy that gives it the appearance of pure subjectivity, and of course, this is largely true. What one feels about someone, is after all, key to one’s libidinal investment in them. But once again, psychoanalytic researches teach us that through the associative mechanism meanings are attached to internal representations, imagos that from the frame of reference of the intrapsyche, are experienced as if they were objective realities, unshakeably persistent even in the face of the consequences and failures of enactments perpetrated under the influence of the repetition compulsion.

Such is its nature, that the repetition compulsion presents enigmatic challenges to the analyst: why would such a function be at all adaptive? It is well understood by now that under its influence, all manner of psychopathology is manifest and that is we were to distil the purpose of psychotherapy , it is to undo the compulsive nature of repetitive patterns from historical antecedents that continue to exert undue and often negative influence. In often destructive ways, the repetitions exert their influence relentlessly, a puzzling phenomenon that on the face it had no adaptive value for the individual. What possible benefit could accrue to a person repeating patterns in their life that bring loss, pain, or damage. Is nature this disingenuous? If some adaptive value is to be found, it must be for the evolutions of the species would be seriously compromised if the mind programmed by mindless repetition of no inherent value.

Natural economics suggests that there is no function in body or mind that is entirely superfluous to adaptive function. Repetition, in the mental sphere, is no exception to this rule - but why would it return to the very impingements that evoked disequilibrium to begin, and revisit them again and again, violating the inherent logic of any organism that will avoid impingements that threaten equilibrium. Part of the answer to this paradox lies in the theoretical assistance we get from Kandel (2006) and his work on memory, whose function is to encode neuroanatomically circuits that act to remind the organism of experiences that were aversive and threatening, beyond a critical valence. Minor aversive stimuli will trigger a response that is temporary. Prolonged exposure, beyond a critical threshold, appears to create circuits of encoded ideation, which able to recruit emotional centres of the brain can serve as immune identifiers in the mental realm. Memory is to the mind what the immune system is to the body, utilising aggression as its chief mechanism to neutralise sources of disequilibrium or the signature of a pathogenic trigger. In the somatic realm, “immunological memory” is the ability of the immune system to respond more rapidly and effectively to pathogens that have been encountered previously, and reflects the preexistence of a population of antigen-specific lymphocytes. This ability to identify potential pathogens in the somatic realm is mirrored in the mental one but in an apparently self-defeating way.

Memory lies at the heart of the repetition compulsion, a pattern to which the mind can return again and again as a mechanism aimed at encoding past ‘pathogenic triggers’, and alerting the individual to their risks at recreating disequilibrium. A symbolic activator of the past injury/ aversive event is likely to trigger an aggressive response because aggression is the mind’s mechanism whose aim is restoration. Memory is the mental representation of the body’s immunological memory, and aggression its means of defence. Nonetheless, it’s aim remains benign, merely the restoration of stasis. However far the reality of the destructive effects of such a response might be, proportional to the internal identification of the degree of threat it poses to the self, it’s aim is ultimately benign. Memory, the building blocks of the Unconscious, serves the function of recognition, ideation whose purpose is to identify pathogens that have previously incurred injury to that individual. Aggression is the response to such unconscious identification, aimed at eliminating the threat and returning to stasis. The peculiar characteristic of repetition, and the repetition compulsion identified by Freud, appears to be bound up with this function, of returning repeatedly to the memory of what is pathogenic, identifying signatures that trigger this memory, and then seeking to neutralise the threat. In this fashion, the unconscious silently gears itself towards scanning for and identifying threats and, when necessary, acting against them. In the somatic realm, this response had no effect on another person, but is murderous to pathogens venturing against it. But in the mental realm, the pathogenic trigger is invariable attachment-based, another person representing a pathogenic trigger, against which a response must be mounted.

Early object representations suffer projection, attributing to even neutral objects some of the experiences of early imagos. But it is also clinically obvious that not all objects are tarred with the same brush. Some associative elements must exist to remind the person of a familiar pathogen, and by such association, external objects, pathogenically neutral to the outside observer, become tainted with such internal representations. The age, gender, build, mannerisms of an external object must trigger by association a memory trace, which ideation will recruit affect to give expression to previous early experience. At times, a sensory stimulus, such as a smell or sound, appears to have the power to trigger a memory trace to life, even when such sensory memory is rooted in ancient personal history, long ‘forgotten’ to consciousness. At other times, such as in extreme trauma (violence, car accident), the density of experience in the process of the trauma leads to memory trying to encode the events, but in a situation of helplessness to effect outcomes.

