Hatred Willard Gaylin (classic novels TXT) 📖

body’s defensive maneuvers against the invading microbe. The boil is a perfect “compromise formation” having elements of both cause and defense against the physical trauma. Freud suggested very similar mechanisms for psychic trauma.

In a somewhat grandiose attempt to find a universal theory—like Marx and Einstein—Freud evolved the Libido theory. This theory postulated the rather absurd idea that all behavior could be understood as an expression of the sexual drive and its vicissitudes. Unfortunately, Freud’s followers, the “Freudians,” tenaciously held onto these early concepts as though they were religious testaments. Eventually, this loyalty led to the increasing disillusionment with psychoanalysis as a treatment form and the demise of Freud’s reputation in current times.

Nevertheless, those psychoanalysts like me who abandoned the Libido theory continued to use the most basic Freudian principles of human motivation to analyze aberrant social behavior. We would accept the idea of internal conflict, but cast that conflict in terms of different and varied sources of psychic distress. Once liberated from the need to always see a sexual underpinning to psychological tensions, we found that conflict could be located in all sorts of internal desires. Psychic stress could be generated in all the various areas of aspiration and failure that occupy the human being in his daily life. A person could be conflicted by power, aggression, authority, anger, guilt, humiliation, or pride.

Internal conflict often arises from dependency. An analysis of the manipulated populations in Africa and the Arab world indicates that their emasculating dependency, not their poverty, drives them to genocidal hatred. Dependency forces us to inhibit and constrain our desires when they bring us into conflict with those on whom we are dependent. Someone enraged at a despotic authority figure is frustrated by his inability to express that hatred, particularly when that figure is a parent, an employer, a religious leader, or a despotic tyrant and his lackeys. Our rage and our fear of the consequences of releasing this rage create the kind of conflict that underlies much neurosis. For such rage to be released safely, it must be displaced to a neutral person or group in the environment with whom one can be angry without fear of the consequences. A scapegoat must be found.

Symptoms, such as the glove anesthesia of hysteria, are devices that facilitate living with conflict or avoiding despair. Failures and guilt can be—in the terms of psychoanalysis—“rationalized,” “projected” to others, “denied,” or converted into successes by “delusion formation.” All these strategies serve to make the unbearable present bearable by mitigating our own impotence in the face of the dilemma and our own responsibility in our humiliation.

Nowadays psychiatrists treat an array of patients who have no specific symptoms, but suffer from character and adjustment disorders, people now labeled “the worried well.” But in those early days of therapy, with its much more restricted definition of mental illness, a mental patient always presented with a symptom. Some symptoms were clearly in the realm of the mental, although some might be products of an underlying physical cause, such as brain damage. An example would be the memory loss or personality changes that are manifest with certain brain tumors.

The first of the purely mental symptoms to be identified were obsessions, compulsions, phobias, delusions, and hallucinations. And common to all of these was the fact that they were subject to rational analysis, they had “meaning.” They were not just random events. The awareness of an area of pathology that was in the mind rather than in an organ—the birth of mental illness—was the great transitional phase in the relatively new field of psychiatry.

One of the inquiries that served this transition, and will serve us in understanding scapegoating, was Freud’s discovery of displacement. This emerged from his early attempt to understand the phobias that seem ubiquitous in children between the ages of three and five, in his celebrated study of Little Hans.30 Displacement is an essential feature in the process of scapegoating, which is central to the psychology of the terrorist. The model established in this simple case of Little Hans is a paradigm for understanding the hatred that we see today.

Imagine the predicament of any five-year-old child beginning to establish his own identity by starting the process of loosening the bonds with his parents. He is terrified of his own anger with his parents and equally terrified by their potential responses, should he make his anger manifest. What can he do with his defiant rage? There is no way to win a power struggle with the parents. The child knows he is smaller and vulnerable to their retaliation. He cannot win this battle. But the thought that he might win is even more frightening. The parents are the strong protectors needed to shield him from the dangers of a hostile and unpredictable world. A power struggle with the parents is always lost, particularly when the child is allowed to win.

The classic way of handling such aggressive impulses and the anxiety that ensues is to displace it to an imaginary figure, a ghost or a scary animal like a dray horse or a wolf. Animal displacements are particularly wonderful. All that is needed to control the anxiety is to avoid the source of danger. One cannot avoid one’s father at this age, but how many wolves is a little boy likely to meet in his daily activities within his house? If the danger were with horses, the danger was outside. One could feel safe only at home. Ironically, this last statement summarizes the condition of most phobias. Displacement and avoidance are the defense mechanisms that are offered to explain all phobias. And phobics characteristically tend to remain—or retreat—to the safety of their homes.

The case of Little Hans was a landmark discussion of the general problem of how human beings attempt to handle the existential anxiety that is the inescapable product of the human condition. One normal way of handling our anxiety is to displace it. Direct it at some controllable cause, other than the true and inescapable one.