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    Fantasies of Revenge and the Stabilization of the Ego;
    Acts of Revenge and the Ascension of Thanatos



            There’ve been 2 major traumas in my life: one before my analysis, the other during.

            My first was when I was a senior in college; I was brutally assaulted, my neck was sliced open with a razor
    blade, and I almost died.

            My second was when the man I was passionately in love with rejected me, decided not to marry me.

            For many years after the assault, I was not consciously angry at that man. Even after he was caught, my
    overriding fantasy never had to do with exacting revenge. I imagined that one day I would go to prison and
    meet him, and just simply ask him why he felt compelled to do that to me. My  liberal compassion, my
    desire for understanding carried the day.

            But ten years later, when my sweetie decided that he couldn’t marry me, revenge fantasies filled the whole
    of my interior self. I have to assume that my fantasies were fueled by the freedom of thought and feeling
    that analysis fosters. This was my fantasy: I imagined that my lover would be involved in some terrible
    accident  – and that as a result he would be a paraplegic; he would have no use of his legs – maybe even
    he would have no legs. But – here is the kicker – his mind would be totally in tact. And, in this state, he
    would finally come to realize that I truly loved him, that my love was the most valuable thing that he had ever
    had in his life – and that without my love, he was doomed to live out his last awful years, with no love.

            These fantasies were quite conscious. I gave them full room to breathe and be alive in my psyche. And
    they were quite specific. I didn’t imagine him dead because having him dead was quite beside the point. I
    wanted to see him suffer – and for a long time. That was to be my revenge.

    Revenge in our culture

            The earliest known picture depicts men killing one another. Later in history, the Old Testament tells of Cain
    and Abel, the two bothers, one killing the other. Before we chastise Cain for his horrifying act of destructive
    aggression, let us remember that Cain is credited, in modern terms,as the founder of civilization; he built
    the first city and invented agriculture. Cain, the founder of civilization; Cain the murderer. Most of us have
    learned from childhood that the desire to get even is neither noble nor mature. We have been taught, for
    instance, that it is not appropriate for individuals to take justice into their own hands and exact revenge over
    a private feud. Our Judeo-Christian religions are based on the precept of forgiveness. Rabbi David Posner
    says that forgiveness is “the central thrust” in God’s relationship with humanity. Father Richard Neuhaus
    says “To wish revenge is evil.” He advises to “hate the sin, love the sinner.” Similarly, our criminal justice
    system, we solemnly assure ourselves, is based on our commitment to fairness and to the need for
    punishment appropriate to the crime. Revenge, we are told, has no place in the restoration of order.

            Yet, in spite of our moral stance of recoiling from revenge, we are fascinated by it and embrace it. Revenge
    has been a favorite theme in art,from the Greek tragedies to Shakespeare. Revenge is a leading theme in
    modern movies and in detective and spy fiction. In any of the movies based on revenge, there is scarcely a
    shudder in the audience when the hero starts killing, picking off one punk after another, in revenge for the
    murder of his wife, say, or the rape of his daughter. Instead, a cheering audience always gives its approval
    of this behavior. Our cultural fascination with murder arises, then, not out of some perverse, other-than-human part of our
    selves, but rather from a deep, often unacknowledged awareness of our own murderous inclinations.
           
             As a theme in entertainment, revenge is so popular – maybe even more popular than the church -  
    because we are given license to feel what we can't help feeling anyway.

    Revenge and the stabilization of the ego
            
            When our desire for revenge remains on the level of a fantasy, it actually serves several constructive
    psychological functions. For example, thedesire for revenge, directed toward another, can serve as an
    internal gyroscope. Vengefulness maintains the balance of the destructive drive bydirecting it away from
    the self. In this, a desire for revenge is self-protective and stabilizing to the psyche. It marks the beginning
    of movement away from narcissistic self-involvement by allowing another person existence enough for
    blame. When someone has been wronged, apsychologically healthy response is to direct rage at the
    wrongdoer rather than turn it against the self. Wanting revenge is part of the healing process of hurt and
    anger.
            
            Fantasies of revenge maintain a bond with the person toward whom the revenge is directed. As long as
    one is busily occupied with fantasies of revenge, the other person is not really given up. If the feelings of
    separation or grief are too painful to be tolerated, holding onto the hate is a way of holding onto the
    relationship with the person.

            Hate and revenge impulses can provide a force for life when life doesn't seem worth living. I have spent
    many therapeutic sessions with spurned lovers plotting  revenge, successfully forestalling suicidal
    behavior that was threatening to emerge whenever the feelings of grief and loss got too intense.

            Vengefulness also serves as a defense against feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness. The hope
    of vindictive triumph makes life more bearable and makes us feel less like helpless victims. By imagining
    the world the way we would like it to be in our revenge fantasies, we escape the real world. In our
    fantasies, we control our environment; we are powerful enough to give our story whatever ending we like.

