Hatred and love seem diametrically opposed feelings. Yet there are many cases when love masquerades as hatred and hatred as love. Altho such hatred and such love are not genuine they may drive us at times into acts of cruelty or self-sacrifice which to all appearances seem to emanate from perfect love or from savage hatred.
Very exaggerated feelings should always be viewed suspiciously as blinds for the opposite feelings. An extravagant display of affection is generally a desperate attempt on the person indulging in that display at repressing loathing and hatred. On the other hand, morbid hostility toward one person is generally an attempt at repressing a love which would be unjustifiable or detrimental for the personality.
A few illustrations from life will make my meaning clear.
A Worried Wife. One woman I analysed was[Pg 74] thrown into hysterical anxiety whenever her husband reached home a little late. She pictured him dead, dismembered by a train or knocked down by robbers. When she first called on me, she stressed the struggle going on in her heart. She loved two men and her nobility of soul, her delicacy of feelings, and many other qualities she bestowed on herself very liberally, were making that double life unbearable for her. "I have wronged my dear, dear, hubby," she kept repeating. "And he is so good, so kind, so considerate."
The wife who never tires of singing her husband's praise is always somebody else's mistress. It is generally her way of settling accounts with her conscience.
In this case, the anxiety she felt over her husband's whereabouts and health when he was late in reaching home, supplied the expiation which neurotics seem to crave for their misdeeds.
But there was more in that anxiety than one of the manifestations of her sense of sin. I asked her whether she had ever experienced the same anxiety when her lover was late in coming to their trysting place.
"No," she said, "and this is what leads me to think that I don't love him nearly as much as I do[Pg 75] my husband." Her reaction to her lover's lateness was simply one of anger. She felt herself slighted and she suspected him of stopping somewhere to flirt with some woman. Even once, when a wreck on a suburban line leading to his home town, had prevented him from meeting her, she never imagined him the victim of any accident.
Further questioning elicited the information that death wishes had crossed her mind on several occasions in relation to her husband. She finally came to see that those repressed wishes were simply finding an outlet in her wish fulfilment fears. She was constantly visualizing the tragedy which would have given her her freedom.
The Test of Love. In other words, her unconscious wished her husband dead. The repression of that wish compelled it to masquerade as a hysterical concern for his health. The thought of her lover, however, never suggested to her any death scenes.
During the war a woman patient who had two sons at the front, was tortured every night by a nightmare in which she saw her older son killed in action. She very naturally interpreted those dreams to herself as convincing evidence of her greater fondness for that boy than for his brother. In the course of our conversations, however, she gradually admitted[Pg 76] that her elder son was a gambler and drunkard and had found himself in many an unpleasant complication.
She had thought several times, altho she had at once repressed the thought, that death would be preferable to his life of embarrassment and degradation. Those repressed death wishes found an outlet in nightmares accompanied by a great display of emotion consciously felt as love and grief.
Parents who continually warn their children against accidents "likely" to happen to them, who grow panicky when some street commotion takes place and imagine that their child has been hurt or killed, are not quite as loving as they imagine.
In such unjustified fears, as in death dreams, there lurks an ill concealed desire to be freed from the thraldom of parenthood and to regain the selfish happiness of the childless state.
A young woman fainted several times when she heard shouts on the street where her young child had been taken by the maid. She "knew" something must have happened to her boy. Her dreams would with alarming frequency picture accidents befalling the child. After I made her realise the way in which her child had interfered with her social activities, with her attending dances, theatrical per[Pg 77]formances, etc., a change became noticeable in her dreams. Instead of visualising her child dead she saw him in her day and night dreams as an adolescent, no longer in her way, no longer a handicap to her in her pursuit of pleasure. Her panics disappeared about the same time.
More elusive at times are cases of hatred which analysis reduces to a struggle of the personality against an inacceptable love.
Sour Grapes. A man, unduly attracted to a woman who socially, intellectually or financially, is or should remain outside of his reach, and would probably make an impossible mate, is likely to manifest violent hostility to her, to disparage her or even slander her.
Every analyst has seen in his office the middle aged woman who "breaks down" soon after her daughter's marriage to a man whom she "despises." Either a family scene or a campaign of nagging and disparagement has caused a break between her and her daughter and son-in-law.
Analysis reveals that she is love with her son-in-law, a situation more frequent than the layman imagines. This infatuation which she cannot accept as a fact is repressed savagely. To prot............