Masculinity, Sexuality and Hate ‐ Motivated Violence: The Case of Darren

In this paper I use the case study of Darren, derived from two interviews in a research study of racism in the city of Stoke, UK (Gadd, Dixon and Jefferson 2005; Gadd and Dixon 2011), to explore how best to approach the topic of hate‐motivated violence. This entails discussing the relationships among racism (the original object of study), hate‐motivated violence (the more general term) and prejudices of various sorts. Because that discussion, I argue, justifies a psychoanalytic starting point, and since violence has become, almost quintessentially, masculine, this leads on to an exploration of what can be learnt from psychoanalysis about the relations among sexuality, masculinity, hatred and violence. This involves brief discussions of some key psychoanalytic terms, but only what is needed to enable sense to be made of my chosen case, which I shall then interrogate using these psychoanalytic ideas, focused on understanding the origins and nature of Darren’s hatred.

In earlier work drawing on this same research study of racism, I argued that there is an important distinction between racist violence (or racial hatred) and racist talk and attitudes (racial prejudice) that has become confused in the literature on racism (Jefferson forthcoming). The reasons for this, I suggested, were the loss of an interest in psychoanalysis (with its massive contribution to the origins of hatred in individual subjects) within social psychology as well as sociology's general lack of interest in motivational questions. What was needed, therefore, was a return to a psychoanalytically-informed psychosocial approach if we were to understand racial hatred (and not simply racial prejudice), an approach that must include the individual hating subject, albeit in his or her social location. In some respects, this distinction mirrors that of Young-Bruehl's between ethnocentrisms (similar to my idea of racial prejudice) and ideologies of desire (similar to my notion of racial hatred). (For an elaboration of this sort of approach more generally, see Gadd and Jefferson 2007.) Becoming a boy, part 1: The perils of separation A first psychic fault line of masculinity involves gender and selfhood in relation to women and femininity. Men's relationships to women, forged originally in the relationship to the mother, bring up a range of threats to masculinity and the male sense of self -especially fears of dependency, abandonment, and loss of self, as well as an intolerance and fear of women's sexuality. (Chodorow 2012: 130) Psychoanalytic accounts of the earliest period of life generally start with Melanie Klein (1988aKlein ( , 1988b, whose clinical work with children led to her focus on the infant's early relationship with its mother, the so-called pre-oedipal period, and the developmental task of separation. The trauma of birth leads to the separation of the baby from the oceanic oneness of the womb; thereafter, from perceiving the world in terms of part-objects (face, breast, and so on), the baby gradually develops the ability to perceive the mother as a whole object, separate from itself. But there is nothing automatic about this and its achievement comes with varying degrees of success, for the trauma of separation at birth is followed by many other separations from womb-like pleasures: the breast that is not full enough; arrives late, accompanied by loud noises or bright lights; and so on. In response to such denials of pleasure, the baby phantasises a good breast/mother, when it feels full, contented, satisfied, and a bad breast/ mother, when left feeling hungry or insecure. But because the bad phantasy provokes anxiety, it has to be split off and located elsewhere: projected into another. This aggressive forcing of parts of the self into another, usually the mother at this point, Klein eventually termed 'projective identification' (often now used synonymously with 'projection', according to Hinshelwood 1991: 180). Splitting (good and bad, love from hate) and projective identification are characteristic of the first developmental moment which Klein termed the paranoid-schizoid position (in recognition that it is not a stage that will necessarily be grown out of but a 'position' that can be adopted, as we shall see, at any time). These then are the first, primitive defences (which predate repression, the sequel to the oedipal complex that instantiates the unconscious, according to Freud).
The task for the mother (a theoretical area importantly developed by post-Kleinians like Winnicott and Bion: see Hinshelwood 1991), who will be a primary recipient of these hostile projections, is to bear these hostile assaults without retaliation: to contain them and thus detoxify them. When this happens, the baby gradually learns that the mother is not simply good or bad, but sometimes good and sometimes bad: that the source of love is also the source of hate. This discovery is accompanied by guilt for the prior hatred and a consequent desire for reparation. Once this point is reached and the baby is able to 'self-contain', as it were, Klein talks of the baby entering the depressive position. This too is not a once and for all achievement, and it is also variably accomplished, depending, crucially, on the mother being a 'good enough' container. With these key notions -splitting and projective identification, paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions -Klein revolutionised our understanding of the origins of love and hate. And although she did not complete the task herself, she laid the foundations for a new understanding of masculinity, one where a boy's pre-oedipal relations with his mother are as influential as his oedipal relations with his father.