            The bad guys can all end up dead. Nothing beats revenge fantasies for feeling good about yourself. You're
    powerful, righteous, and the number-one winner all the time.

            Revenge fantasies are important healing tools, because they help us to use thoughts and feelings in the
    service of harnessing our impulses and controlling our actions. Revenge fantasies are a way of acting
    without acting.

             King Lear is a prime example of how revenge serves this stabilizing function for the psyche. Lear’s
    daughters have abandoned him in his oldage, and he becomes obsessed with fantasies of revenge. He
    plots revenge on them -- deeds that will be "the terrors of the earth."

            But Lear begins to think better about his revenge fantasies. Immediately before his descent into madness,
    he begins to feel a little sorry for his daughters, the "poor naked wretches." He even begins to blame
    himself for their suffering.

            As Lear's rage toward his daughters softens, he turns this same fury back on himself, blaming himself for
    their hard hearts. It is a classic twisting of rage back toward the self in order to protect the beloved others.
    Three centuries before the discovery of the concepts of narcissism and narcissistic defense, Shakespeare
    surely wants us to make the connection between Lear's setting aside his revenge fantasies and the dark
    madness that overcomes him.


    Cultural codification of revenge

            All around the world, for centuries, societies have had principles of revenge that have been precisely
    spelled out. These people are not squeamish about consciously acknowledging their desire for
    vengeance. In fact, for many of the cultures, still today, acts of revenge define law as precisely as our own
    laws define acceptable behavior for us. In these cultures, revenge is not a choice; it is a sacred duty.
    In the fifteenth century, Albanians compiled a canon of revenge. Today, in Albania, this canon is found on
    the tops of refrigerators in peoples’ homes, as commonplace as telephone directories. There are 200
    pages, more than a thousand precepts that outline every variety of violence in which vengeance is justified.

            Laura Blumenfeld went looking for revenge after her father, a rabbi visiting Israel, was shot. The bullet
    grazed his head, and he lived. As Laura read through the Albanian Canon, she found Precept 906 that gave
    the revenge prescription for shooting someone, and only grazing their head.

            But Laura couldn’t understand the precept for revenge. She traveled to a small town where she met with
    the head of the Blood Feud Committee.

            Here, they don’t believe in “turn the other cheek.” They believe: “Don’t hit my cheek because I’ll kill you.”
    In Siberia, when a man kills a man, the family of the killed man gets a concrete form of revenge. The family
    of the killer has to give up one of their own men. He substitutes for the dead man in every way, performing
    his work, raising his children.

            In southern Greece, women sing lullabies of vengeance to the sons of murder victims, fully expecting that
    when the sons grow up, they will take their revenge.

            The Bedouins pass their legacy on through multiple generations by virtue of an oral tradition. They don’t
    care how long it takes to exact revenge.
            They have a saying: “If a man takes revenge after forty years, he was in a hurry.”

    Murder as metaphor

            Like everyone (hopefully), I live with revenge fantasies of murder daily.

            When I am imagining being alone, being away from those I love the most, my unconscious is on the
    subject of revenge and murder. There are times, for instance, when my daughter's demands have pushed
    me beyond my tolerable limit. I might be driving, and I imagine an accident in the car – I get hurt or dead,
    and finally my precious, beloved daughter understands that she cannot make such demands on me. My
    revenge is my injury to myself.

            I have, as well, wishes and desires about the temporary obliteration of another person. These arise out of
    a need to be away, to be separate and separated from them. Of course, I do not say to myself (or G-d
    forbid, to anyone else) that I want these people dead at these moments. I say to myself that I just want
    them to be a little different from the way they are. Or, I want them to go away, if only for a little while. I want
    Molly to be less childishly narcissistic: "Come on Mol, have a heart. Be good to your over-aged Mom. Be a
    good girl who can put my needs in front of your immediate, ever-changing entirely-appropriate-for-a-child
    impulses."

            But here is the ghastly truth about the unconscious: wanting someone to be different is the same as
    wanting them to not be there; and they’re both equivalent to wanting the person dead, if only for that
    moment. It’s saying: “You’d be just fine, if only...” But, of course, that brings us into that shoreless arena of
    the infinite list of “if onlys.”

            The if onlys never stop at just one. The if onlys are a thousand contingencies that aren’t true. All of the if
    only’s are just ways of not being with what is. They’re ways of killing what is. They’re ways of killing, without
    the actual act.

