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Hating, Abhorring and Wishing
to Destroy
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.
Donald Moss is on the faculty, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author
of four books and over 60 articles, Chair of the APsaA Program Committee, and
Member of the College of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Moss
practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in New York.
Dr. Lynne Zeavin is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst 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.
The New Library of Psychoanalysis ‘Beyond
the Couch’ Series
General Editor: Alessandra Lemma
The New Library of Psychoanalysis was launched in 1987 in association
with the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. It aims to promote a widespread
appreciation of psychoanalysis by supporting interdisciplinary dialogues
with those working in the social sciences, the arts, medicine, psychology,
psychotherapy, philosophy and with the general book reading public.
The Beyond the Couch part of the series creates a forum dedicated to dem-
onstrating this wider application of psychoanalytic ideas. These books, written
primarily by psychoanalysts, specifically address the important contribution
of psychoanalysis to contemporary intellectual, social, and scientific debate.
Current members of the Advisory Board include Giovanna Di Ceglie,
Liz Allison, Anne Patterson, Josh Cohen, and Daniel Pick.
For a full list of all the titles in the New Library of Psychoanalysis main
series and also the New Library of Psychoanalysis Teaching Series, please
visit the Routledge website.
Titles in the ‘Beyond the Couch’ Series:
Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience: Psychoanalysis
and the Uncanny
Gregorio Kohon
Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism
Edited by Matt ffytche and Daniel Pick
Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and
Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis
Giuseppe Civitarese
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/New-
Library-of-Psychoanalysis-Beyond-the-Couch-Series/book-series/NLPBTC
Hating, Abhorring and
Wishing to Destroy
Psychoanalytic Essays on the
Contemporary Moment
Edited by Donald Moss
and Lynne Zeavin
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
©2022 selection and editorial matter, Donald Moss and Lynne
Zeavin; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Donald Moss and Lynne Zeavin to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moss, Donald, 1944– editor. | Zeavin, Lynne, 1956– editor.
Title: Hating, abhorring and wishing to destroy : psychoanalytic essays on the
contemporary moment / edited by Donald Moss and Lynne Zeavin.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series:
New library of psychoanalysis beyond the couch | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021026367 (print) | LCCN 2021026368 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032102399 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032102375 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003214342 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Hatred. | Violence. | Psychoanalysis and racism. | Civilization,
Modern—21st century.
Classification: LCC BF575.H3 H36 2022 (print) | LCC BF575.H3 (ebook) | DDC
152.4–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026367
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021026368
ISBN: 978-1-032-10239-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-10237-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21434-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003214342
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For our children Hannah, Ivan, and Isaiah – with
gratitude for their commitments to better the
world they have inherited
Contents
Acknowledgmentsxi
Introduction 1
DONALD MOSS AND LYNNE ZEAVIN
PART 1
Hating in the first person plural11
1 On hating in the first person plural: thinking
psychoanalytically about racism, homophobia,
and misogyny 13
DONALD MOSS
2 This is not about Trump: rage, resistance, and
the persistence of racism 32
ANN PELLEGRINI
3 First world problems and gated communities of the mind:
an ethics of place in psychoanalysis 51
FRANCISCO J. GONZÁLEZ
4 Insidious excitement and the hatred of reality 79
LYNNE ZEAVIN
5 A composite of King Kong and a suburban barber:
revisiting Adorno’s “Freudian theory and the pattern
of fascist propaganda” 97
SAMIR GANDESHA
x Contents
PART 2
The racialized object/the racializing subject117
6 On having Whiteness 119
DONALD MOSS
7 “When reparation is felt to be impossible”: persecutory guilt
and breakdowns in thinking and dialogue about race 135
JANE CAFLISCH
8 Murderous racism as normal psychosis 158
ALAN BASS
9 Hunting the real: psychosis and race in the American
hospital 182
HANNAH WALLERSTEIN
10 A psychoanalytic contribution to understanding anti-Latino
discourse and violence 199
RICARDO C. AINSLIE
PART 3
This land: whose is it, really?215
11 Trees and other psychoanalytic matters 217
LINDSAY L. CLARKSON
12 Shame, envy, impasse, and hope: the psychopolitics of
violence in South Africa 234
WAHBIE LONG
Index 258
Acknowledgments
Many people have helped to bring this volume into being. First of all, we
thank our contributors and their passionate commitment to the issues we
are raising in this book. We wish to thank Sue Levy of the South African
Psychoanalytic Association for inviting us to the marvelous SAPI confer-
ence in South Africa in 2019. That invitation was the impetus for Don
Moss’s paper On Having Whiteness and is when we first heard and met
W. Long, whose paper is in this volume. We wish to express our gratitude
to colleagues from the British Psychoanalytic Association, especially
Michael Feldman, Priscilla Roth, Ignes Sodre, Daniel and Isobel Pick,
and Irma Brenman Pick, whose teachings and friendship over the years
have strengthened us as psychoanalysts, and we are appreciative of Ales-
sandra Lemma who first read and encouraged this manuscript. We have
benefited profoundly by many conversations concerning the environment
with the other members of Green Gang, our dear friends and colleagues,
Lindsay Clarkson and John Kress. Donald Moss has benefitted greatly
from the opportunity to participate on the American Psychoanalytic Asso-
ciation’s Holmes Commission on Racial Equality.