Becoming a boy, part 2: Sexuality, masculinity and castration anxiety … I suggest … that an equally fundamental component of male selfhood and identity to the dynamic of male as not-female … is masculinity as being an adult male and not a little boy. Humiliation, specifically, is especially a male-maleoriginally father-son -affair. In the normal developmental course of events, much hinges on how a boy relates to his father and turns into a man -the delicate negotiation of this transformation, of identification, of how to replace or join without bringing on retaliation, castration, or humiliation. All of these, in turn, depend partly on a father's own sense of confident masculinity and selfhood. (Chodorow 2012: 131) For Freud, becoming aware of being a boy child (rather than a girl child) was part of his general theory of sexuality, with its (controversial at the time) discovery of infantile sexuality, its notions that everyone starts out (unconsciously) bisexual, that both heterosexual and homosexual object choice are developmentally contingent, and that 'perversions' and 'normal' sexuality exist on a continuum (Freud 1905). Many of these ideas have, subsequently, 'been elaborated, challenged and revised' (Chodorow 2012: 37), especially those to do with the dominant role given to the penis (in female sexual development) and to the normalisation of heterosexuality (thus making homosexuality a perverse object-choice and sexual acts not leading to heterosexual coitus definitional of perversion). But in understanding how boys come to notice sexual difference and, with whatever difficulties, become masculine, it is impossible to bypass Freud's Oedipal theory. This focuses on the process of the Oedipus complex, sometime between the ages of three and five, when the boy child becomes aware of sexual difference, sees the father as a powerful, threatening rival for his mother's love and attention and, fearful of castration, gives up the desire to possess his mother in favour of an identification with (a desire to be like) his father (and the culture of masculinity he represents).
Klein herself tried not to depart from Freud's view of the Oedipus complex, but eventually was forced, on the basis of her clinical work with young children, to say it was operative in the first year of life. This meant reconfiguring it somewhat in relation to the mother, but her work on the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions took over and she gradually stopped referring to the complex. Indeed, 'the baby's working through of the depressive position virtually replaces Freud's…Oedipus complex', in her later work (Minsky 1998: 43). This meant that the orthodoxy whereby boy children give up love of the mother for identification with the father under the threat of castration has gone largely unchallenged -until feminist relational psychoanalysts (a distinctively American version of object relations psychoanalysis) began to explore issues of masculinity and to suggest alternative oedipal scenarios. Jessica Benjamin (1998) is one of the key figures here. She talked of the need to understand the role of the pre-Oedipal father and the child's identifications with both parents, a situation she called 'overinclusive'. From this starting point, there does not need to be a sharp dis-identification (with the feminine) during the Oedipal process. Rather, she suggests, it depends: everything is contingent. Crucially, the degree to which feminine identifications are given up in favour of masculine ones, and the manner in which this is done (gently renounced or violently repudiated), has huge implications for the type of masculinity adopted: the more it becomes a defence against femininity, the more sexist it becomes (for a fuller account of this, see Jefferson 2002).

