Shame,hatred, and pornography: Variations on an aspect of current times

Drawing on a number of clinical vignettes, the author seeks to highlight the relations between shame, hatred and pornography in contemporary clinical practice, and to explore certain metapsychological avenues that can help us understand how these relations are established.     

Under the volcano: varieties of anger and their transformation

This paper seeks to illustrate the ambiguity of the affect of 'anger' which masks a number of subtly different emotions observable in clinical work. The author differentiates between anger, rage and hatred in terms of the dialectical relationship between ego and self and pays particular attention to why it is that for some patients, experiences of anger may be harnessed creatively into development, whereas for others, they remain self destructive. Using illustrations from work with two patients in analysis, the author describes how a persistent grievance originating in the earliest stages of life is linked with hatred and can lead to a defensive self structure. It is suggested that the clues to the presence of a grievance and to its potential transformation are likely to be observable first in the analyst's countertransference in the form of an all-embracing emotional strait jacket. Analysts' capacity to tolerate their own hatred is crucial to the transformation of a patient's grievance.     

AQUINAS ON ATTACHMENT, ENVY, AND HATRED IN THE SUMMA THEOLOGICA

This essay examines Aquinas's discussions of hatred in Summa Theologica I‐II, Q. 29 and II‐II, Q. 34, in order to retrieve an account of what contemporary theorists of the emotions call its cognitive contents. In Aquinas's view, hatred is constituted as a passion by a narrative pattern that includes its intentional object, beliefs, perceptions of changes in bodily states, and motivated desires. This essay endorses Aquinas's broadly “cognitivist” account of passional hatred, in line with his way of treating passions in general. I suggest that Aquinas's account of hatred's arising out of attachment is compelling. However, I also argue that if Aquinas's treatment of hatred is to help us understand the phenomenon of hate, where classes of people are abominated for an identity they bear, and to avoid equating an oppressor's hatred with that of the oppressed for the oppressor, the cognitive pathway to hatred must be broader than through envy.     

Explaining Normative Versus Nonnormative Action: The Role of Implicit Theories

The current research investigates what motivates people to engage in normative versus nonnormative action. Prior research has shown that different emotions lead to different types of action. We argue that these differing emotions are determined by a more basic characteristic, namely, implicit theories about whether groups and the world in general can change. We hypothesized that incremental theories (beliefs that groups/the world can change) would predict normative action, and entity theories (beliefs that groups/the world cannot change) as well as group identification would predict nonnormative action. We conducted a pilot in the context of protests against a government plan to relocate Bedouin villages in Israel and a main study during the Israeli social protests of the middle class. Results revealed three distinct pathways to collective action. First, incremental theories about the world predicted hope, which predicted normative action. Second, incremental theories about groups and group identification predicted anger, which also predicted normative collective action. Lastly, entity theories about groups predicted nonnormative collective action through hatred, but only for participants who were highly identified with the group. In sum, people who believed in the possibility of change supported normative action, whereas those who believed change was not possible supported nonnormative action.     

The Central Role of Group-Based Hatred as an Emotional Antecedent of Political Intolerance: Evidence from Israel

In recent years, political scientists have shifted the focus of explaining political phenomena from the purely cognitive perspective to an integrated emotion-cognition one. Yet most studies which examine antecedents of political intolerance ignore the potential role played by "gut feelings" or group-based negative emotions in endorsing those attitudes. Moreover, even the few studies that deal with emotions and intolerance concentrate exclusively on the role of groups of emotions (positive vs. negative, dispositional vs. surveillance) or on basic emotions (anger or fear) and ignore the potential influence of more complex discrete emotions like hatred on political intolerance. Hence, the main goal of this study was to create a deeper understanding regarding the role of discrete negative emotions in increasing political intolerance among different groups of individuals in different contexts. In order to do so, the relations between political intolerance and three group-based negative emotions (hatred, anger, and fear) were tested by means of four large-scale nationwide surveys. Within the surveys, various intolerance measurement methods were used in various contexts (wartime vs. no-war/routine periods) and among individuals with different levels of political sophistication. Results, obtained via multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling, show that: (1) Group-based hatred is the most important antecedent of political intolerance even when controlling for important intolerance inducers such as perceived threat. (2) Other group-based negative emotions like anger or fear influence political intolerance wholly through the mediation of hatred or perceived threat. (3) The role of group-based hatred in inducing political intolerance is more substantial in the face of heightened existential threat and among unsophisticated individuals than among sophisticated ones.     

Working with chronic and relentless self‐hatred,self‐harm and existential shame: a clinical study and reflections

This paper is the first of a two‐part series which explores some of the theoretical and experiential reference points that have emerged in my work with people whose relationship to their body and/or sense of self is dominated by self‐hatred and (what Hultberg describes as) existential shame. The first paper focuses on self‐hatred and the second paper focuses on shame. This first paper is structured around vignettes taken from a 14‐year analysis with a woman who was bulimic, self‐harmed and repeatedly described herself as ‘feeling like a piece of shit’. It draws together elements of Jung's concepts of the complex and symbol, and Laplanche's enigmatic signifier to focus on experiences of ‘inner otherness’ around which we are unconsciously organized. It also brings Jung's understanding that emotion is the chief source of consciousness into conversation with Laplanche's approach to the transference which is that by being aware that they do not ‘know’, the analyst provides a ‘hollow’ in which the patient's analytic process can evolve. These combinations of ideas are linked speculatively to emerging understandings of the neuroscience of perception and throughout the paper clinical material is used to illustrate these discussions.