Five Prologues on Hatred

This article reframes the problem of inviting hate into psychoanalytic relationships as tantamount to asking how an analytic dyad can speak about highly charged subjective realities experienced by each member of the dyad as tightly held incommensurate facts. Within this perspective, hate is understood to be a relational property of a given dyad, whereby it is a marker of a boundary that is felt to be too thin to contain difference. A complexity sensibility introduces the fractal nature of boundaries within complex human systems that allow for the possibility of incommensurate realities to speak to each other inside their common fractal boundary zone. The latter feature heralds the emergence of a special ethic of relational accountability entailed by a willingness to bear a reality of the other before one can welcome it. The author’s failure to meet that ethical standard with a patient concerning the Israel Gaza conflict became a spur to reexamine the complexities of his relationship to Israel.