The importance of narcissism
[T]wo clinical complexes seem to me especially useful in thinking about terrorism and other extreme violence: first, paranoid-schizoid splitting and projective identification and, second, narcissism and humiliation. (Chodorow 2012: 126) In everyday terms, narcissism means 'a morbid self-love or self-admiration' (OED). Psychoanalysis offers accounts of the origins of both: the self-love and the nature of its 'morbid' pathological dimension. According to Freud, primary narcissism stems from an infant's original sexual satisfactions: 'We say that a human being has originally two sexual objects -himself and the woman who nurses him -and in doing so we are postulating a primary narcissism in everyone' (Freud 1914: 81-2). Although Chodorow (2012: 36), I think correctly, finds this statement problematic since it elides 'two mutually exclusive claims, sexual pleasure in the self, sexual pleasure in the mother', it makes sense once we read it through an object relations lens and presume the time when the infant cannot perceive itself as separate from its mother, as Lasch does: The newborn infant -the primary narcissist -does not yet perceive his mother as having an existence separate from his own, and he therefore mistakes dependence on the mother, who satisfies his needs as soon as they arise, with his own omnipotence. (Lasch 1979: 36) Secondary narcissism occurs, for Freud, in those 'whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance' (Freud 1914: 81). Such people, 'in their later choice of love-objects … have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed "narcissistic"' (Freud 1914)). Once again, an object relations lens provides a more satisfactory account of the nature of these 'disturbances', which are recast, specifically, as difficulties or disappointments in relating to love objects, as Christopher Lasch explains in his influential study of narcissism: 'Secondary narcissism … "attempts to annul the pain of disappointed [object] love" and to nullify the child's rage against those who do not respond immediately to his needs' (Lasch 1979: 36, quoting from Freeman 1963. This is done by attempting 'to re-establish earlier relationships by creating in his fantasies an omnipotent mother or father who merges with images of his own self' (Lasch 1979: 36) and which can then be used 'to annul the anxiety and guilt aroused by aggressive drives directed against the frustrating and disappointing object' (Freeman 1963: 295, quoted in Lasch 1979. In other words, secondary narcissism is a result of a failure to integrate love and hate, good and bad in the depressive position: instead a (good) omnipotent, fantasy mother/other/self is constructed to counter the rage felt towards the 'bad' love object. Minsky (1998: 41) expresses this with her characteristic clarity: The two defences characteristic of Klein's depressive position are denial and omnipotence. These are less violent than those of the paranoid-schizoid position.
Denial is primarily a denial of dependency (feelings of helplessness) and ambivalent feelings towards the mother … Associated with this is omnipotence, which may express itself in feelings of triumph or contempt which conceal the pain associated with the inevitable loss of the mother as well as the phantasy of total control over her. Young-Bruehl (1996: 237) also notes the centrality of denial to narcissists who, she says, 'may use the defenses most common in obsessional and hysterical characters … but their chief mode seems to be disavowal or denial'.
Lasch also argues that secondary narcissism 'has come to be recognised as an important element in the so-called character disorders that have absorbed much of the clinical attention once given to hysteria and obsessional neuroses' (Lasch 1979: 36-41). Without going into the features of such 'character disorders' in detail, some of the broad characteristics they subsume, namely, '"chaotic and impulse-ridden"' rather than 'severely repressed and morally rigid', a tendency to '"act out" their conflicts', 'a protective shallowness in emotional relations', and an inability to mourn 'because the intensity of rage against their lost love objects, in particular their parents, prevents their reliving happy experiences or treasuring them in memory' (Lasch 1979: 37), might all have been written with Darren in mind, to whom we now turn.

Darren: A case study
Darren is a 32-year-old troubled man, unemployed and with few prospects of work, whose life is 'crap'. He has a furious temper, is a serial abuser of his partner, constantly shouts and screams at her children for not doing as they are told, no longer sees two of his own children, drives without license or insurance despite convictions for dangerous driving, and gets angrily abusive when talking about immigrants and 'Pakis'. He hated his drunken, wife-beating father and has fallen out with his only sister for interfering in his own abusive relationship. Misbehaviour as a child, which included arson and shoplifting, eventuated in multiple suspensions from school and being sent to a residential school for unruly children (which he thought did him some good).
This is the barest outline of Darren's life as told in two interviews, conducted according to FANI principles (Hollway and Jefferson 2013). In what follows, I hope to show the following: the origins of Darren's characteristic tendency to deploy the defence of splitting good from bad; the insecurity of his identifications with both his parents; the related narcissistic tendencies; and the relationship of these to his (horrific, as we shall see) partner violence and his tendency to 'act out' and behave impulsively. (For reasons of space I will not be exploring his use of violent racist language.) Since both his sexist violence and racist language are endemic rather than fitful, they both deserve to be called hate-motivated examples of what Young-Bruehl (1996) would call 'orectic' prejudices because, as I hope to show in the case of the former, they seem to fulfil certain of his 'needs and desires'.

