Becoming a free person

There are many theories in psychology and psychoanalysis about what constitutes a person or an individual.

Some of them stress that our feelings of hate are at the heart of our development of our identity. Freud for instance would say that hate precedes love in our development. Others, Fairbairn for instance, did not agree and said that love precedes hate. That hate is the consequence of our frustrations and disappointments in love.

It is a difference of view with far reaching consequences for ways we approach each other and our lives. It also has far reaching implications for our therapeutic understanding of relationships.

My understanding is that love differentiates and hate separates. Differentiation leads to individuating. Separation leads to egoism. Individuation leads to understanding boundaries between ourselves and others, leading to understanding and tolerating and loving differences, it leads to interdependency.
Egoism leads to instilling limits between self and other, removal of the other person as a necessity for independence, it leads to divisions and alienations between ourselves and others.

Feelings of hate are part of us and they need to be understood within us- we can’t avoid them or deny them because then we alienate from ourselves. But we can understand that they come from a place of fear for and frustration with and disappointment in our love for an other person - Once we come to term with those feelings- we can feel our first and fresh love once again, the basis we have for loving life in spite of all the frustrations and disappointments it might expose us to. In the end we are interdependent, and we- as a people- we truly need each other. If we can be in touch with that initial love, then we have a future ahead that will be benign and humane. We can understand and we can have compassion for our own and others feelings of hatred, egoism, and separateness, we can work together to overcome them. This is a life long and not an easy commitment which constitutes us as free persons.

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