Liberation Psychologist Asks if Hatred Has a Place in Progressive Politics

For those on the left side of the political spectrum, capitalism and far-right ideology are often seen as grounded in hatred and dehumanization. According to some psychologists, however, hatred is a broadly human emotion, and political progressives must learn to work through and harness their own capacity for hatred rather than deny it.

In his recent article, Problems of Hate and Emancipation: Some Considerations for Liberation Psychology, published in the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, liberation psychologist Nick Malherbe reflects on this necessity for political progressives to address hatred in order to avoid being consumed by it.

Malherbe also sees a place for psychologists in progressive political movements as facilitators of working with and through hatred, and even of helping direct it toward political structures rather than people. In this latter sense, he explores the question of whether hatred has a place in progressive politics.

“The building of collective emancipatory political power requires that comrades, at different moments, acknowledge, challenge, embrace, and work through hatred. Hate is thus to be engaged in and for emancipatory political projects rather than hateful ones. Liberation psychology, I insist, can be of value to psychopolitical work of this sort,” writes South African liberation psychologist Nick Malherbe.

Malherbe’s work adds to a growing body of scholarship that challenges the dominant view of mental life as something to be regulated through personal adjustment and emotional restraint. Instead, emotions like hatred, often treated as pathological or antisocial, are here understood as potentially meaningful responses to histories of injustice that may carry within them the seeds of repair if held with ethical and psychological complexity.

This perspective resonates with calls to move beyond the therapeutic management of discontent and toward a psychology oriented by democratic struggle, ecological responsibility, and relational forms of well-being. Whether exploring the psychological dynamics of authoritarianism, the emotional toll of climate collapse, or the fragmenting pressures of neoliberalism, this approach to the study of the mind insists that inner life is shaped through—and can speak back to—the world.