Darren's relations with his parents: Splitting, projective identification and a paranoidschizoid world
A superficial reading of Darren's relations with his mother would see her as he did, as all good, ideal, in contrast to his hated, violent dad: 'she looked after you. She was very good, very loving … I miss her so much … I love her to bits'. However, attention to the qualifications and to other comments reveals a somewhat less than ideal figure. The first quotation, above ('very good, very loving') continues, 'but she was very disciplinary, you respected your elders'. This oft mentioned 'disciplinary' side included a furious temper and, arguably rather ill-disciplined, physical 'chastisement'. When Darren smashed up his step-father's car when his parents were on holiday, he decided to move out because 'if I was still there when they got back me mother would have killed me there and then … swear … she'd put a knife in me neck there and then … you didn't mess with me mother'. If that was an exaggeration, Darren had experienced her wrath on many occasions: 'I got scars all over me head from me mum and me sister', incidents which included being thrown along a wall with such force that it 'tore the back of me head open', being hit on his eye by a record flung downstairs, being hit across the knuckles 'with one of those fold-away carpenter's rulers', being hit across the head 'with high heels', being 'cracked … round the back of me legs' with a hockey stick with such force that it 'took both me legs, yeah'. Characteristically, these punishments were justified in terms of their presumed disciplinary intent ('she also made sure I respected me elders and I realised a lot of right from wrong'), rather than, perhaps more realistically, the slightly out of control behaviour of an abused woman with a short temper at the end of her tether. When a child is brought up in a home where parents are 'forever fighting', whose tempers make them unpredictable carers, not to be messed with, not averse to dishing out physical punishments, there is no safe emotional space in which to develop. The consequence is likely to be that the primitive paranoid-schizoid defences of splitting and projective identification become characteristic, rather than just occasional. That is to say, Darren's mother seems to have been too traumatised, preoccupied and generally overburdened to be a safe and reliable container for Darren's 'bad' thoughts. And, despite his clear preference for Darren, his father was too hated to act as a substitute. So, Darren's projections would remain split off, and his ability to achieve the depressive position severely attenuated.

Family violence: Disavowal, fragmentation and identification with the aggressor
One consequence of this attenuated ability to achieve the depressive position was the development of Darren's narcissistic tendencies ('to annul the pain of disappointed [object] love') and the associated defence of denial or disavowal. Defensive disavowal is evident in the following account of his father beating his mother and of Darren knocking him unconscious with a rounders bat, when he was about eight, one of the 'two or three times' he claimed he intervened: downstairs. I went and collected that and he had a sore head … he was that drunk, he just went … out for the count.
It is a chilling and terrifying account, vividly and precisely recalled after a quarter of a century. Its emotional impact must have been profound. But the story is told as a series of facts ('threw up on it, came to', and so on), with all the terror and fear, that he must have felt, eliminated, and thus, effectively, disavowed.
Disavowal was also noticeable in his accounts of his own partner violence. His first mention of this uncannily echoes his talk of his father's violence: 'Just typical relationship, me and [her]… were always fighting, screaming and arguing. We've tried to beat each other black and blue'. And, also like his father 'I always seem to get the better of her even though she's like three times bigger than me'. We will return later to this similarity. For the moment, note the normalisation ('just typical relationship') that effectively removes its horror, and the accompanying emotion or affect. The fact that in the second interview he continues to rationalise his violence in terms of typicality ('Me and … [her], typical, the life we led. We are forever arguing') further secures the point: generally speaking, or most of the time, the emotional horror of violence has to remain unacknowledged, denied, disavowed (despite it being the acknowledged norm of his parents' relationship).
Given a mother who was unreliable as a container and a father too hated a figure for direct identification, at least two possibilities (not mutually exclusive, of course) follow from this, namely, 'fragmentation' and 'identification with the aggressor'. Darren's interviews provided evidence of both. When an attempt at projective identification is resisted by the person who is the object of the projection and there is, thus, no 'concomitant introjection', attempts become 'increasingly forceful' leading to 'severe distortions of identity and the disturbed experiences of the schizophrenic' (Hinshelwood 1991: 179). In other words, his parents' inability to detoxify Darren's 'bad' phantasies by containing them would lead, at worst, to an increasingly paranoid state and, ultimately, to a complete fragmentation of Darren's ego, or sense of self. This would become an issue, whenever and wherever Darren was attempting to control others, since taking over or controlling the other's thoughts and behaviour, forcing them to take over the hateful, bad split off phantasies, is the whole (unconscious) point of projective identification. As Minsky (1998: 38) nicely puts it, 'the people onto whom these projections have been made have to be severely controlled because, like human psychical dustbins, they contain rejected parts of the self'. Darren talked more than once of his head being 'messed up', strictly speaking of others messing it up, as with an old girlfriend who 'really messed me head up'. But where he has most difficulty holding himself together is in relation to challenges to his authority from his partner's IJCJ&SD 10 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2013 2(3) children. It is a primary source of their constant rows: he believes in discipline, whereas, 'she's a lazy cow that sits on her fat arse and lets them do whatever they want'. By the time of the second interview, this had become so bad ('I got screaming kids all the time … I'm just continually losing me temper, screaming, shouting, not coping') that he was thinking of moving out. This period included an incident where he had struck one of her children and 'just about avoided going on the child protection register'.
