The Quangle Wangle Hate: Edward Lear, countertransference, and the parts of us we do not want under the hat

As the new year rolls around, many of us drift into a familiar ritual of self-appraisal. We think about who we have been, who we are becoming, and how we want to position ourselves in the world. For those of us who work clinically, this often includes a quieter question. Not just, “How can I be more compassionate or effective,” but, “What am I really like in the room with my patients, supervisees, or groups, and what do I do with the parts of me I dislike.”

In this season of resolutions and ideal selves, I have found myself returning to an old nonsense favourite: Edward Lear’s “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat.” Only this time, I have been reading it alongside something far less whimsical: Lawrence Epstein’s paper on The Therapeutic Function of Hate in the Countertransference, together with Winnicott’s “Hate in the Countertransference.” Suddenly the Quangle Wangle’s hat has begun to look less like a charming curiosity, and more like a clinical fantasy.

A fantasy about goodness, containment, and the enormous hat under which we try to hide our hate.

Lear, an odd hat, and a crowded tree

Lear himself knew something about living at the margins of things. Born in 1812 into a large, financially unstable family, raised by older sisters, managing epilepsy and periods of retreat, he earned his living first as a draughtsman before becoming known for his absurd verses and drawings. Together with Lewis Carroll, he helped to shape a new literary space in Victorian culture, where nonsense could be playful and serious at the same time.

In “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,” we meet a solitary figure sitting high in a Crumpetty Tree, wearing a hat so vast that it becomes prime real estate. One by one, fantastical creatures arrive and ask to live on the brim. The hat becomes a sort of eccentric apartment block in the sky, a place where strangeness gathers and finds company.

Readers often enjoy the poem as an invitation to embrace their eccentricity, to imagine that somewhere in the world there is a hat big enough for their oddness. In a group analytic mood, the hat can be read as a kind of container. A self that is capacious enough to hold many internal figures. Or a group space wide enough for a flock of incompatible people to roost together without falling off.

So far, so cosy.

What the poem does not tell us is what happens when a creature turns up who cannot stand the others. Or when one of the residents loathes the hat itself. Or when the Quangle Wangle, politely inscrutable on his branch, realises that there is someone he would quite cheerfully push off the brim.

This is where I start to think about hate.

The hat as our clinical self-ideal

In group analytic language, Foulkes invites us to think of the group matrix as the invisible web of relationships, communication, and unconscious life that exists between people. The conductor, like the Quangle Wangle, sits within that web, both part of it and responsible for its boundaries. We are taught that our task is to offer safety and containment, to be a thoughtful host for whatever arrives.

There is an unspoken ideal that our “hat” should be vast and welcoming. We are encouraged to be understanding, empathic, curious, tolerant, reflective. Anger may be acknowledged, but hate is often quietly evacuated. It is what the patient brings, not what we feel. If we do feel it, we reassure ourselves that it is “really” something else. Anxiety. Helplessness. Concern.

Epstein, drawing on Winnicott, Searles, Racker, and others, describes how deep this ideal runs. Analysts, he suggests, have historically carried a self-image of rationality, objectivity, emotional control and moral decency. We are meant to be the good parent to the immature, damaged patient. From that stance, our hatred becomes almost unthinkable. When it surfaces, our first move is to deny or transform it, in order to preserve our image of ourselves as caring and benign.

In other words, we polish the hat. We add more sequins. We tell ourselves that if we can only enlarge it further and be a little kinder, a little more patient, the difficult creature will eventually settle down and feel loved.

The problem, as Epstein carefully shows, is that for some patients this is not only unhelpful, it is actively damaging.

When hate is already the atmosphere

Epstein is writing about those patients we might now call “borderline” or otherwise structurally fragile. People whose internal world is organised around badness, persecution, and the need to secure a boundary between self and other by any means necessary. The hateful interpersonal matrix is already their habitat. It is how they know who they are.

In this kind of psychic climate, “kindness in the face of hate” can feel less like love and more like hypocrisy. If I experience myself as disgusting, enraging, unlovable, and every time I attack you, you respond with gentle understanding and unruffled concern, one of two things must be true. Either you are an idiot, or you are lying. In both cases, you become more contemptible.

Epstein points out a further cruelty hidden inside this benevolence. If the therapist genuinely is good, decent, and unshakably kind, then the contrast between their goodness and the patient’s felt badness becomes almost unbearable. To believe in your love is to face my own hatred, guilt, and envy with no internal resources to manage them. The more kindly you respond, the worse I must feel.

Hatred, in this configuration, is not simply aggression. It is a way of holding oneself together. By provoking others into attacking, criticising, or rejecting, the person restores a sense of identity. “I am the one you hate. I knew it. Now I exist again.”

When we meet this with endless softness, we participate in a vicious circle. The patient escalates their attacks in a desperate attempt to make contact with something real. The therapist clings more tightly to their ideals, offers more understanding, more patience, more forbearance, and both end up exhausted and secretly despising each other.

The hat, in other words, becomes intolerable. It shines with goodness, but it leaks reality.

Objective hate and a credible emotional world

Winnicott made the unfashionable suggestion that an analyst working with psychotic or antisocial patients must be able to hate them, and to know it. He distinguished between subjective countertransference, steeped in our own history, and what he called “objective hate”: the therapist’s emotional reaction to what the patient is actually doing in the room. For some patients, he argued, there is a genuine need to reach that hate, in order eventually to believe in our love.

