ABSTRACT
This chapter describes many kinds of conversations about hating and being hated. Being hated can become a self-definition, safety operation, and defense against anxieties about separation and individuation. There are at least three ways of thinking about hatred as it derives from racism, namely being hated, hating the self, and hating the other. Part of psychoanalytic imperative is to help the patients recover the learning processes in hateful experiences so that unlearning and relearning become possible. The chapter explains that people learn lessons from being hated, which inform character development as surely as do the events of family interaction that are more typically cited in theories of development. White male self-hatred may contribute significantly to the collective flirtation with global annihilation under their leadership. Defenses are mobilized against the apprehension of complexity; there is a denial of the existence of the hatred.