The violent incident where he 'froze', and imagined he was becoming his father, is revealing on this score too. Its origins lay in his partner's refusal to let him escape, which was his preferred method of dealing with his rising temper: 'Get away, escape, walk out, spend a bit of time on your own, go down the fields, sit down the fields for 10 minutes. Just calm down'. But, 'then she starts coming with the blockage … "You're going nowhere" … [and] I just lost it'. Although he does not say he was falling apart at this and similar points, it is clear that his inability to get his own way, to force his partner (or her children) to accept his view of events (or, as I'm suggesting, to introject his projective identifications) becomes unbearable: the other cannot contain him and he cannot contain himself. If he cannot get away to recompose himself, his only other resource is to physically force his views into the other; hence the violence. At this point, the only thing holding the ego together, the only way of avoiding fragmentation, is pure hatred: I hate therefore I am.
The second possibility, identification with the aggressor, is also demonstrated by this example of violence: Darren becoming like his dad. Earlier I talked of Darren's father being too hated to be a source of identification. But things are never that simple, and a child 'who cannot defend himself against a severe parent or take revenge for a punishment suffered may identify with the parent, as "he takes the unattackable authority into himself". This is what Anna Freud called "identification with the aggressor" or with the aggressor's aggression' (Young-Bruehl 1996: 311). Although this identification with his father's violence was disavowed with the rationalisation that his violence was about something ('I'm not kicking off for no reason, really') whilst his father's was the pointless result of drink and his football team losing, Darren was aware that he had picked up his 'vile' temper, the constant prelude to violence, from both his mother and his father. It might have been possible, if the violence had not been so omnipresent, to have developed more positive identifications on the basis of the father's apparent privileging of Darren the boy child. But Darren never took to his father's love of football ('He would take me football, anything like that. In his dreams. I hate football'), presumably because it came already tainted with his father's violence: indeed the 'reason' for much of it, according to Darren's memory.

Impulsive behaviour, 'acting out' and disconnected thinking
A less extreme version of fragmentation is the inability to think straight, to make simple connections: what Bion calls 'attacks on linking'. There is, again, much evidence of this. It would seem to be implicated, for example, in Darren's account of him and a friend, aged around ten, setting light to a disused gypsy caravan the two them had been using as a 'base', an act of bored messing about that spread to two vans and a garage to cause a 'hell of a lot of damage'. On an impulse, they destroyed their hang out, and all that Darren could offer by way of explanation was boredom and the non-thought that 'it was just something that happened'.
Darren tended to blame others in his accounts of his misbehaviour at school and the suspensions that led to him spending most of his secondary school life in a school for the unruly: a 'vile' teacher in infants school for whom he refused to work; a fellow pupil for accusing him of doing something he hadn't (which led to a fight, just as the headmaster entered the room); his secondary school headmaster who 'got hold of the record and he just had it in for me. From day one'. Maybe. But, from what we know of Darren's early life and his emotional insecurity at home, 'acting out' in school would be a predictable response to such an environment. The fact IJCJ&SD 11 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2013 2(3) that the two specific instances of misbehaviour that he cites involved fights, albeit he called one 'play-fighting', would tend to support such a reading. And blaming others is a typical narcissistic response when bad things happen, a defensive denial of responsibility.