Epstein takes this further and asks what happens when we allow some of that hate, once thought about and “neutralised”, to show. Not in acting out, retaliation, or cruelty, but in emotionally congruent responses: irritation, firmness, a clear “no”.

He suggests that “neutralised objective hate” can serve several vital functions. It makes the emotional situation credible. If you treat me contemptuously and I feel frustrated and say so, the world suddenly makes sense. Cause and effect line up. The patient discovers that they can make an impact on us, which may reduce their desperate attempts to test our reality. It also redistributes the “badness”; we are no longer spotless saints enduring a monster, but two flawed humans in a charged relationship.

Crucially, when we show that we can be furious and still stay in the room, we offer an antidote to the fantasy that their hatred has annihilated us. The patient does not have to leave the consulting room imagining that they have murdered the analyst in phantasy and are now alone with unbearable guilt and fear of retaliation. We are still sitting there. Annoyed, perhaps, but breathing.

In Lear’s terms, the Quangle Wangle does not pretend to enjoy every creature on his brim. He notices when someone is pecking holes in the fabric and is able to say: “Stop that. If you keep doing it, you will have to move.” The hat becomes less magical and more trustworthy.

Hate under the group hat

Group life complicates this further. In Nitsun’s language, anti-group processes are never far away. Envy, rivalry, sabotage and despair swirl around the edges of any group. Dalal invites us to pay attention to how power and authority are held, resisted and attacked, especially in those who occupy the “leader” position.

The conductor, like the Quangle Wangle, is often unconsciously nominated to carry the group’s ideal goodness. We are meant to be fair, endlessly inclusive, above petty politics. At the same time, we are the obvious target for hatred of authority, parental disappointment, institutional betrayal.

If we cannot make room under our own hat for hate, we will disavow it. We tell ourselves that we “understand” why this subgroup is attacking us, that their hostility is “really” fear or trauma. That may be partly true. Yet if we never allow ourselves to feel, think about, and sometimes name our anger or dislike, the hate does not disappear. It simply leaks sideways.

We may collude with attacks on a scapegoated member because it is a relief to have the hate somewhere else. We may become emotionally absent while maintaining a polite presence. We may tighten the frame in rigid ways, or loosen it impulsively, as a form of unconscious acting out. The group senses all of this, even if nobody speaks it.

Holding hate in a group context is not about giving ourselves permission to be rude or punitive. It is about allowing our own aggressive responses into the matrix, so that they can be thought about rather than denied. Sometimes that means saying, in ordinary language, “Something in me really does not want to see you this week,” and then wondering together what that might be about. Sometimes it means setting a limit with more affect in our voice than feels “proper,” and noticing the ripple.

In those moments, the hat becomes more solid. It is no longer a fantasy of perfect safety, but a space where destructive currents can be acknowledged, met, and survived.

New year, old hate

At this time of year, psychologists and therapists are bombarded with invitations to set intentions. To be more trauma-informed, more compassionate, more boundaried, more available, more self-care savvy. There is often very little space for the simple and unsettling fact that there are people we hate.

We hate the patient who always arrives late and then demands extra time. We hate the supervisee who treats our concern as persecution. We hate the manager who uses our care as a resource to be exploited. We hate the system that places us in impossible ethical positions, and the part of ourselves that keeps complying.

Our professional culture often encourages us to translate this hate immediately into something more palatable. Burnout. Moral injury. Compassion fatigue. Those are real, and important, but they can also function as sophisticated ways of not saying, “I hate this,” or “I hate you,” or “I hate what I have to become here.”

What would it be like, as clinicians, to make a different kind of resolution. Not to act out our hatred, not to idealise it as “authenticity,” but to stop pretending it is not there. To recognise hate as one of the colours in the emotional palette of care, particularly in work with severely disturbed patients and deeply damaged systems.

This might mean letting ourselves notice the spike of contempt or disgust rather than smothering it with understanding. It might mean taking our hate seriously enough to take it to supervision, personal therapy, or a reflective group, not as a shameful failure but as live clinical material. It might mean asking whether, in a specific piece of work, some carefully thought through expression of irritation or anger is not only honest, but necessary for the other person to feel that we are real.

It certainly means revisiting our internal hat. Is it huge but brittle, glittering with goodness and secretly full of holes where disowned aggression gnaws away. Or is it becoming a bit more weathered, less impressive, more able to bear teeth marks and still stay on our head.

A small invitation

If you feel like it, you might pause with this question as the year turns.

Who, in your clinical or organisational life, do you most struggle not to hate.

Not in theory, but in the small, bodily signs. The session you dread. The email that makes your stomach flip. The name on the waiting list that brings up an old familiar sigh.

If you could admit that hate to yourself without judgement, and treat it as information rather than a failing, what would it tell you about the work, about the setting, about your own history. What might it make possible in terms of honesty, boundary, and perhaps, one day, love that is not counterfeit.

Maybe the Quangle Wangle knew something about this. Sitting in his tree, wearing his enormous hat, watching creatures arrive with all their inconvenient habits and sharp little beaks. The poem never tells us what he feels. But if we listen with analytic ears, we can imagine a version in which he is not just the benign host of nonsense land, but a figure who is learning, painfully and usefully, how to live with his own Quangle Wangle hate.