Love, Hate, and Reparation for a Koinonia

Abstract

The dynamics driving a collectivity toward open conflict are rooted in unconscious processes that political analysis alone cannot fully account for. Integrating psychoanalytic perspectives with a polisanalytic reading, this essay explores the deep grammar of hostility—from the construction of the enemy as Other to the legacy of transgenerational trauma—suggesting a counterintuitive reading of revenge, here understood as a desperate request for relational recognition. The shift from the chain of resentment to a genuine possibility of reparation is traced through the working-through of grief and the function of forgiveness. Within this trajectory, group devices emerge as crucial pivots: spaces where identity saturation gives way to a collective re-elaboration of meaning and the preservation of the social fabric.