1st Edition
Hating, Abhorring and Wishing to Destroy Psychoanalytic Essays on the Contemporary Moment
The kinds of hatreds that analysts have assumed make up part of the unspoken backdrop of Western civilization have now erupted into our daily foreground. This book, consisting of essays from eleven psychoanalysts, responds to that eruption.
The five essays of Part 1, "Hating in the first person plural," take on the pervasive impact of structured forms of hatred – racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. These malignant forces are put into action by large- and small-group identifications. Even the action of the apparent "lone wolf" inevitably enacts loyal membership in a surrounding community. The hating entity is always "we." In Part 2, "The racialized object/the racializing subject," the essays’ focus narrows to an examination of racist expressions of "hating, abhorring, and wishing to destroy." A particular focus is the state of excitement attached to this form of hatred, to its sadistic origins, and to the endless array of objects offered to the racializing subject. In Part 3, "This land: whose is it, really?," its two essays focus on symbolic and physical violence targeting the natural world. We expand the traditional field of psychoanalytic inquiry to include the natural world, the symbolic meaning of its "trees," and the psychopolitical meanings of its land.
This book offers a psychoanalytically informed guide to understanding and working against hatreds in clinical work and in everyday life and will appeal to training and experienced psychoanalysts, as well as anyone with an interest in current political and cultural climates.
Section 1: Hating in the First Person Plural 1. Donald Moss: On Hating in the First Person Plural: Thinking Psychoanalytically about Racism, Homophobia and Misogyny 2. Ann Pellegrini: This is Not about Trump: Rage, Resistance, and the Persistence of Racism 3. Francisco J. González: First World Problems and Gated Communities of the Mind: An Ethics of Place in Psychoanalysis 4. Lynne Zeavin: Insidious Excitements and the Hatred of Reality 5. Samir Gandesha: A Composite of King Kong and a Suburban Barber: Revisiting Adorno’s "Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda" Section 2: The Racialized Object/The Racialzing Subject 6. Donald Moss: On Having Whiteness 7. Jane Caflisch: When Reparation is Felt to be Impossible: Persecutory Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue about Race 8. Alan Bass: Murderous Racism as Normal Psychosis 9. Hannah Wallerstein: Hunting the Real: Psychosis and Race in the American Hospital 10. Ricardo C. Ainslie: A Psychoanalytic Contribution to Understanding Anti-Latino Discourse and Violence Section 3: This Land: Whose is it, Really? 11. Lindsay Clarkson: Trees and Other Psychoanalytic Matters 12. Wahbie Long: Shame, Envy, Impasse and Hope: The Psychopolitics of Violence in South Africa
Biography
Donald Moss is on the faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of four books and over 60 articles, Chair of APsaA Program Committee, and Member of the College of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Moss practises psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in New York.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalst in full-time practice in New York City. She is a training and supervising analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. An associate editor of JAPA, she has written on a variety of topics exploring the status of the object in contemporary psychoanalytic theory.
'This collection important encourages psychoanalysts to acknowledge the privileged contexts in which many of our theories and practices have developed and to work toward a psychoanalysis that recognizes how the realities and inequities of the external world affect the internal worlds of our patients.'
Tuba Tokgoz is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. To read this review in full, please see the following: Tokgoz, T. (2023) Hating, Abhorring and Wishing to Destroy: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Contemporary Moment, Edited by Donald Moss and Lynne Zeavin, London and New York: Routledge, 2022, 262 pp., $32.55 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-032-10237-5. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 104:592-596.