Accordingly, the recruitment of all the senses into the inputting of memory facilitates unconscious identifiers being established for an ‘immune’ response which is immobilised - the aggressive response remaining ineffective at re-establishing equilibrium because it cannot be enacted. This may be either because one is helpless to effect outcomes or the threat of violence prevents any normal retaliatory response. This freezing of the immune response to an acute and annihilatory threat, may prove so overwhelming that a pathological post-traumatic response is effected, with all the symptom profile that is so familiar to clinicians working with post-traumatic effects. The link between somatic and mental responses should not, it is increasingly recognised, be separated, since the mind utilises neurochemistry to register its discontents and impingements, from which the encoding becomes unconscious memory, the reservoir of ideation that forms the foundation of mental immunity.

The effects of aggression on others is nonetheless perturbing - and in its manifest form often seems to develop an internal self-perpetuating life, separated from its internal roots. If the immune system of the body could manifestly attack the external environment too, this would be cause for concern. The mental realm does precisely such a thing - brings the perceived source of attack, invariably represented in and by external objects, into the realm of defence. Often, the original cause for this can no longer be found or recognised, at least not consciously. This form of perversion of the aggressive drive is not unlike perversion in sexuality - the splitting off into a self-perpetuating cycle a component of how libido has cathected, to an object, part object, or even ideation represented in phantasy into which displaced affects and strivings have been placed. However, because some people have foot fetishes, or enjoy being tied with rope in the sexual encounter, or commit acts of sexual violence, does not make sex bad. Whilst some for religious reasons may deem sexuality as inherently perverse, psychologists do not dismiss the fundamentals of sexuality as perverse because some people manifest perverse forms of it, nor deride the sexual drive as pathological because some people may recruit it into the service of pathological aims. Aggression too in its purer forms has aims that are essentially benign, even if at times some people represent it in malignant forms that violate rather than mitigate, in line with its aims.

I wish to digress into a review of some case material to assist in illustrating some of the mechanisms described above. The person in question is a man whose early years spent under the smothering protectiveness of an over-anxious mother, to whom he was exceptionally close and bonded. His home was dominated by his father, a threatening presence of a disciplinarian, against whose wrath the submissive mother was helpless to protect her offspring. The mother was described by his sister as a “very soft and tender person, a compensatory element between an almost too harsh father and the very lively children. Parents quarrelled mainly about the children, and he in particular challenged his father to extreme harshness and who got his sound thrashing everyday. His mother, however, caressed him, trying to obtain with her kindness what his father could not with his harshness”. According to the man, his father was prone to sudden bursts of temper and would then immediately hit out. He did not love his father but in fact feared him all the more. His poor beloved mother, he used to remark, to whom he was so attached, lived in constant concern about the beating he had to take, sometimes waiting outside the door as he was thrashed.

Later in life this seemed to be associated with a rather patronising contempt for the submissiveness of women and his own thirst for success and dominance. He seemed to struggle forming deep personal relationships as a result and battled with alternating between self-hatred and marked narcissism. His adolescence was ‘very painful’, and marked by increasing tension with his father, who died suddenly when he was about 13 years, leaving him to step into the shoes of the man of the house, and perhaps increasing the closeness with his mother. After school, he was cosseted and looked after by his doting mother, her sister (his aunt) and his own little sister, who washed cleaned and cooked for him. He spent his time on the piano they had bought for him, drawing, painting, reading and writing poetry, and in the evening going to the opera or theatre, fantasising most of the time about himself and his future as a great artist.

A friendship he developed became part of his evening routine of theatre and opera, and this friendship helped this weedy young man to navigate his life, albeit a rather aimless one at this point, and perhaps gain some self-confidence. He became passionate about classical music, describing listening to Wagner as an almost religious experience, an example of supreme artistic genius that this (sensitive young man) wanted to emulate. This was effected later when his mother became ill with incurable cancer, and he became distracted by tending her during her illness and was anguished at the pain she suffered. This perhaps added to his resolve to become an artist and he made plans to apply and enter the Academy of Fine Arts. Armed with a thick pile of drawings he sat various entrance exams but did not succeed. His test drawing were described as “unsatisfactory”. He had been convinced he said, that passing the entrance exam would be ‘child’s play’. “I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue”. A double blow came in the form of his (young, at mid-forties) mother’s death, leaving the young man ‘prostrate with grief’ (according to his General Practitioner) and a ‘dreadful blow” (as he himself put it), leaving him feeling alone and bereft. The double loss in a four month period was a crushing blow to his already fragile sense of self and his fantasies of effortless path to success as an artist.

Nonetheless, he decided to try again and enter the academy but again admitted angrily, “they rejected me, they threw me out, they turned me down”. The blow to his self-esteem was profound and the bitterness showed, often through flaring up in an instant into boundless anger and violent denunciation of all he thought were persecuting him, including mankind in general who did not understand him, or appreciate him, and who left him feeling persecuted and cheated. These tirades of hate directed at everything and everybody were those of an apparently outsized ego desperately wanting acceptance and unable to come to terms with his personal insignificance with failure and mediocrity. This seemed to affect his sexuality too, in which he avoided contact with women, apparently repelled by homosexuality, and refrained from masturbation, although apparently was both horrified and fascinated by prostitution.