    Metaphorical murders

    Murder as vengeance

    I see the line between metaphorical murder and actual murder as thin. Being a psychoanalyst is really the
    same as being a homicide detective who tracks down the murdered and the murderer – the aspects of self
    that have been killed off and those that want to kill. The themes of life and survival and murder and
    destruction are common to both endeavors. Ordinary, run-of-the-mill ghetto crime, street-killings, random
    killings and such are of interest to a sociologist; but intimate murder – murder where eros and thanatos
    have become fused in some grotesque-Frankensteinian combo – this is the stuff of psychoanalysis.
    Unless you’re a psychopath, a person who has moved into that death-land of indifference and utter non-
    feeling, then there’s really no point in killing unless you kill someone you love. A killer who kills with feeling
    will choose as his victim whomever he loves the most. These murders of passion happen when the love
    and death drives meet, and then in that sudden moment of passion the death drive – thanatos in all its
    glory–takes over, and in its ascendancy, erases all memory of eros.

    Murderers embody life lived on the edge, and beyond. Murderers entice us, even seduce us with the fact of
    their having crossed a line in actuality that we only dream about. I have read that Jeffrey MacDonald, in
    prison for the murder of his wife and two small children, has a large fan club and gets marriage proposals
    from women all the time.

    It is just this fascination – with eros and with thanatos – and with how the two can, at times, intersect at
    destructive angles that led to my interest in Dale Kagan. I think, too, it was my own brush with violence, with
    my almost-murder that brings me, now, years after the event, to Dale Kagan.

    A true tale of revenge spurned by a desire for separation

    I read about Dale in the New York Times. It was a small article, hidden way in the back of the Times, page
    39 or so, describing a lawsuit that an inmate had won against the correctional system for inadequate
    medical attention. At the end of the article, there was mention, as though an afterthought, that this woman,
    the lucky recipient of a lot of cash, was a former Harvard University Graduate School of Business honor
    student and that she was in prison for the murder of her mother.

    After reading the article, on an impulse, I wrote to Dale. I wrote to her because I wanted to know what it
    takes, what odd mechanism is at work in the mind of a bright, relatively affluent Jewish (I presumed from
    her name) girl from Long Island. What I wanted to know is how a girl with roughly the same background as
    myself, privileged in both money and opportunity, could bring herself to kill her own mother. I thought that in
    coming to know Dale, I might come to know better how murderous rage and the desire for revenge, and
    the need to be separate and love and togetherness can co-exist in the same space.

    The history

            This is what I found out from meeting Dale and researching her story. The time shortly before the murder
    was a particularly happy period for Dale’s mother. She had begun seriously dating a man; her friends have
    described her during this time as being the happiest they had ever seen her since the death of her
    husband five years earlier. But apparently Dale’s mother’s circle of inclusion for her new life did not extend
    to Dale.The last significant communication Dale’s mother made to Dale was that she was planning to
    remarry and that Dale would have to move out of the house.

            Dale’s murder of her mother was a crime of passion. Not pre-meditated, and not your ordinary kind of
    murder passion between lovers, by a betrayed sweetheart. This was a passion that went back to the
    original source, the first object of our passions, a passion for mother. This was a murder stimulated, I
    believe, by the fright and rage of too much separation. And, a blood-thirst for revenge for that forced
    separation.

            Murder and revenge – whether metaphorical or real – is mostly about separation. You don’t want to kill or
    punish if you don’t feel caught by the involvement. If it’s a mere manner of walking away without a care,
    then anger, rage, impulses of revenge and murderous thoughts don’t come into the equation. But if you
    have the feeling that you can’t get away, or that you don’t want to get away, or that you don’t want the other
    person to get away, then you may resort to murder – either murder in thought and feeling or murder in
    deed. It’s the fastest escape route known to man.
    (But not the smartest.)

    The Faustian bargain she made with the devil when she chose to kill her mother .

            Dale Kagan had become a lost soul, split off from the self that meant the most to her, the self that was still
    tied to her mother. It is the Faustian bargain she made with the devil when she chose to kill her mother.

            She had thus ended all possibility of ever living again peacefully or even merely comfortably with her
    emotions.

            That one fateful day back in 1983, when Dale took a shotgun to her mother’s back, something in Dale
    broke down. All benefit of reason left her.

            Thanatos split off from eros, spinning off into its own descent toward hell.

    Forgiveness

            Psychoanalysis says to be cured – and Arnold Bernstein’s likes to think of cure as like a cured ham –
    matured with the right spices -- you need to have access to all your feelings. So, as Dick Bundy has said: “If
    you only want to get even, you’ll never get ahead.” So, we have to look at the opposite of revenge; we have
    to look at forgiveness.

    Dale couldn’t forgive her mother. And in thinking about Dale, I came to a stunning realization about myself. I’
    m not sure that I have ever forgiven anybody for anything. (I seem to be a bit more kindly toward my dog
    Sam. I forgive him everyday for going after my new little toy poodle Lilly. I love him and I hate him and I keep
    forgiving him even after I swear I’ll give him away.) But with humans, with a lifetime of accumulated angers
    and resentments, I have either moved on, or I’ve stopped caring, or I’ve used reason to set aside my
    grudges. And some grudges – I still fiercely hold onto them. Remember my sweetie who I wanted limbless
    because he broke my heart. Well, it took him 25 years, but he was finally able to manage to come be with
    me. Have I forgiven him all those lost years. Not on your life. We have a loving, wonderful life together. I
    adore him today as I did when I first met him. But in a New York nano-second, if he says the wrong thing to
    me, I will remember those years that he wasn’t with me, and I will be so angry that I know that forgiveness can, in no
    way, describe my state of mind.

