Stray Reflections on Hate with Gandhi and Winnicott as Companions

ABSTRACT

In psychoanalysis, hate is imagined to be fundamental to the creation of the inside and outside, the self and the other. Donald Winnicott took a step further to see in hate a place of ruthless love and a mother’s capacity to tolerate without retaliation. Similarly, Gandhi too imagined hate as a place of self-other transformations through nonviolence. This paper attempts to draw connections between hate and survival, between Winnicott and Gandhi, as they inform the personal and the political realms of our existence.

KEY WORDS:

• Gandhi
• hate
• Kashmir
• mourning
• nonviolence
• survival
• Winnicott

Notes

1. Gandhi held daily prayer meetings at Sabarmati Ashram inviting meditation on hymns and songs. “Vaishnav Jan,” a song written by a fifteenth-century poet, Narsi Mehta, became very popular. The song suggests that true notability of heart resides in connection to the sorrows of the other.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shifa Haq

SHIFA HAQ is psychoanalytic psychotherapist and assistant professor of psychology in the School of Human Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi. She is the author of the book In Search of Return: Mourning the Disappearances in Kashmir (2021). She serves as an associate editor in the journals Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Correspondence: [email protected].