Why Should I Love Thee When I Have So Many Reasons to Hate Thee?

Martin Bergman’s The Anatomy of Loving (1987), covers the significant developments and important contributions to the psychology of loving, and consequently the psychology of the opposite—hate, anger, hostility, and violence. From these contributions and my experience in the practice of psychoanalytic psycho-

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therapy, hate, anger, hostility, and violence to oneself and to others are always related to the unfolding of how we are or were loved, our developed capacity to love others, and how we love ourselves. All positive and negative components of human relatedness are derived from our interpersonal experiences throughout life. Like others in my profession, I am struggling to understand better what the psychological components are in the increased violent acting out of anger in the patient population and in society at large.

My patient, Mr. V, is representative of those cases in which positive feelings, from his early childhood to coming to treatment, were not able to outweigh the negative ones. I was able to learn from him that when we speak of anger, hate, and violence, we are really looking at the presence or absence of love, and how both our innate ability to love and to hate, and how the ability of “important others” to love and hate interact. Mr. V’s case offers a glimpse into the components that at times led him to act out against family members, himself, and society in general. His request for help was to maintain emotional stability to keep his job, continue his studies, and resolve some of the difficulties with his wife. He felt on the verge of physically striking his supervisor at work and of striking back at his wife by having an extramarital affair as he perceived both his supervisor and his wife exercised their power over him in an abusive manner. He indicated that when such powerful feelings of hate and utter contempt overwhelm him, he comes very close to repeating his past violent, acting-out behaviors. A pattern exists in which he gets most jobs he applies for with ease, but eventually negative feelings develop toward the individuals above him, and he sees no alternative but to leave the job before inflicting physical harm. As to his wife, what he perceives as her manipulation of sex infuriates him to the point of wishing her harm.

Mr. V is a middle-aged, engaging man who presents himself on the one hand as intelligent, verbal, interactive, caring, and seemingly easy to get along with, and on the other as threatening when afraid, frustrated, misunderstood, or feeling “unfairly provoked.” His resounding voice and his big size—he is six feet tall and of

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solid build—invoke two split images: that of a growling bear on the one hand and that of a cuddly bear on the other. The first four months of his treatment were spent with him using me as a container for his seemingly bottomless anger and contempt for all those important others who had failed him, and my learning how to tolerate his mannerisms without getting caught in my own fear. After those four months, he stopped treatment.

For two years I did not hear from him, until a message on my answering machine, full of contrition, begged me to take him back into therapy. He said I was the only person who could prevent him from destroying that which he attains through hard work. He had changed jobs, was about to graduate from college, had applied to graduate school, and had refrained from having an extramarital affair. After resuming treatment, he remained in therapy until he obtained his master’s degree. Below is a reconstruction of why Mr. V’s negative, hateful feelings prevail over the positive, progressive ones.

Mr. V remembers feeling happy until about the age of four: he loved his father, mother, and two siblings who were two and three years younger. His life spiraled downward after his father left the Dominican Republic to look for work in the U.S., leaving his family to face severe poverty. His mother was unhappy and struggled to make ends meet while waiting to hear from a father who never returned. When he was seven, his mother left to find his father in an attempt to reunite the family, leaving her boys in the care of her sister.

The first time Mr. V can remember doing something violent, an act which he feels was justified, and yet one that leaves him with a sense of shame, happened while living with his “mean-spirited” maternal aunt. She came after him “viciously yelling, smacking, and pinching him.” Her anger was aroused by his interference with her punishment of one of his brothers. To protect himself before she inflicted serious physical damage, he grabbed a baseball bat and gave her a hard blow to the stomach. The following days he spent alone by a creek near the house. The water had a

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quieting effect on him and provided a place where he could sort out his feelings, but it also intensified his loneliness and sadness, and perhaps induced unformulated thoughts of drowning as well. At the point when things between himself and his aunt were at their worst, his grandfather took the three boys to live with him and their grandmother, who were extremely poor but provided a nurturing environment.

