Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Self-Hatred

Self-hatred is a reflexive notion: In it, the subject is the hating person and at the same time the hated person. The concept of self-hatred appeared in Sigmund Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" (1916-17a [1915-17]): "If the love for the object . . . takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object" (p. 251).

This concept was thus initially understood as the vicissitude of identification with the object of loss: "The self-tormenting in melancholia... signifies... a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned round upon the subject's own self" (p. 251). Later, in "The Ego and the Id" (1923), it was developed in connection with obsessional neurosis and melancholia, but this time within the framework of the second topography. At this point, the superego was theorized as replacing the object that persecutes the ego: "The fear of death in melancholia admits of one explanation: that the ego gives itself up because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the super-ego, instead of being loved" (p. 58). Revealed here is the degree to which self-hatred is infiltrated by sadomasochism, and to which the superego, in this context, can become the "culture of the death instinct" (1923b, p. 53).

In Language and Insight (1978), Roy Schafer emphasized the idea that the persecutor and the victim can unconsciously be persons other than the self, "say, one's father in the act of hating one's mother; here, 'I hate myself' translates into 'In this way I enact, experience, and perpetuate my father's hating my mother'" (pp. 123-124). In (1990), André Green introduced the interesting idea of the logic of despair, in which self-hatred is posited as reflecting "a compromise between the inextinguishable desire for revenge and concern for protecting the object from the hostile desires directed against it."

NICOLE JEAMMET

See also: Turning around upon the subject's own self.