On Hatred: Perpetrator Fragments and Totalitarian Objects

ABSTRACT

In times of political extremis, the author probes the evoked hatred that threatens to transform her into the dehumanizing totalitarian object that is inciting her hatred. This article explores the trans-generational inheritance of perpetrator objects that can reignite in such inflammatory times – in our psyches, and in cultural spaces. How do we recognize, embrace, and constructively use these persecutory parts of ourselves, to illuminate the distinction between facilitating rage and annihilating hatred? Instead of trying to create a better sealant on our “depressive containers,” what would happen if we looked through the cracks in that container? Would something new appear that might restore the alliances that totalitarianism fractures? This question is probed in reference to U.S. colonial era, and in relation to the voices of Black feminist psychoanalysis.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Sue Grand

Sue Grand is faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis; faculty the Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis; faculty, National Institute for the Psychotherapies; a visiting scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, and a fellow at the Institute for Psychology and the Other. She is the author of The Reproduction of Evi: A Clinical and cultural Perspective and the Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude, as well as the co-editor of several books on trauma and Relational theory. She is on the board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. She is in private practice in N.Y. and N.J.