Patricia Gherovici, PhD
HATE, IDENTITY, THE OTHER
More Powerful than Hate: Freud, Lacan, Fanon, and Bad Bunny.
January 30-31, 2027
ZOOM
This seminar examines the role hatred plays in the constitution of the subject: in the choice of a subjective and sexed position, and in the ways the discursive framework of our era brings its manifestations to light, manifestations that now erupt ever more openly and virulently.
Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and in dialogue with other disciplines and practices, the lecture traces the main lines along which hatred can be thought. Each of these lines opens onto new questions. Hatred concerns not only the effects of our most general condition as speaking beings, but also the particular discursive character of the present moment. Despite its lo urgency, it remains a topic on which relatively little sustained psychoanalytic work has been done.
This seminar considers what community psychoanalysis can bring to these questions. Since Freud’s 1918 call for free clinics accessible to all, a strand of psychoanalytic practice has worked beyond the private consulting room, with people marked by poverty, migration, racism and institutional neglect. In these settings, hatred is not only a concept but a lived reality: it appears in the exclusion patients suffer, in the ways they are made into objects of suspicion or contempt, and sometimes in the institutions meant to care for them. Community psychoanalysis offers a space where those pushed to the margins can speak as subjects rather than be treated as problems to be managed. It also asks clinicians to examine their own position, and how practices of care can reproduce the segregation they seek to address.
On Saturday January 30, participants will explore the subject of hate as a developmentally self-protective response to the other, intrinsic to, but also a potentially self-destructive aspect of Identity. The class will also examine how the seductiveness of racism, fascism, and the resulting violence (interpersonal or structural) can be viewed and addressed through a psychoanalytic lens.
On Sunday January 31, they will participate in an open discussion based on their own experience and readings, and prompting a deeper set of questions:
How is fascist rhetoric, to paraphrase Adorno, psychoanalysis in reverse?
How does community psychoanalysis address the subject of hate and its active presence in our culture?
What do we do with our own hate? If hate is unavoidable, can we negotiate with our own hate?
Required Reading
Freud, S. (1957). Instincts and their vicissitudes. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 109–140). Hogarth Press; Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1915)
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents
Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Translated by Chevalier, Haakon, Grove Press, 1988, Chapter 1 ("The 'North African Syndrome'").
Gherovici, Patricia. "Hate Up to My Couch: Psychoanalysis, Community, Poverty and the Role of Hatred." Psychoanalysis and History 24, no. 3 (December 2022): 269–90. https://doi.org/10.3366/pah.2022.0434.
Lacan, J. (2006). The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience (1949). In B. Fink (Trans.), Écrits: The first complete edition in English (pp. 75–81). W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (2006). Aggressiveness in psychoanalysis. In B. Fink (Trans.), Écrits: The first complete edition in English (pp. 82–101). W. W. Norton & Company.
White, K. P. (2002). Surviving Hating and Being Hated: Some Personal Thoughts about Racism from a Psychoanalytic Perspective. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 38(3), 401–422.
Winnicott, D.W. (1949). Hate in the Counter-Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal, 30:69-74.
Suggested Reading
Bass, A. (2021). “Murderous Racism as Normal Psychosis: The Case of Dylann Roof”. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 69(2), 291-313.
Euripides. Medea. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35451/35451-h/35451-h.htm
Ghent, Emmanuel. “Masochism, Submission, Surrender – Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender” (1990). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, (26):108-136.
Weiland, C. (2015). Chapter 7 "The Homogenized Group" and Chapter 8 "Masculinity and the Fascist State of Mind". The Fascist State of Mind and the Manufacturing of Masculinity. (pp 109-140).