    The hope of words

    Fortunately, there is hope for those of us for whom forgiveness is not possible; there is a solution to the
    urgent calling of our destructive drive. Psychoanalysis is a method by which we try to prevent the kind of
    fragmentation of self that can lead to the utter abandonment of one drive and an absolute descent into the
    other. While it is true that psychoanalysis takes feelings seriously, it is also true that one can come, finally,
    to the point of nonchalantly dismissing feelings with a shrug, as if to say, “Well, they’re only feelings after
    all.” The left brain, the new brain that reasons and thinks logically can counterpoint the old brain that sways
    us to and fro with our feelings. Reason tempers the need to discharge the drives into action. The goal of
    the psychoanalytic method is inherent in the belief that reason and logic can be brought to bear on all our
    murderous inclinations, real or imagined murder – that reason and logic is what, in the end, should
    prevail. Psychoanalysis posits that I can want Molly, who I love more than anyone alive, to disappear for a
    time, but that I do not need to act out this wish in any destructive fashion; I don’t need to drive the car into a
    concrete piling; I can make her disappear by going myself for a massage or to a movie. Psychoanalysis
    posits that Molly can be helped to grow out of her self-centered narcissism in order to develop into a
    human being who will, at the appropriate age, consider her mother’swishes. She can make herself
    disappear by going into her room to play with her Barbies. And psychoanalysis posits that Laura Rosenfeld’
    s father’s shooting and Dale Kagan’s mother’s murder could have been prevented.

    Laura Rosenfeld went looking for revenge for her father’s shooting, but what she found instead was words.
    She wrote to the shooter. He was in prison for another crime. She did not identify herself, but presented
    herself as a journalist. Through their letters, these two – enemies by right – developed a relationship.
    When you look at the shooter’s letters, at first you see just diatribes – fierce party lines. You wonder if there
    is a person in there. But there is a progression as they begin to get more comfortable with each other.

    Laura wonders why he didn’t kill her father. He had other bullets in the gun. He confesses that he has
    come to realize that he does not have the moral make-up of a terrorist. You sigh with relief (as did Laura) when you read
    this. There is a human in there.

    Laura’s revenge was that in coming toknow this man, in allowing him to come to know her, they were both
    transformed.         

    That’s why she calls her book, 'Revenge: A Story of Hope'. A transformation through words. Mere words.
    Psychoanalysis is a ritual of telling one's story. Its medium is words. The use of words for the purpose of
    healing comes from the Greeks. They recognized speech to be man's greatest treasure, a gift from the
    gods. Revered even more than the physician, who could heal the body was the person who could bring
    "cheering speech" to another.  In telling the patient to say what comes to his mind, psychoanalysts are
    suggesting the silencing of the normal operations of our everyday conversational speech. When we do
    this, another language presents itself to us. This is the language of the unconscious. This is our inner
    speech. This is the speech that connects us with our deepest being.

    The process between patient and analyst is, if nothing else, a conversation. Patient and analyst engage in
    the exchange of words. This is all they do: talk. The patient comes to tell a story about himself. In fact, the
    patient has decided to be in this process of self-examination largely because, as psychoanalyst Adam
    Phillips says, the story that he has been telling himself has either stopped or become too painful. The
    analyst  listens to the story and talks back; and they continue doing this – this specific kind of dialoguing –
    as long as the conversation is either useful,interesting, pleasurable – even painful, but ultimately gratifying
    in some way. The dialogue continues and the story moves along. One might even develop a clear
    beginning and end, a cogent storyline that comes to have rational meaning. For a while it doesn’t even
    matter whether the story has the authenticity of truth. The analyst suspends disbelief in order to enter the
    emotional reality of the patient. It is only later that the analyst must take on the difficult job of aiding the
    patient to move towards reality, into an accurate rendering of his life story. The maturing adult, then, is a
    storyteller who is, as Louise Kaplan describes, continually in process of reliving and revising his
    memories, continually re-finding his identity, continually re-forging the shape of his very selfhood.

    This is slow work. It is the reclamation of selves, the re-finding of the essential humanity in us – the lofty
    as well as the gutter in us. It’s sometimes a nasty business. But as the ad for Ikea says – more or less:
     “It’s a big country out there. Somebody’s gotta’ furnish it.” We analysts hope to transform the world by
    furnishing it with new selves, and we do this work self by self, one self at a time.
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