Revenge—the Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name: a Psychoanalytic Perspective

Abstract

M y interest in the topic of revenge and my subsequent two-year, virtually full-time immersion in writing this essay had their conscious origin in the reading of Laura Blumenfeld's memoir, Revenge: A Story of Hope (2002). That more than intellectual curiosity was driving my exploration would not become clear to me until the essay's near completion.In her book Blumenfeld describes a train of events that began when her father, then a rabbi visiting in Israel, was shot during the Intifada by a Palestinian gunman.The wound was superficial; he was briefly treated in the local emergency room and sent home. Upon his return to the United States, he swiftly recovered from both the physical and the psychological effects of the trauma and regained his psychic balance, as did his son and his ex-wife. Not so his daughter Laura, a journalist with the Washington Post, who tenaciously brooded, obsessed, dreamt, wrote, and talked about the event over a ten-year-period-all with a nagging, persistent, yet righteously ego-syntonic affective experience that congealed around a structured pattern of fantasied revenge in which she would confront her father's assailant and demand his admission of guilt and his apology, along with his acknowledgment that, in her words, "you don't fuck with the Blumenfelds."Eventually she goes to Israel, where, using her journalistic credentials and connections, she gains access first to the family of the gunman, by then imprisoned, and later to the man himself. At first Blumenfeld uses only her f irst name and identif ies herself only as an American reporter wishing to learn and write about the Intifada. j a p aTraining and Supervising Analyst, Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute.

Masochism and Pathological Gambling

“…Another type of masochistic symptomatology is based on the need for a "bad enough" object (Rosen, 1993(Rosen, , 2007. In relational masochism, one's "relationship is unconsciously believed to be dependent on one's suffering or victimization.…”

Seduction and Revenge in Virginia Woolf’sOrlando

“…Others have written of the manifold psychic functions of revenge, and how the revenge motive can be "overlooked and underestimated" (Rosen 2007, p. 598). Revenge can be a defense against bad feelings, maintenance of an enduring object-relational tie based on envy and splitting, an attempt to restore the grandiose self fueled by narcissistic rage, an obsessional idea and a compulsive enactment that denies reality, and a Fairbairnian tie to the exciting/rejecting object (Rosen 2007). But as Lansky (2004) alludes to and LaFarge elaborates, vengefulness is also a way of representing and managing rage and restoring "the disrupted sense of self" (LaFarge 2006, p. 447).…”

The Wish for Revenge

“…Within this framework, the ascendancy of the Bette figure within the novel could be seen to represent the regressive shift to a more primitive and aggressive mode of operations that takes place, under the impact of narcissistic injury, in rigid characters such as Adeline's-the dynamic that underlies Rosen's (2004) "falling in hate." Within this regressive system of fantasy-the world seen through Bette's eyes-the narrative structure in which Bette's story is both embedded in Adeline's and held apart from it takes on a different set of meanings.…”

“…Entry into the state of conscious vengefulness is often sudden, felt to be a magical solution to aggressive conflicts that reverberate on many levels. This quality of a sudden crystallization has led Rosen (2004) to describe the emergence of vengeful wishes, aptly, as "falling in hate." The experience of vengefulness in ourselves and others also makes us aware of the tenacity of vengeful wishes.…”