Hate as Testimony: Clinical Encounters with Trauma | Displacement | Struggle for Recognition

Hate as Testimony in Immigrant Clinical Work

The paper I am presenting today grows out of clinical work with immigrant patients, but also from a more intimate location: my own experience as an immigrant clinician who has had to think, feel, and practice across languages, losses, and shifting symbolic worlds. I want to speak about hate not as pathology in any simple sense, nor as an embarrassing affect to be neutralized as quickly as possible, but as testimony. I want to ask what hate may be saying when it appears in the consulting room as a demand, a refusal, a pressure, a test, or a wound that has not yet found a form in language.

Psychoanalysis has often had difficulty granting hate its full dignity. At times, hate has been reduced to a derivative of frustrated love, or treated primarily as a developmental residue, or placed on the side of destructiveness to be managed and interpreted away. Yet many of us working with trauma, migration, and displacement encounter something more complex.

Hate may arrive not merely as an attack on the object, but as a record of injury; not only as aggression, but as an insistence that something unbearable has happened and has not yet been adequately received. In this sense, hate can be understood less as the opposite of relation than as a desperate form of relation.

For immigrant and displaced patients especially, hate often gathers around experiences of misrecognition. It may attach itself to institutions, borders, accents, documents, waiting rooms, professional gatekeepers, or idealized national narratives. It may also attach itself to the analyst. In the transference, the analyst may become the face of the world that doubted, delayed, corrected, translated, diminished, or excluded. What appears as hatred of the analyst may therefore carry an address that exceeds the analyst. It may be a condensed social and historical affect, deposited in the clinical dyad and demanding more than explanation: it demands witnessing.

Ferenczi: Trauma, Tact, and the Confusion of Tongues

Here I find Ferenczi indispensable, especially for those of us who work close to trauma. In Confusion of Tongues, he shows how the overwhelmed subject does not simply protest or defend, but may be rendered mute by the authority of the other and compelled into forms of identification with the aggressor. The traumatized child, he argues, may lose trust in “the testimony of his own senses,” and the result is confusion, splitting, compliance, or defiance without representation. In another register, Ferenczi’s technical writings insist that analytic authority must be tempered by humility, tact, and responsiveness; as he put it, “What is tact? It is the capacity for empathy,” and he even describes moments when “the patient turned out to be right.” These gestures are not minor technical refinements. They inaugurate an ethics of mutuality in which the analyst’s fallibility becomes part of the cure rather than a threat to it.

Ferenczi’s importance for this topic is not only that he rehabilitates trauma as real, but that he understands how retraumatization can occur inside treatment when the analyst hidesbehind technique, disbelief, or superiority. Later commentators, closely following Ferenczi, emphasize that the analyst’s admission of error and emotional sincerity can help establish a contrast between “the present and the unbearable traumatogenic past.” That contrast matters enormously in immigrant clinical work. Many of our patients have inhabited worlds in which authority denied what happened, minimized humiliation, or required the subject to accept an alien account of reality. Under such conditions, hate may emerge precisely where the patient fears that the analyst, too, will know better, name better, or translate better than the patient can speak.

Benjamin: Recognition, Thirdness, and the Doer/Done-To Bind

Benjamin helps us take the next step. Her language of recognition allows us to think about hate not merely as discharge but as what erupts when recognition breaks down. In her account, “Mutual recognition is integral to the space of thirdness,” and she repeatedly contrasts this with the complementary bind of “doer and done-to.” When that complementary structure takes over, each subject experiences the other as the one acts, defines, injures, or overpowers; each feels done to, while the shared space of thinking collapses. For Benjamin, the task is not to erase asymmetry—analysis remains asymmetrical in responsibility—but to create a relational field in which both minds can remain present without one annihilating the other.

This is especially useful for immigrant clinical situations, because displacement often intensifies the risk of complementary relating. The patient may experience the analyst as the representative of a dominant language, dominant culture, or dominant institutional order. The analyst, in turn, may feel recruited into positions of rescuer, translator, judge, or expert. Once this happens, analytic space can harden into a struggle over whose reality will prevail. Benjamin’s formulation of a “shared third” offers another possibility. She describes thirdness as an intersubjective process constituted through mutuality, accommodation, and the intention to “recognize and be recognized by the other.” The third is not simply theory in the analyst’s head; it is a co-created space in which difference becomes bearable because neither party has to disappear for the other to exist.

