Hatred Willard Gaylin (classic novels TXT) 📖

This displacement is practiced by all of us in our daily activities. It is a central mechanism of bigotry and hatred. When the real oppressors are too terrifying or powerful to confront, find a safer population toward whom you can direct your hatred.

Freud utilized this and other cases to explain the formation of symptoms in general. He believed that analyzing the symptom would direct the physician to the underlying causes. He stated that each symptom contained a symbolic representation of both the cause of distress and the attempted resolution. He labeled symptoms “compromise formations,” meaning that they were a compromise between a dangerous feeling and the defense against the impulse. The neurotic behavior was designed to protect ourselves or our standing in our own eyes. It is a model that lends itself to understanding aberrant social behavior as well as hysterical paralysis.

Some of these attempts to give specific meaning to a symptom became convoluted to the point of embarrassment. I remember once reading that a peptic ulcer was the product of “the bite of the introjected [swallowed up] mother.” The fancifulness of some of these elaborations was a product of the ebullient enthusiasm of the early practitioners. Foolish as the elaborations were, they should not distract us from the recognition of the profound impact that these early studies of “disease” had on the everyday behavior of the well. Freud’s genius did not lie in his conjecture that all behavior could be explained by his Libido theory. His great contribution was his assumption that all behavior could be explained! Starting with the most bizarre symptoms, the irrational delusions and rants of the madman, Freud took that which was the mark of madness—crazy, meaningless, irrational, purposeless lunatic meandering—and offered it up as scientific data to be evaluated seriously. If one starts with a symptom, one could locate a cause. Once the cause was discovered, one was on the way to a cure.

Over the years, certain early Freudian postulates were abandoned. But basic ones endured. Symptoms were still perceived as problem-solving devices. Symptoms were maneuvers designed to resolve painful dilemmas arising from many sources: perceived failures, cowardice, shame, impotence. They still had meaning, and they were still seen as failed attempts to ease psychic distress, that is, they were still seen as examples of the “cure” being worse than the disease.

The great psychoanalytic teacher Sandor Rado referred to a symptom as a “misguided repair.” A symptom is an attempt to solve a problem, but it is misguided, since it does not really work. It will leave the patient worse off than he was in the life situation with the symptom he attempted to remedy. It is a plain term that I find useful.

In inventing “mental” illness—illness of the mind as distinguished from brain disease—Freud started a process that led him well beyond his roots in medicine and his therapeutic intentions. Mental illnesses appeared in “normal” people, not just lunatics, and the absolute breach that had existed between the two was closed. It was not long before the major leap was made to an awareness that psychic conflict influenced all human behavior, not just the abnormal.

This Freudian bombshell had fallout the extent and range of which could not possibly have been anticipated at the time. His basic theories derived from mental illness were insights that could be applied readily in analyzing all forms of social and political behavior, even as I do now in the analysis of hatred. The apparently crazy aspects of mental illness are only crazy when examined superficially. When exposed to dynamic evaluation, their purposes are exposed. The crazy behavior of suicide bombers can also be analyzed and demystified. By extension, we can use the same dynamic explanations used in mental illness to better understand the social phenomena of prejudice, bigotry, and hatred, all of which have psychological roots. Understanding them can help in dealing with them.

Freud himself started the process. Since the same psychodynamic principles that operate with the sick operate with the healthy, we can understand motivation, character formation, values, prejudices, taste, and lifestyle. We can apply psychodynamic understanding to the underpinnings of legitimate religions like Christianity or the more bizarre uses of religious convictions demonstrated by the Christian militias.31

Beyond understanding the individual in his normal and abnormal ways, the psychodynamic approach helps us understand the dynamics of group behavior.32 Group identities can be analyzed like individual identity—we can discover which psychological factors lead an individual to join a right-wing Christian militia. With these Freudian insights, we can examine the individual as part of his group, religion, profession, national roots. We can understand how an individual who has not himself been personally humiliated can suffer the shame and humiliation of the group with which he identifies. This explains the confusing presence of privileged members of the upper classes in hate groups. The awareness that an individual can only be fully understood within the various milieus he occupies legitimates a psychological study of environments and institutions like the KKK or Al Qaeda.

The examination of cultural institutions in the light of Freudian theory gave birth to the field of psychoanalytic anthropology. 33 Cultural anthropologists could interpret the variety of differing cultural characteristics without resorting to genetic or racial assumptions. There is a varying amount of generosity and selfishness, aggression and passivity, trust and paranoia, in different populations. The average individual of a paranoid culture will become more paranoid than the average member of a trusting community.

Religion was now fair game for analysis. Freud saw God as the product of man, not the other way around. The Bible was not revealed truth, or if it was, what it revealed was not God’s will, but man’s thinking processes.34 Now that religions could be viewed as products of culture, rather than the instruments of the Lord, we could analyze the disparities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We could explore their cultural differences, seeing where was the vulnerability for paranoia and hatred in each religion.

And finally, the rise and fall of