On Kindness by Adam Phillips

Author:Adam Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429957571
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The complicated Freudian jargon has a simple picture in it, but one with perhaps startling implications. What we call hatred is our rejection of everything in the external world that doesn’t work for us, that endangers our well-being. The good things we take for granted—the loving comforts, the satisfactions, the protection—but the bad things have to be warded off in the service of self-preservation. Hatred is our primal form of self-protection, a closing off from everything that threatens us. Our sexuality, which Freud equates with our love, opens us up to the satisfactions we can’t find in ourselves.

There are always, according to Freud, “frequent conflicts between self-interest and love interests.” We reach out to others for love and in the process we come up against things that disturb us. At its most extreme, the paradox Freud proposes is that we would rather starve than risk our lives; that the dangers of loving are in excess of its satisfactions. In this, as in many other things, Freud is a stalwart Darwinian: first there is the struggle for survival (both physical and emotional survival), and then, if there is sufficient safety—if psychic survival is guaranteed—there is the possibility of satisfaction from and with others. Hatred is one of our methods of survival. What Freud calls the “admixture of hate [in love] can be traced back to a source in the self-preservation drives.” In love we are more preoccupied with our survival than with anything else. In this picture hatred is not, then, a sign of malevolence (innate or not), but a sign of danger. What might look like a secular version of original sin in Freud is more akin to original self-preservation. Freud was to discover that the ways we protect ourselves tend also to be the ways we imprison ourselves. Our sexuality endangers us because it turns us toward others, and that very exposure of appetite makes us vulnerable. (When it comes to appetite, all exposure is experienced as overexposure.) All animals suffer from where their appetites lead them.

Ten years later, in a paper entitled “Negation,” Freud was to say all this more simply. Our lives can be understood through two straightforward questions: What do we want to take in? And what do we want to expel? What do we want to include in our lives, and who do we want to keep at a safe distance? Ideally what we take in will be what we think of as good, valuable, and necessary; what we reject will be bad, redundant, and irrelevant. Love is what we call the taking in; hatred is the expulsion. So, ironically, our so-called hatred keeps us good and keeps us going. The decision, Freud writes, for the infant as for the adult, is

expressed in the language of the most archaic oral impulses: “I want to eat this, or spit this out.” . . . That is: “I want it inside me or outside me” . . . the primal pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything good and expel from itself everything bad.

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