Winnicott: Surviving Hate in the Countertransference

Winnicott adds something equally crucial, and perhaps more difficult. In “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” he refuses the sentimental fantasy that the analyst—or the mother—should be free of hate. He writes that work with psychotic patients becomes impossible unless “the analyst’s own hate is extremely well sorted-out and conscious,” and he distinguishes “objective counter-transference” from merely neurotic contamination. He insists that the analyst must be capable of hating the patient objectively, on the basis of what actually occurs in the relationship, without disavowing that response and without acting it out. This is not a celebration of hate. It is a call for ethical consciousness: hate that is denied becomes dangerous; hate that is known may become thinkable.

Winnicott also says something I think we still underestimate: the patient may need the analyst’s capacity to bear hate if the patient is ever to trust love. He warns that hate “that is justified in the present setting” must be “kept in storage and available for eventual interpretation,” and he goes so far as to suggest that a patient cannot tolerate his own hate unless the analyst can hate him. I read this as a profoundly ethical claim. The analyst’s task is not to answer retaliatory hatred with moral correction, nor to neutralize it with prematureempathy, but to survive it without evacuation. To survive hate is to refuse the collapse into either counterattack or withdrawal. It is to make room for the patient’s destructive fantasy without confirming the patient’s expectation that destruction will end relation.

Toward a Clinical Ethics of Bearing

Taken together, these three thinkers offer, for me, a clinical ethics of bearing. Ferenczi teaches us that trauma destroys the subject’s confidence in lived reality and that analytic humility may restore trust. Benjamin teaches us that the breakdown of recognition throws us into the bind of doer and done-to, where each perspective seeks victory rather than relation. Winnicott teaches us that hate in the field is not, by definition, failure, and that the analyst’s responsibility is to become conscious enough not to convert countertransference into retaliation, sentimentality, or flight. Hate, then, need not be interpreted away. It must first be borne, metabolized, and recognized as an address.

Clinical vignettes

Clinical Vignette I — "An Accent of Authority"

Let me turn to a first brief vignette. This is a composite clinical illustration, altered to protect confidentiality. A patient in the early phase of treatment began to react with visible irritation whenever I spoke in a more interpretive register. He once referred to my “accent of authority,” a phrase that struck with precision. At first glance, it might have seemed a simple resistance to interpretation or perhaps a displacement onto me as a professional figure. But as we remained with the phrase rather than defending against it, the meaning thickened.

“Accent” named not only voice, but hierarchy; not only foreignness, but correction; not only language, but a history of being spoken over by teachers, officials, supervisors, and family elders whose legitimacy was never available to question.

The patient’s contempt was unmistakable. There were moments in which I could feel the invitation to become either apologetic or authoritative in return. Yet both options would have repeated the field he was bringing. What proved mutative was not an immediate interpretation of transference, but a willingness to let the contempt stand long enough to become legible. Underneath it was a lineage of institutional humiliation: repeated experiences in which speaking incorrectly, speaking from the wrong class position, or speaking with the wrong inflection had exposed him to shame. What he was testing, I came to think, was whether my authority would insist on innocence. Ferenczi helps us here: the patient’s reality had too often been overridden by others more certain than he was. To acknowledge the truth-value of his experience—even when it implicated me—was to begin restoring faith in perception.

Benjamin’s language also clarified this moment. The dyad was in danger of collapsing into complementarity: either I would become the one who knows and he the one who is corrected, or he would become the righteous accuser and I the defensive authority. Neither position would have allowed thought. The clinical work consisted in finding a third position from which the phrase “accent of authority” could be held as more than an attack and less than a literal accusation. Slowly, the phrase became symbolic. It came to stand for the patient’s history of encountering institutions that did not merely fail to hear him, but made hearing itself conditional upon submission. In that movement, hate shifted from sheer contempt toward testimony. It still burned, but now as something that could be spoken, linked, and remembered.

Clinical Vignette II — The Analyst as Border

The second vignette concerns another immigrant patient for whom the analytic relationship became organized around refusal of entry. Session after session, the patient experienced me as a border: unavailable, opaque, withholding, arbitrarily sovereign. Minor breaks in rhythm—a delayed interpretation, a vacation, a misunderstood remark—were experienced not simply as disappointment, but as repudiation. At times the patient’s retaliatory hatred was fierce. The fantasy seemed to be: if you refuse me entry, I will turn myself into the thing you fear, or I will make the room uninhabitable for both of us. The temptation, clinically, was to reassure too quickly or to explain too much. But explanation would have functioned as a bureaucratic reply, not an analytic one.

