The Origins and Structure of Hatred
A Psychoanalytic Perspective
Image: AI ‘Coldplayed’ Van Gogh style
Hatred is often dismissed as mere hostility or a personal flaw. But through the psychoanalytic lens, it reveals itself as something far more foundational — not an anomaly of the psyche, but one of its earliest organizing forces.
Before we ever learn to love, we learn to hate — and through that hatred, we begin to shape the boundaries of the self.
Freud’s Early Insight: Hate Comes First
In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915), Freud positioned hatred as the ego’s first reaction to the external world.
“At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical.”
— Freud, 1915, p. 136
Rather than being a byproduct of social learning or moral failure, hatred is the ego’s instinctive response to what disrupts internal equilibrium. For Freud, this reaction predates affection or connection:
“Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love.”
— Freud, 1915, p. 139
Where love emerges through libidinal attachment and relational development, hatred begins as a form of psychic defence, a necessary stance against what is perceived as unpleasurable or threatening.
Hatred as Boundary-Work
Paul-Laurent Assoun clarifies that hatred plays a crucial role in self-preservation:
“Hatred is a kind of self-preservation, to the extent of destroying the other, while loving is a way... of making the other exist.”
This signals more than emotional aversion. It marks the ego’s first active effort to define itself against the outside world, to separate, exclude, and survive.
Hatred is what allows us to differentiate, to reject, to say "this is not me."
Freud’s stages of psychosexual development reflect this logic:
Oral phase: The infant either incorporates what is satisfying or expels what is not. The world is split between what can be digested and what must be rejected.
Anal-sadistic phase: Emerging control and aggression come to the fore. The object may be manipulated or destroyed, with little regard for its independent existence.
The capacity to love, to relate to another without annihilating or absorbing them only becomes possible once these earlier instincts are moderated.
The Paradox of Love Emerging from Hate
Roger Dorey captured the paradox at the heart of this developmental arc:
“There is love only because there is hatred, at the very origin of the person.”
— Dorey, 1986
Rather than love and hate being clear opposites, they are entwined. The ego’s first task is to establish separateness. Only after doing so can it reach toward connection.
Freud’s later essay Negation (1925) reinforces this: the ego must first reject before it can choose. To say "I love" assumes the prior capacity to say "I do not."
Containment and Emotional Development
Later psychoanalysts like Winnicott, Bion, and Meltzer shifted the focus to how early emotional states are shaped by the caregiver’s ability to receive and hold the infant’s rage and confusion.
Winnicott described the caregiver, often the mother as a container, absorbing intense projections and transforming them into something manageable. Bion developed this further, suggesting the caregiver digests these emotional storms, making them thinkable.
These theories show that:
Hatred is not inherently pathological; it is part of the infant’s psychic survival.
Emotional growth depends on whether hatred is expelled into an environment that can hold and return it in modified form.
The way early hatred is met and processed profoundly affects the individual’s capacity for future intimacy and resilience.
Exploratory Extensions: Lacan and Jung on Hatred
Freud laid the foundation, but hatred takes on new dimensions in later schools of thought.
Both Lacanian and Jungian frameworks offer further insight not by contradicting Freud, but by deepening the terrain he opened.
Lacan: Hatred and the Imaginary Other
For Lacan, hatred is not just instinctual, it’s structural. In the mirror stage, the infant identifies with its reflection, forming an ego based on an image of unity it does not yet possess. This identification produces both fascination and rivalry.
The ego is born in a field of misrecognition. The self emerges in comparison to an idealised image that is always out of reach.
Hatred here arises not simply as rejection, but as envy and rivalry directed toward the imagined completeness of the Other.
In Lacan’s symbolic order, the Other is not just another person, it represents language, law, and prohibition. Hatred often expresses the subject’s response to what constrains or defines it.
To hate the Other is to resist the very structure that enables subjectivity.
Jung: Hatred and the Shadow Within
In contrast, Carl Jung approached hatred through the concept of the Shadow, the unconscious aspect of the psyche where we store everything we disown or refuse to acknowledge in ourselves.
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
— Jung
Hatred becomes projection.
What we despise in others often mirrors what we repress in ourselves. Instead of boundary-work or rivalry, hatred in the Jungian model points to unfinished psychological tasks what must be reintegrated for the self to become whole.
Individuation, for Jung, involves recognising the Shadow and making peace with it. Hatred is not eliminated, but transformed.
A Comparative Glance
Hatred is far from a singular concept; it reveals itself differently depending on the lens through which we examine it. While some see it as a defence, others see it as a signal, or even an invitation.
To distil the psychoanalytic richness of Freud, Lacan, and Jung, the following table offers a brief comparative glance:
Each of these thinkers offers a distinctive yet overlapping layer:
Freud situates hatred within the instinctual fabric of ego formation. It's not merely an emotion, but a crucial boundary-making force for survival.
Lacan reads hatred through the prism of rivalry and alienation. It emerges structurally — a product of our entanglement in the symbolic order and the mirror stage.
Jung, by contrast, externalises hatred as a projection of our own unconscious shadow. For him, it is a pathway — not away from the self, but toward its reintegration.
Together, they challenge us to reconsider hatred not just as something to be suppressed or condemned, but as a psychological signal worth decoding.
From Theory to Experience
Hatred or hate, as it tends to echo in public discourse is often used as though it were a stable, linear emotion. But in reality, what we call hate can be an amalgam of injuries, disappointments, failed recognitions, and protective responses that don’t quite fit inside the word itself. The psyche doesn’t always move in straight lines.
Lacan’s understanding of emotional life challenges the idea that we know our own feelings. What we call hate may only be a signifier, floating in the symbolic order, without anchoring to a genuine affect. Jung, in contrast, invites us into the shadow, into the unacknowledged, rejected aspects of the self that we often displace onto others.
These frameworks don’t just offer theoretical clarity, they open space to rethink our personal encounters with hate. What does it mean to feel hate‽ And how much of what we call hatred is truly felt, rather than assumed, inherited, or misnamed‽
In navigating these ideas, I did find myself reflecting more deeply on my own emotional regulations and thought patterns. At one point, realised that hate was often just a word, a noisy placeholder that didn’t truly reflect how I felt. It lingered in my headspace like static. More often than not, what I thought was hatred was actually confusion, fear of the unknown, or the residue of being not really seen or heard accordingly.
Putting myself in someone else’s shoes only helped partially. Empathy doesn’t resolve everything. What brought greater clarity was the willingness to sit with discomfort — to allow what I didn’t yet understand to speak, not to silence it with moral certainty.
I don’t subscribe to collective cancel culture. Not because I believe all actions are defensible, but because transformation rarely begins in public rituals of exile. Sometimes reframing requires us to encounter the shadow — not just in others, but within ourselves.
To genuinely dissolve hatred, not suppress or disown it, we need to understand its shape, its purpose, and its misdirections. Only then can we move beyond the vocabulary we inherit.
Perhaps hate is never just about the other; but always, in part, about the self learning where it ends and begins. We do not lose ourselves by trying to understand Hate, we begin to find what holds us together.