Revenge: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Psychoanalytic research

Abstract

Revenge is a ubiquitous phenomenon known since ancient times, while in some cultures, retribution practices are even institutionalized. Despite this, there are not so many papers studying the wish for revenge and its dynamics from a psychoanalytic point of view. In this article, I make an attempt to understand and reconstruct the development of the wish for revenge at the metapsychological level. I have divided the dynamics of the wish for revenge into 4 stages, namely, “Ego injured”, “Ego telling stories”, “Ego punitive”

and “Ego spoiled”. In line with this division, the article consistently examines the prerequisites that determine a person's propensity for revenge, analyzes the manifest story of a person who craves revenge, the subsequent regression to the archaic omnipotent Ego and legitimization of the punishment of the aggressor object. In addition to this, the destructiveness of a persistent and intense desire for revenge is discussed. As a result, I demonstrate that by its nature, the wish for revenge is similar to the work of melancholy. This study may be of interest to psychoanalytic psychotherapists, whose clients' material refers to the topic of revenge, and / or those psychotherapists who have experienced revenge as a negative therapeutic reaction.