The landscapes of minus. Hatred, adolescence and the paradoxes of growth

Abstract

This paper explores Bion’s theory of links, L, H, K (Love, Hate and Knowledge) and their minus counterparts, ‐L, ‐H, ‐K, which are not conceivable as simply opposite to or as a lack of L, H, K. Rather, they correspond to a way of experiencing Love, Hatred and Knowledge in terms of absoluteness, and in terms of a radical impossibility of acknowledging loss, relativeness and absence. The theory of links is also examined in its evolution towards the conceptualization of three types of container/contained configurations (commensal, symbiotic and parasitic). These Bionian models are compared and referred to the way Jung articulates the coexistence of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and the paradoxical nature of mental functioning in relation to the individuation process. The images taken from the Rosarium Philosophorum, particularly the Fons Mercurialis, examined by Jung in ‘The psychology of the transference’ (1946), are explored in the paper. Theory is examined with a particular focus on the adolescent mind and its dramatic phenomenology. Two excerpts taken from the analytic work with a mid‐adolescent female patient and a late‐adolescent male patient are presented to describe minus‐Hate as a form of absolute love, and minus‐Love as a form of absolute hatred.

Digressions on the fascist state of mind. Psychoanalytic perspectives on narcissism and ‘social‐ism’

“…(Bollas 1992, pp. 200-01) This is where, in Bion's terms, minus K and its corollaries of minus L and minus H, come to rule the mind with their absoluteness (Bisagni 2020).…”