Perhaps the best evidence of this inability to make connections occurred in Darren's discussions about his various driving convictions. The time he smashed up his step-father's car, he had not learned to drive but decided to take the car anyway. This led to a 'Taking Without Consent' (TWOC) conviction ('Me own mother had me for TWOC', he said, with some surprise) plus fines and compensation payments. Later, after her death and his inheriting some money, he was hanging around with 'guys who were … repairing cars and that' so decided to buy a car: 'I'll get a car. I'll learn to drive'. But, 'unfortunately it never worked like that. I just learnt to drive and just kept going. Never bothered to sit a test, never bothered to have a lesson'. Queried about the reason for his present probationary status, he said: 'Driving whilst disqualified. Never drunk driving, doesn't happen, bit more sense than that'. But it's an odd (or just a ruthlessly selfcentred) kind of sense that can afford a car but does not bother to invest the much smaller sums needed for lessons, licence and insurance, especially as he knows that 'if I did have an accident and I was to injure somebody, I'm knackered'. However, once again, this logic is countered by the fact that 'I'm not really a reckless, dangerous driver' because 'I don't go caning it around'; nor does he drink-drive: 'no chance on this earth of that ever happening'. But he had had a 'bump' that he would not talk about on the record, and a crash on a motorway, one which could have proved fatal: he fell asleep in the 'fast lane' from where (he was later told) he drifted across lanes, 'ploughed into the side of an artic, that's bounced me straight back into the central reservation' and woke up in an ambulance taking him to hospital. Afterwards, he admitted it was 'sheer luck how I'm still here' (and that nobody else was killed either). He got a two year ban for this offence.
The only explanation he can give for his disconnected form of thinking is, once again, in terms of his need to 'escape' his troubled home life: 'I used it as an escape. I know I shouldn't have but. When your head's as messed up as mine is, you just do what you feel comfortable with … you pay the consequences in the end but at the time of doing it … [everything] just goes out the window. You don't think about it. You gotta know, you know a little bit, if I get caught I'm knackered but a lot of the time you just by-pass it. Ah bugger it. Stupid thing to do'. This is also an example of impulsive behaviour.

Narcissistic omnipotence and humiliation
I have already dealt with Darren's use of the narcissistic defence of denial. The associated defence of omnipotence supplies the phantasised reality that replaces the denied reality. When this is challenged, humiliation is keenly felt. Chodorow links this with the Oedipal process, as we saw in her earlier quotation: 'humiliation, specifically, is especially a male-male -originally father-son -affair' … [involving] the delicate negotiation … of identification … without bringing on retaliation, castration, or humiliation'. In other words, she is arguing, those males for whom the process (of giving up one's first love attachment to the mother, and with it the accompanying narcissistic sense of omnipotence, in favour of an identification with their father) has not been well handled may become sensitive to humiliation by other males. This would seem to be especially the case for those males having continuing problems with narcissistic phantasies of omnipotence. There were at least two examples of Darren's enraged responses to other males that seem indicative of Darren perceiving threats to his omnipotent sense of self and attempting to ward off humiliation.
One emerged in the story of Darren nearly being ejected from his own home by his sister's husband and his mate, a result of Darren's partner complaining to Darren's sister of his violence. There is little doubt that he found the experience of men attempting to turf him out of his 'own The second occasion was when the police were called to talk to him about his violence towards one of his partner's children: 'The social services woman was alright but the copper, I swear, I just wanted to go in the kitchen and get me hammer and cave his face in 'cos he just hadn't got a clue'. Not having a clue seemed to relate to the (male) 'copper' being unable (or refusing) to recognise Darren's point of view: 'Was I supposed to sit there and allow these kids and everybody else to wreck everything I've ever gone out and done? All this work I've done to get a nice house?' Ventriloquising the 'copper', Darren recalled him as saying 'that is beside the point; you should do something about it'. The direct challenge of another male to his interpretation of the problem ('couldn't see where I was coming from') proved humiliating, prompting this outburst of recalled rage. He ends the story with a remark that is Darren's attempt to turn the tables and humiliate the 'copper', by feminising him: 'Never mind the tit on your head [a reference to his helmet, presumably], I think you got a tit on your flaming face you tool'. This double insult, implicating the male organ, 'tool', as well as the female 'tit', provides further evidence of just how strongly Darren felt about the incident: how much enraged 'work' was needed to restore his omnipotent reading of the incident.

