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 ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
Psychology teaches us at every step that though two types of activity can have the same external manifestation, whether in origin or essence, their nature may differ most profoundly.
Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin
I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.
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