During this period he did not drink or smoke, preferring milk or fruit juice, became vegetarian, and in his struggled to survive economically, spend his small amount of money on opera or classical concerts. This second failure a year later to get into the Arts Academy left him bereft, his hopes of an artistic career now laying totally in ruins. He felt like a confirmed failure. Incidentally, these experiences also sensitised him to prejudice, which worried him and encountering it left him unsettled, perhaps understanding the experience of being marginalised. Once he came across an anti-Semitic pamphlet which disturbed him and left him saying: “it seemed to me so monstrous, the accusations so boundless, that tormented by the fear of doing injustice, I again became anxious and uncertain”.

This is the story of a sensitive and wounded young man, suffering narcissistic injuries from his father, narcissistic gratification from his mother, and later rejection of his dreams of great art - pained, anxious, feeble, weedy but as a young man, facing these failures and rejections, finding himself also increasingly enraged, aimless, angry, and emotionally isolated. We don’t normally associate such sensitivity, anxiety, artistic passion, love of music and so on with merciless cruelty. Yet presumably the narcissistic injury underlying this personality lent itself to human devastation unparalleled in the history of humankind.

This man became, directly and indirectly, responsible for more deaths in human history than any other person. The 50 million souls who lost their lives in the Second World War may not have, save for the personality of Adolf Hitler, the sensitive artist with aspirations for artistic greatness that so eluded him. The case is useful in assisting to demonstrate the link between underlying injury and aggression, forming itself into a perverse loop separated from its original traumas and links. Nonetheless, the aggression served to constantly expunge the defeated, undignified, humiliated person and nation that was Germany in the years between the Wars.

A reading of this case suggests that the inner world of Hitler was contorted by narcissistic injury and humiliation, betrayal and deflation. Beginning in his early parental relationships, his rage response to perceived injury created a volatile and thin-skinned character, becoming increasingly embittered at the perceived injustices of the world. Himself as a victim of these, he found a scaffolding on which to enact these bitter internal representations, finding, perhaps opportunistically in the political climate of the day, scapegoats upon which his projections could be manifest. The perverse form of his aggressive tirades does not eradicate the underlying perception of injury to the Self, provoking a response from his psychological ‘immune system’, aimed at restoring equilibrium and stasis.

Whilst the complexity of the contributing factors to the historical periods of the Wars and the environment in which Hitler arose are manifold, I use this case to illustrate one mechanism manifest by one man. In the couple system, manifest aggression is commonplace, and invariable its aims are as an antidote to perceived slights and injuries, since those closest and to whom investment is greatest, will threaten the self so much more than those distance or irrelevant. The opposite of love is not hate - but indifference. Love and hate are close allies in the reduction of emotional disequilibrium to injuries perceived. Without love, there is less likelihood of hate, since without love, the investment in an attachment, there is less likelihood of hurt. Without hurt, there is no disequilibrium, nor aggression in its wake assigned the task of restoring it.

So much of the aggression we see enacted in both our consulting rooms and the media, is suggestive of something quite other to what I am describing here. Perverse manifestations of aggression abound but these are perversions, technically, the separation of the (aggressive) response from its underlying drivers. The link to the unconscious becomes unknown to consciousness and what remains to consciousness is the manifest form of the response, attaching itself to other objects as if the internal objects are no longer represented. When a number of people bind themselves together around an ideological scaffolding onto which these perverse manifestations can be expressed, group violence becomes acceptable to the group and can freely manifest itself in this perverse form, separated from the internal impulse to personal object representations that may inhabit the internal world of the individual psyche. The recurring nature of emotional aggression in the consulting room between couples, indicates often as-if it were a response to something distant, a memory or associative cascade triggering affects that do not seem to belong fully in the present.

The aggressive cascade often seems to be an attempt to remove the perceived injury creating hurt by the partner’s omission or commission, and find a route to the restoration of emotional equilibrium. Loss if sexual interest, for example, may have nothing to do with the partner directly, yet can trigger significant hurt and rage because of the perception of injury. The intent of the mechanism remains benign. It’s manifestations to the external world may be quite malignant. Whilst Mandela’s point would be so wonderful, that people must learn to hate, and love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite, the psychic reality is that hate is as natural as love and that without it, without an aggressive response, the psyche would have no mechanism to restore equilibrium and protect itself from impingements. Love without hate might remain the purview of angels - but humans are not spared the struggles of ambivalence, especially to those nearest and dearest who have the capacity to create disequilibrium. In its purest form, the aggressive drive, and its manifestations in the feelings of hate, serve no other purpose than to maintain core functioning and integrity of the psyche. If it could achieve its aims silently, none of us would be any the wiser that it even existed.

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