When he was 10 years old, he was “wrenched away” by his mother and brought to New York, where she had remarried. His relationship with his stepfather, who was alcoholic and bad-tempered, deteriorated continually. He desperately wanted to escape from this man, but could not; he felt compelled to protect his mother and brothers. He began to spend hours away from home, and became a street urchin, developing a talent for storytelling and ingratiating himself with some older adults in the neighborhood. In mid‑adolescence he made a definite conscious choice. Although doing well in school, he saw no use in trying to survive as things were, thinking, “Fuck the world. I want money and sex.” He began to sell drugs and eventually to use cocaine. He was part of a gang and helped protect their territory by carrying a gun. Looking back, he thinks an angel sat on his shoulder; for all intents and purposes, “I should have been dead!”

Mr. V married in late adolescence and fathered a son, but the marriage did not last. At that point he was abusing alcohol and cocaine. When he was 25, he met his present wife while involved in a rehabilitation program based in a Pentecostal church where she attended revival meetings regularly. She had also been divorced and had a young daughter. They have been married for 22 years and have a son together. Their relationship has had many ups and downs but Mrs. V.’s determination to see it through has held them together. He still has occasional alcohol binges but has not used cocaine since his 20s.

Mr. V’s return to treatment after the long absence significantly changed the love and hate ratio that helped modulate an original fear expressed by his leaving. In developing a trusting re-

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lationship with me, he feared that he would ultimately be let down as had been his experience with others, who led him to think they believed in him and were looking out for his welfare, only to disappoint him, which then caused his subsequent knee‑jerk reaction to attack and harm them.

With an increasing ability to express his feelings of hurt rather than act them out, he was able to experience both the depth of his lost childhood and the concomitant depression. He began to report dreams involving themes of life and death. He wrote poems and brought them to sessions, and at the same time developed severe chest pains.

Sometime into the second year of treatment, Mr. V developed a tolerance for accepting interpretations that challenge his right to be overly aggressive toward others, such as, “You don’t have to raise your voice for others to hear or see you. Your height and your defensive lineman frame are threatening. Like a growling bear you can intimidate and frighten others.” He would begin each session by expressing satisfaction in being there: “I love this room. In this room I can be myself.” He would take possession of not only the chair he was sitting in, but the whole room and my presence as well, “When I am here it feels good to be alive. Here I am free of shame. I have been a liar all my life. I do not want to lie here, or anywhere else for that matter. But I have to tell you, people don’t make it easy. Everyone wants to impose their own agenda on me. At work they tell me we are like a family, they treat me as if they love me and promise to take care of me, but they always end up taking care of themselves and not giving a ‘shit’ about me. This makes me feel manipulated, stupid, powerless, frustrated, and angry. Here I am able to realize that as a kid I was not a liar even though I was told I was. I was just a kid with a big imagination who loved to talk and entertain. At the same time my mother made it impossible not to lie in order to keep myself out of her line of fire. At times I really thought she wanted to kill me.

With his increasing sense of well‑being and self‑awareness, recognition began to take hold that going to treatment was not

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about anger, hate, and violence, but about the promise of love and the love that comes from within him. He engaged in a campaign to tell the truth at all costs, no matter what the consequence. It is significant that at this point he began to speak to me only in Spanish, the language of his childhood and my first language, and began sharing fond memories of his childhood, such as the folklore he enjoyed. He began to speak of his wife with a deep attachment, and to recognize and accept the vital role she plays in his life. “Even though she is difficult, she has stuck with me through the worst of times during my alcohol abuse and simultaneous verbal abuse of her. She is my best friend and I love her. Only with her continuous emotional support can I accomplish what I need to accomplish.”

Mr. V is now at a point at which he no longer denies his need for his mother’s love, but he is willing to acknowledge realistically that the relationship with his mother could not offer him that and will not change. He is able to acknowledge that his mother’s abuse when he was a child had to do with her sense of helplessness and frustration. He is also more aware of his deliberate attempts to prove to himself and to others that there was only hate and that love was not worth fighting for. His new sense of reality enabled him to remain at a job, pass his professional examination, remain in treatment, and complete his master’s degree.

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