Very exaggerated feelings should always be viewed suspiciously as blinds for the opposite feelings. An extravagant display of affection is generally a desperate attempt on the person indulging in that display at repressing loathing and hatred. On the other hand, morbid hostility toward one person is generally an attempt at repressing a love which would be unjustifiable or detrimental for the personality.
A few illustrations from life will make my meaning clear.
=A Worried Wife.= One woman I analysed was thrown into hysterical anxiety whenever her husband reached home a little late. She pictured him dead, dismembered by a train or knocked down by robbers. When she first called on me, she stressed the struggle going on in her heart. She loved two men and her nobility of soul, her delicacy of feelings, and many other qualities she bestowed on herself very liberally, were making that double life unbearable for her. "I have wronged my dear, dear, hubby," she kept repeating. "And he is so good, so kind, so considerate."
The wife who never tires of singing her husband's praise is always somebody else's mistress. It is generally her way of settling accounts with her conscience.
In this case, the anxiety she felt over her husband's whereabouts and health when he was late in reaching home, supplied the expiation which neurotics seem to crave for their misdeeds.
But there was more in that anxiety than one of the manifestations of her sense of sin. I asked her whether she had ever experienced the same anxiety when her lover was late in coming to their trysting place.
"No," she said, "and this is what leads me to think that I don't love him nearly as much as I do my husband." Her reaction to her lover's lateness was simply one of anger. She felt herself slighted and she suspected him of stopping somewhere to flirt with some woman. Even once, when a wreck on a suburban line leading to his home town, had prevented him from meeting her, she never imagined him the victim of any accident.
Further questioning elicited the information that death wishes had crossed her mind on several occasions in relation to her husband. She finally came to see that those repressed wishes were simply finding an outlet in her wish fulfilment fears. She was constantly visualizing the tragedy which would have given her her freedom.