American Imago

Abstract:

This contribution reads Freud's Instincts and Their Vicissitudes re-contextualising it as the necessary complement of his pivotal paper On Narcissism: An Introduction. Despite its foundational importance for the concept of narcissism and the vicissitudes of love, the latter text has a serious blind spot, an account of the aggressive aspects of narcissism. The latter issue, however, is specifically elaborated in the often neglected last part of Instincts and Their Vicissitudes. This appears to be the only place in the entire Freudian corpus where a genuine account of hatred is developed. This account is contrasted with Freud's prior account of hatred as a transformation of love. In the same vein as The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis, however, Freud argues in favour of the primacy of hatred, drawing on the constitutive importance of the ego-development and the ego-instincts as announced in On Narcissism. Freud's plea for an original conception of hatred in terms of non-sexual aggressivity contrasting with sadism, is presented as coinciding with the idea of hatred as the dark truth of love.