When Love Resembles Hate: Self-deception, Ambivalence, Dissonances
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2021-08-23

Hate is often confused with love because it produces the same bonding/attachment to its subjects. The transition from love to hatred is seamless and imperceptible. The two emotions often cohabit (ambivalence which is a form of dissonance).

Such conflation is especially pronounced in mental health disorders that involve object inconstancy, persecutory objects, dysregulation, and abandonment anxiety. In these, the wish to subsume the intimate partner, merge or fuse with him is felt as a wish to destroy an object that is, at times, frustrating.

Consequently, hate is sometimes mistaken for love and vice versa.

This is especially true when certain defense mechanisms - such as projection, reaction formation, splitting, projective identification - are at work and reframe reality.

Not strictly a defense mechanism, it still exhibits many of the hallmarks of one.

Cognitive Dissonance: simultaneously harboring two or more conflicting pieces of information or contradictory thoughts.

Cognitive dissonance is when someone holds simultaneously two conflicting views, values, or bits of information which call for diametrically opposed decisions or actions. This state of things generates an inner conflict and triggers several primitive (infantile) defense mechanisms such as denial, splitting, projection, and reaction formation.

One way to cope with this predicament - to transition from dissonance to consonance - is to come up with a reconciling narrative, a theory which seamlessly accommodates both conflicting points of view or data.

Such soothing fiction falls into several categories:

(A=Love, Not-A=Hate)

1. Temporal: A is true at one time and not-A is true at another period. Or: A is a transient state of affairs.

2. Reactive: A is the normal. Not-A happened because of some trigger, provocation, or change in circumstances or conditions. Not-A is abnormal, and, therefore, an aberration or a mere curiosity.

3. Inclusive: both A and Not-A are pieces of a bigger puzzle, picture, or theory. Their contradistinction is only apparent because we have no access to or awareness of the true and full picture, our knowledge or capacity to know are limited.

4. Denial: both A and Not-A are true and lead to the same conclusions. There is no contradiction. For example: he loves me. He beats me up. But his battering just proves that he loves me, it is his way of showing that he loves me.

5. Defensive: both A and not-A are valid. But only A applies to me while not-A may apply to others (splitting). Not-A is bad (projection) and should be eradicated in others in order to restore A to its rightful place as the sole viable and ethical alternative (reaction formation).

Volitional Dissonance is when we act in ways which we perceive to be akratic, immoral, or antisocial, rather than phronetic. When we perceive our actions to have been the outcomes of akrasia (weak willed misbehavior contrary to our best judgment) and not of phronesis (good judgment, excellence of character, habits conducive to eudaimonia - a good life - and practical virtue).

Dissonance is intolerable. We resolve it by using a variety of, mostly alloplastic psychological defense mechanisms - like displacement or rationalization - and narrative solutions, such as reframing

We also tend to externalize the locus of control (and thus our agency, self-control, autonomy, or free will in the matter): It wasn't my fault, something or someone made me do it or inexorably and irresistibly led to what happened!

Other dissonances include:

Emotional Dissonance (aka ambivalence): experiencing two opposing emotions (such as love and hate) which are elicited by the same object;

Axiological Dissonance occurs when two dearly upheld and deeply felt values are incompatible;
Deontic Dissonance is a subspecies of this dissonance: when one has two irreconcilable duties or obligations;

Attitudinal Dissonance is an inner conflict between two internalized beliefs, attitudes, statements or propositions held to be true.

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