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Abby, Patrick, and Dan put Winnicott’s ideas about hate and aggression to work. What everyday situations, personal experiences, and institutional practices get clarified when we consider them as reflecting displaced feelings of hate? What do popular beliefs about hate look like when seen in Winnicottian terms, and how might familiar ideologies actually rely on channeling aggression while disavowing hate and even championing values like justice, family, and love? The conversation leads Abby, Patrick, and Dan to consider everything from theologies of “hating the sin but loving the sinner” and the injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself” to the differing approaches of Democrats and Republicans when it comes to assigning blame, enjoying cruelty, and claiming collective righteousness. They also explore how the invocation of hate can be flexibly used to disqualify, condemn, or explain away the behavior and motivations of entire groups, mystify material political antagonisms, and even assert dominance in hateful ways while maintaining fantasies about legitimacy, the impersonality of state violence, and much more. 

Key texts in addition to Winnicott’s “Hate in the Counter-Transference” and Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents include On Loving, Hating, and Living Well: The Public Psychoanalytic Lectures of Ralph R. Greenson, M.D. 

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