Winnicott became essential here. The patient needed me not to deny the intensity of what I was feeling in the room—pressure, exhaustion, at moments even dread—but to know it without using it against him. He needed an analyst who could survive being made into the border without becoming one in deed. Only when the retaliatory hatred could be borne without retreat or moral correction did something else become imaginable. The hatred began to reveal not only aggression but grief: grief for a homeland that could not protect, grief for applications denied, grief for languages left half-alive, grief for all the scenes in which one presents oneself and is told, again, not yet, not here, not like this. Hate had functioned as a last defense against collapse. When it was received, loss entered.

What both vignettes show, I think, is that hate often tests the sturdiness of the analytic field.

The patient is asking, in effect: can this relationship survive my experience of exclusion without reproducing it? Can the analyst remain present when I bring the violence of misrecognition into the room? Can we think together when my first impulse is to make you feel what I have had to feel? These are not marginal questions in our present world. They are central clinical questions, especially wherever migration, race, bureaucracy, class, language, and geopolitical violence shape psychic life before the patient ever arrives.

The Analyst Who Is Also an Immigrant

As a clinician who is also an immigrant, I do not stand outside these tensions. My listening is not untouched by them. There are moments in which I am not only interpreting displacement but inhabiting it; not only receiving the patient’s relation to accent, documentation, belonging, or foreignness, but feeling the resonances in my own body. This does not collapse the difference between analyst and patient. Rather, it intensifies the ethical necessity of reflection. Ferenczi’s humility, Benjamin’s recognition, and Winnicott’s disciplined consciousness of hate are all ways of preserving analytic responsibility without pretending to stand outside history. They help me remember that neutrality is not the absence of implication; often it is only the denial of it. I also want to suggest that in polarized social worlds, hate offers a false cohesion.

Collective Hate and the False Promise of Belonging

Collective hatred can promise belonging where symbolic life has failed. It can simplify injury into enemy-thinking and convert grief into certainty. This is why the analytic task is, in a sense, countercultural. We do not cure hate by sanitizing it, nor by celebrating it, nor by collapsing it into moral pedagogy. We work by tracing its genealogy, surviving its transferential force, and opening time for it to become thinkable. The point is not to redeem hate sentimentally. The point is to make symbolization possible where only repetition had been available.In that respect, reclaiming clinical sensibility also means reclaiming time. Trauma compresses time; migration fractures it; hatred hardens it. The consulting room must therefore become a place where time can reopen—where what was forced into action can return as language, where what was lived as humiliation can become memory, where what appeared only as attack can disclose its appeal to be witnessed. Benjamin’s thirdness, Winnicott’s holding of objective hate, and Ferenczi’s empathic tact all converge on this temporal task. They ask whether we can remain in the interval between enactment and understanding without rushing to mastery.

When Hate Begins to Change Form

So when I say that hate may be testimony, I do not mean that every expression of hate is ethically valid or analytically generative. I mean that clinically, hate may carry knowledge before it carries thought. It may know humiliation before it can narrate it; know exclusion before it can symbolize it; know the failure of recognition before it can risk dependence on another mind. Our responsibility is to listen for that knowledge without romanticizing destruction. To do so requires an analyst who can be affected, who can recognize his or her own participation, and who can remain answerable to the patient without surrendering reflective function.

I want to end with this proposition: hate lasts—in the psyche, in the transference-countertransference field, and in the social world—when its appeal has not yet been received. When hate is met only with correction, fear, or denial, it hardens. When it is met with a sturdy and reflective witnessing, it may begin to change its form. Not disappear, not purify itself, but change form. It may become grief, protest, mourning, memory, speech, or even the first fragile bridge toward recognition. In that sense, the analytic task is neither to love hate nor to eradicate it, but to bear it consciously enough that it no longer has to remain the patient’s only language of truth.

This text was originally presented on May 10, 2026, at the 22nd Annual Conference of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Toronto, Canada. Co-authored with Dr. Morteza Modares Gharavi (Iran).