Radical Hate and Concretization

Abstract

In this article, hate, an emotion that can be destructive to our linking and connections, is understood as arising from intolerable absence. Such absence occurs when connection to the other is lost (e.g. failure of recognition, feeling mutually understood and co-constituted as subjects). There is hate that makes use of the tolerable absence for the development of thinking, mediates distance in emotional connection, and is needed for demarcation. And there is radical hate that arises from overwhelming experiences of a void that leads to concrete thinking and the expectation of recurrence. Concretization, which is conceptualized to lie at the center of radical hate, closes off the possibilities to imagine and to learn from experience. I illustrate from the paradigm of post-Bionian Field theory the development of symbolization in poetry, personal experience, and clinical work.