SAEDNEWS: In “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” D. W. Winnicott explores therapists’ feelings of hatred toward clients, linking them to early mother–infant relationships and emphasizing the importance of acknowledging these feelings in therapy.
According to Saednews, It has probably happened to us as psychotherapists many times that we have felt aversion toward certain clients. If we look back on our experiences, we will surely remember some clients whose sessions left us feeling overwhelmingly exhausted, sluggish, and unmotivated. Some of us have probably had at least one client whose approaching session made us feel distressed, as we wondered: How are we going to endure another 45-minute session with this client?
Perhaps some of us have also experienced a sense of liberation, relief, and release when the treatment of certain clients came to an end. In short, experiencing aversion, anger, or, more precisely, hatred toward a client is a common phenomenon in the therapeutic setting, one with which most therapists are familiar.
In this article, we will revisit the paper “Hate in the Counter-Transference” [1]. In 1949, Donald Winnicott [2] sought to explore the roots of the experience of hating a client, examine its various dimensions, and offer a clear and comprehensive account of the hatred that emerges within the therapist–client relationship.
In “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” Winnicott acknowledges that therapists can experience hatred even when working with neurotic patients. However, he distinguishes the nature of this hatred from that experienced in work with borderline and psychotic patients. He argues that managing patients experiencing psychosis is considerably more complex, demanding, and exhausting.
In making this distinction, Winnicott suggests that hatred in the treatment of neurotic patients is more abstract, can remain concealed throughout the therapeutic process, and does not tend to become a major problem.
These patients have a considerable capacity to understand ambivalence and distinguish love from hate. In contrast, when treating borderline and psychotic patients, the absence of this capacity transforms hatred into something concrete. It becomes tangibly present in the therapy room and can create significant difficulties.
It is worth noting that Winnicott does not regard the mother and infant as separate entities during the first months after birth. Indeed, he considers them to constitute a single psychological unit. He applies a similar understanding to the therapist–client relationship, drawing attention to the dynamics of transference and countertransference.
In other words, the therapist and client continually encounter one another in the roles of primary objects, creating an interpsychic world within the therapy room. Understanding this point is important because the hatred Winnicott describes as emerging in the therapy room has its roots in the very hatred experienced by the object in its early relationship with the mother.
Winnicott challenges idealized notions of motherhood by speaking explicitly about a mother’s hatred of her infant. He implicitly rejects Melanie Klein’s idea that the death drive, annihilation anxiety, and aggression originate primarily from the infant, and he states clearly in this paper that, in fact, hatred begins on the mother’s side.
Although he continues to regard love as more primordial, he acknowledges that a mother may experience hatred toward her infant at certain moments throughout the process of mothering.
Winnicott identifies 18 reasons why a mother may hate her infant. The most significant include the following:
The infant does not correspond to the mother’s mental image of her imagined baby.
During birth, the infant physically injures the mother as it emerges from her body.
The infant behaves brutally toward the mother and causes her pain.
Once its needs have been met, the infant discards the mother as though she were an orange peel.
The infant disrupts the peace and tranquility of the mother’s former life.
The infant frustrates the mother and is sometimes unkind to her.
And so on.
Winnicott concludes that a mother must distance herself from idealized and stereotypical images of motherhood, bring her hatred of the infant into conscious awareness, and acknowledge its existence. Otherwise, she may experience guilt toward the infant and resort to masochistic behaviors.
Winnicott clearly distinguishes between concepts such as holding and containing, on the one hand, and masochistic behaviors on the other. He considers it essential for the mother to understand the fine boundary between these two domains.
Continuing this discussion, Winnicott points out that some lullabies sung by mothers contain violent themes, which may reflect the mother’s hatred of her infant. A mother sings lovingly to her baby, who peacefully falls asleep, yet each word of the lullaby may carry traces of the mother’s unconscious hatred.
Winnicott emphasizes that these lullabies can, in fact, provide an outlet for some of this hatred, thereby increasing the mother’s capacity to tolerate it.
In his paper, he provides an example of such a lullaby:
“Rock-a-bye, baby, on the treetop. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall…”
Drawing a parallel between the mother–infant dyad and the therapist–client dyad, Winnicott applies the same complex, multilayered dynamics of hatred to the therapeutic relationship.
He explains that he himself experienced such hatred when working with psychotic patients. Because these patients have fragmented, disorganized psyches and a limited capacity for ambivalence, they struggle to understand abstract concepts and distinguish love from hate. Instead, they discharge whatever they experience directly into the therapeutic space.
This situation can leave the therapist profoundly exhausted and depleted. Such exhaustion may reveal aspects of the therapist’s unconscious through countertransference. At times, it may also become infused with anxiety and guilt, potentially obscuring the ultimate purpose of the treatment.
For this reason, Winnicott concludes that, just like the mother, the therapist must bring this hatred into conscious awareness, acknowledge it, and even make use of it in the therapeutic process.
In “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” Winnicott describes a dream that is closely connected to one of his psychotic patients.
He recounts that, in one part of the dream, he finds himself on a theater stage, required to perform before an audience. At that moment, he experiences an unusual and overwhelming anxiety: the fear of losing the right side of his body.
Winnicott interprets this part of the dream as a representation of something he had experienced in the therapy room with his psychotic patient.
The patient believed that he had no body and possessed only a mind. Winnicott explains that any discussion of the body was intensely anxiety-provoking and intolerable for this patient. The patient had asked Winnicott to communicate with his mind solely through Winnicott’s own mind.
Winnicott describes this demand as extremely difficult and emotionally draining, and acknowledges that he had been trying to repress his awareness of this reality.
His disturbing dream represented something he had been experiencing in the therapeutic relationship. He writes:
“The night I had this dream, I was somewhat hurt by something my patient had said, despite all the other concerns occupying my mind.… It took some time for me to recover myself and repair my lapses. The essential point was that I needed to understand my anxiety, and this was revealed in my dream: the loss of the right side of my body while I was trying to perform a role that people were watching.
“The right side of my body was the part that was in contact with this patient and, according to his wishes, had to exist in a state of absolute denial.… Other interpretations of this dream are possible, but as a result of the dream and by recalling it, I was able to resume the analysis and heal the damage that had occurred—damage rooted in my relationship with a patient who did not want to have a body.”
In this paper, Winnicott explains that the therapist must be able to tolerate hatred, just as he believes a mother must tolerate her hatred of her infant.
He argues that by understanding this hatred and becoming aware of its various dimensions, the therapist can discover what is happening within the client’s psyche. In a sense, the therapist must tolerate the hatred that the mother was unable to bear and survive the experience without being destroyed by it, thereby addressing the unhealthy early relationship between the client and the mother.
Winnicott adds that, when appropriate, the therapist may need to interpret this hatred to the client. He acknowledges that such clients may sometimes seek to encounter the psychoanalyst’s hatred and argues that the therapist may need to bring this hatred into the open for them to confront.
If the client never encounters this hatred, they may never fully come to understand love either.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the first step toward this process is for the therapist to identify the hatred within their own personal analysis and become familiar with its different dimensions.