A special thanks indeed go to our daughter, Hannah, who lent her gen-
erous mind and spirit to several readings of the manuscript that included
painstakingly and carefully copyediting it.
Permissions
Excerpts from Beloved by Toni Morrison used with permission of the Pen-
guin Random House Publishers.
Caflisch, J. (2020). “When Reparation Is Felt to Be Impossible”: Persecutory
Guilt and Breakdowns in Thinking and Dialogue About Race. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 30(5):578–594. doi:10.1080/10481885.2020.1797402, reprinted by
permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. Retrieved from: www.tandfonline.com.
xii Acknowledgments
González, F. J. (2020). First World Problems and Gated Communities of the Mind:An
Ethics of Place in Psychoanalysis. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 89(4):741–770.
doi:10.1080/00332828.2020.1805271, reprinted by permission of The Psy-
choanalytic Quarterly, Inc.
Wallerstein, H. (2020). Hunting the Real: Psychosis and Race in the American
Hospital. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 17(3):257–271. doi:10.1080/15518
06X.2020.1801035, reprinted by permission of National Institute for the Psy-
chotherapies. Retrieved from: www.nipinst.org.
Introduction
Donald Moss and Lynne Zeavin
A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of
violence, as would disgrace the individual. It makes use against the
enemy not only of the accepted stratagems of war, but of deliberate
lying and deception as well – and to a degree which seems to exceed
the usage of former wars. The state exacts the utmost degree of obedi-
ence and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time it treats them
like children by maintaining an excess of secrecy and a censorship
upon news and expressions of opinion which leaves the spirits of those
whose intellects it thus suppresses defenceless against every unfavora-
ble turn of events and every sinister rumor. It absolves itself from the
guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, and makes
unabashed confession of its own rapacity and lust for power, which the
private individual has then to sanction in the name of patriotism.
– Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
So what happens, then, when we psychoanalysts know, really know, that
our long-standing clinical mantra, the one sponsoring the notion that the
pursuit of love, work, and play unites us and our patients in a common
vision, a common platform by which we can all guide ourselves, measure
ourselves, satisfy ourselves – what happens when we come to know that
this vision and this platform offer a grossly, even grotesquely, insufficient
notion of what we might consider to constitute the basic requirements for
living a full life? What happens when we know, really know, that tending
to our private lives, our private gardens, no matter how successfully we
might find ourselves loving, working, and playing in them – what happens
when we know that such success, if treated as an end, marks us, not as suc-
cessful, but instead as withdrawn, frightened, and uncertain? What hap-
pens when it marks us as the iconic citizens who, when, not too far into the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003214342-1
2 Donald Moss and Lynne Zeavin
future, called to the dock, will assert, shamefacedly, “How could we have
known?” or “What could we have done?” What happens when the dogged
pursuit of work, love and play marks us not as the robust exceptions – the
strong, the self-confident, the thoughtful, the pained – but instead marks
us as the passive, the indifferent, the ones waiting for the moment to be
over, the ones shoring up their walls, husbanding their intimates, saving
their strengths? What happens when, in the name of pursuing the best of
human possibilities, we in fact are replicating the behaviors of the ena-
bling crowd, hugging the sidelines as the active collaborators get on with
their grisly work?
We cannot continue as we have been. Our magnificent clinical experi-
ment in keeping the doors closed, in barricading ourselves and our patients
from our shared surround, has proven enormously successful We have
founded a most remarkable discipline, a way of thinking, feeling, and
speaking by which to sense, locate, and contact in ourselves and in oth-
ers what has never before been sensed, located, and contacted. The con-
straining equilibria we can now disturb; the realms of possibility we can
now open; the previously unimaginable impact we can now reliably have
on another – these are the basic achievements of our ambitious 125-year
experiment.
But the setup of this long-running experiment must now be modified.
We need not open the doors, of course – there is nothing as fundamen-
tal as this that we must absolutely give up. But we do need to recog-
nize that, all along, those closed doors of ours have been porous, have
allowed in precisely what they were designed to keep out. That porosity
has made it possible for us to develop, has in fact forced us to. Were the
doors impermeable, we would still be where we were when we began,
and we would, I think, have vanished, a memento of the moment, like the
Charleston. Actual women infiltrated our offices, replacing the imaginary
“feminine” with which we began. Actual gay and lesbian people infil-
trated our offices, replacing the imaginary “homosexual” with which we
began. We have been sluggish, but the real world has insisted. So, as we
continue to work behind those porous doors, we can feel newer forces of
infiltration – trans people, people of color, insisting that they too are here,
that we cannot proceed as though they weren’t, as though we could make
of them whatever we wanted, that we wouldn’t have to listen to what they
actually say, and that instead we could know, in advance, what they would
say, what they must say, given whom we knew they were. That moment,
then, the one we thought we could control, is about to be over.