Summary and conclusion
My objective has been to try to understand a particular case of a man whose use of racist language was of concern to his probation officer, but whose use of violence against his partner provided a more compelling route to the core of his hatred. My argument for starting with an individual case is consistent with Young-Bruehl's notion that prejudices fulfil certain 'needs and desires' and that psychoanalysis is the key to understanding these. Using a combination of psychoanalytic ideas deriving from Freud and Klein especially, I argued that Darren's difficult and frightening early life experiences of a violent father and abused mother would have made it more likely that the primitive defences of splitting and projective identification characteristic of Klein's paranoid-schizoid position would become characteristic responses to anxiety-invoking situations. With parents too unreliable as containers or points of identification, paranoid splitting of the world into good and bad is the result, as is the replacement of anxiety by aggression. Examples of this paranoid world-view were taken from many parts of the interviews with Darren. Such a fragile sense of identity, constantly depleted through projecting out parts of the self, is vulnerable to the narcissism resulting from experiences of rejection, and the associated defences of denial or disavowal and omnipotence. Although there were other general examples, just two instances of Darren's omnipotent thinking and behaviour were used: those relating to other males; along with material demonstrating the related characteristics of impulsive behaviour and 'acting out'. The most glaring example of Darren's hatred, the one motivating his endemic violent abuse of his partner, was seen to stem partly from his fear of going to pieces, the fragmentation of the self characteristic of extreme paranoia, brought on by his failure to get his partner to see things from his point of view: to take in, or introject, his hostile projective identifications. There was also evidence of Darren 'identifying with the aggressor', his violent father, in these incidents; of becoming, despite himself, the man he hated.
I end with some riders and a pointer towards the social. First, a reminder that the developmental processes that I have been alluding to are universal ones: they affect us all and we all end up somewhere on the relevant continua. Take, for example, narcissism. Learning to love ourselves is a necessary part of normal development, and most of us have 'narcissistic traits'. But it is developmentally contingent whether we become 'narcissistic characters', develop 'narcissistic character disorders', become 'narcissistic neurotics' or, finally, 'schizophrenics', to use the continuum of narcissism from normal to pathological offered by Young-Bruehl (1996: 207). The same with learning to hate: it exists on a similar continuum and, as I have been trying to do here, we need constantly to improve our understanding of its developmental pathways. Second, although I have been drawing on the work of Young-Bruehl (1996) who operates with the notion of character types, I have resisted using it in my presentation, preferring instead the less fixed notion of characteristic defences. This is partly because the idea of character (like personality) does not convey the incessant dynamics underpinning behaviour for which a processual analysis is more appropriate. Moreover, using 'a type' in the detailed examination of any particular person (as here) tends to produce a mixed type. But it is also in full recognition that, with the limited information available, talking in terms of types rather than tendencies risks overstating the case. Finally, this is not an attempt to analyse Darren, the person, but to make sense of evidence produced (material divulged in two interview transcripts) in accordance with a body of theoretical work about hatred, in order to advance that understanding. It's a subtle distinction, perhaps, but one worth holding to.
Finally, what about the social? Here, Young-Bruehl's argument that 'characterologically based prejudice types and types of societies, reflect and promote, or refuse and demote, the different prejudices' (Young-Bruehl 1996: 27) is a useful starting point. What it means, very simply, is that particular types of prejudice will flourish in societies where the associated character types are enabled in some ways. Take Darren's sexist violence. Formally this is disapproved of, discouraged and may even be criminalised. In practice, little is done to stop it and it is, informally, massively condoned. Take the time when Darren, feeling he had become his father, asked his partner to call the police. She didn't; nor did she leave him. After she had invited Darren's sister to become involved in ejecting him from the house, when faced with the reality of it happening, she changed her mind and ordered the would-be ejectors from the house, thus proving, to Darren, that 'she does actually love me to bits and doesn't want me to go'. The same happened with his mother. Despite all the beatings, she reunited with Darren's father after a period of separation, thus proving to Darren, that 'they realised there was still feelings there'. These are concrete, everyday examples of a society 'reflecting and promoting' sexism: institutionally and discursively. Beyond that, the failure of the police and the courts to deal effectively with 'domestic violence' is, unfortunately, the kind of criminological truism and continuing demonstration of patriarchal power that many have written about and which, therefore, should need no reiteration here.