@hipsterelectron I'm going to have to go with the classic moment, the blinding of Polyphemus. Polyphemus is a mythical giant and cares little for humans, and eats a few of Odysseus's men. It seems justified that they should kill him or do anything necessary to escape. But what Odysseus does is at first cowardly and cruel, and then prideful and boastful, having the aspect of what Melanie Klein (a very good psychoanalyst) would call contempt and triumph, qua the manic defenses.

He tricks Polyphemus in to getting blackout drunk, then he and his men drive a hot poker into his eye, blinding him. To add insult to injury, he reveals his true name to the giant, boasting "I did this to you and hear this is my name!" Before this, he'd said his name was "nobody", to protect himself (because, in the Greek civic and religious schematic, much like ours, knowing a person's name gives you the power to affect their legal person), but he decided "I'm so much better than you that I don't need protection from your crippled ass" basically.

Of course, Polyphemus, now knowing his name, pled for the gods to retaliate on his behalf, so even though Odysseus was able to escape with his men, this brought a terrible curse on them. The reason I like this so much is because it directly connects pathological contempt with not only hubris, but also shows how it connects and completes the cycle of violence. "And I'm not sorry!" While they were treated as food, an animal need, they treated him with hatred, and that hatred, being abstract had the memetic power to reproduce itself as a neverending cycle of further violence. This haunts him and his men for the rest of the story!