We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need for children to learn how to direct their feelings of hatred appropriately rather than towards innocents.
In this quote, Karl A. Menninger discusses the importance of teaching children not only to love wisely but also to manage their feelings of hate effectively. It highlights the necessity for children to recognize real threats and to channel their negative emotions towards those that pose a danger, rather than directing their aggression towards friends or vulnerable individuals. This guidance can help in fostering a healthier emotional landscape and prevent destructive behavior.
In practice
In a parenting workshop about emotional intelligence.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
What's done to children, they will do to society.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.
The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.
But in psychoanalysis there are no unimportant thoughts; there are only thoughts that pretend to be unimportant in order to not be told.
Few of us can accurately gauge how we will feel tomorrow or next week. That's why when you go to the supermarket on an empty stomach, you'll buy too much, and if you shop after a big meal, you'll buy too little.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
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