Tag: violence

Psychoanalyzing human aggression and war

Posted on by kathiemm

Uncle Sam poster, Psychoanalysts have had a long interest in war and other forms of human aggression. For example, the “father” of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1915), horrified by the outbreak of World War I, argued that the violence was convincing evidence that “A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.”

Decades later, appalled by violence in the United States (which he identified as “the most violent of industrial societies”), psychoanalyst James Gilligan placed considerable blame on people’s moralistic motivation to punish others. In his view, rigid and hierarchical social structures produce shame in the downtrodden, and those victims strive to replace shame with pride. He cites German resurgence in the post-World War I era as an example of how punishment and shame can generate appalling violence.

More recently, an Israeli scholar, Niza Yanay, offers another psychoanalytic analysis of the psychological foundations of violence. In The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse, she explores the unconscious forces and conflicts that underlie political hatred, which she views as an ideology of power and control.

Disillusioned, like Freud, with governing groups, Yanay comments “Sovereign states and groups are usually motivated to construct a humane face and a just image for themselves” (p. 99). She goes on to suggest that hatred helps aggressors maintain their image of goodness by turning the victims into objects of blame deserving hatred.

What do you think of these psychoanalytic perspectives? Do you think governments seek a monopoly on violence and will commit acts of aggression that would be declared illegal when done by individuals? And do they try to present a “humane face” while using propaganda to promote hatred?

Kathie Malley-Morrison and Majed Ashy

An earlier version of this two-part review was recently published in the American
Psychological Association journal, PsycCRITIQUES, August 2013.

Arms for children

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Luciana Karine de Souza

What does a society do when its children kill? This question became intensely personal in Brazil with the recent shooting death of a college student in São Paulo. The victim was 19 years old; the shooter was 17.

Graffiti boy with gun
Seattle graffiti by bartleby78. Used under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Child and adolescent psychologists teach us that emotional stability, autonomy, and independence come with time and flourish when children develop secure attachments to the adults who care for them. But what happens when the adults providing children and adolescents with reciprocity, sensibility, monitoring, and so on, do so not for a humane education, but for crime education?

In today’s world, adolescents, and even younger children, are often introduced to guns early and taught how to engage in crime, drug trafficking, robbery, kidnapping, and even planned assassination. These firearms can provide not only money, but also prestige, attention, guidance, safety, and, in a way, some sort of education (how to be brave and strong when shooting, how to be firm and clear when confronting).

When we study and teach the concept of attachment, we focus on the positive roles of reciprocity, sensibility, safety, proximity, and attention in child development. To promote strong and secure attachment, we try to give our children love, embrace them with warmth, and surround them with our dedication. We offer them our arms and a safe haven. We strive to protect them, educate them, listen to them, and learn with them.

These arms, the arms of love, are the arms our children and adolescents need: arms to embrace them, safe and fulfilling arms, arms that protect them from violence, war, and hate. Not arms that kill. Not arms that fill the gap left by weak attachments. Arms that make them want to live and to allow to live. No arms should be stronger.

Luciana Karine de Souza is a full professor at Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her teaching and research involve personality and social development in psychology, education, and leisure.

Violence in your backyard: Poverty in America

Posted on by kathiemm

Recent posts have linked poverty to violence in Greece and Africa. But poverty means violence here in America, too, and the forces that breed poverty and violence can reach into every home if they are ignored.Homeless campsite

A few examples of the link between poverty and violence in the United States:

  • Gun deaths are higher in states with higher levels of poverty and lower incomes
  • Poverty is a major contributor to domestic violence (opens in pdf)
  • Deaths due to poverty-related factors are as common as deaths due to heart attacks, strokes, and lung cancer
  • On average, in Camden, NJ, the poorest city in America, someone was shot every 33 hours in 2012.

We can afford to do better.

The U.S. is the richest country in the world, has the largest number of billionaires in the world, and has the highest gross national product.

It also ranks first (opens in pdf) in defense expenditures and military weapons expenditures.  Indeed, the military budget is so large, the Pentagon had a surplus of $105 billion at the end of FY2012.

A small portion of this money could reduce the violence of poverty—and the costs of that violence– dramatically.

UNICEF has shown that nations can lift children out of poverty and nations around the world are doing just that.

The U.S., however, is lagging in this effort.  We have the second highest rate of child poverty among developed nations. This is indefensible.

For more faces of poverty, check out these photos.

Poverty is violence.  It costs money. It costs lives. We must do better. To address violence, we must address poverty.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Creating young martyrs: What leads young people to resort to violence?

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Alice LoCicero

The accused Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, grew up in my home town of Cambridge and went to the high school my kids attended. They look like kids my children would have gone to school with, and their friends and family Creating Young Martyrsdescribe them in ways that make them seem normal and good.

How could young folks we might easily have known and loved act intentionally to create carnage, terror, and radical disruption of lives and psyches? As President Obama asked: What would lead them “to resort to violence”?

Dr. Samuel (Justin) Sinclair and I set out to answer an eerily similar question when we researched kids at risk of recruitment to the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist organization (now defeated) in Sri Lanka. We wrote about this research in our 2008 book, Creating young martyrs: Conditions that make dying in a terrorist attack seem like a good idea. Our findings help explain this apparent contradiction.

What we learned, both from reviewing others’ research and combing through our own findings, is that many kids who engage in terrorist actions, or who aspire to do so, think that their actions are going to bring attention to the grievances of their people, which they perceive–rightly or wrongly–as legitimate, and to begin to address a highly asymmetrical distribution of power, a distribution that disadvantages the group they identify with. The ultimate goal then, the “end” that for them justifies the means, is to help their peoples’ cause. Aware that they will die in the attack or soon thereafter, they see their actions as dutiful or, in Western terms, altruistic.

I realize that this idea–that young people who do things that result in killing, maiming, and disruption, do so with altruistic intent–is highly counter-intuitive, but it comes to my attention over and over again in our own and others’ data and in the words of family members of kids engaged in terrorism.

In the award-winning documentary film, “My Daughter the Terrorist,” in which filmmaker Morten Daae and director Beate Arnestad follow two Tamil girls, trained to be Black Tigers, who are prepared to blow themselves up in a terrorist action, the mother of one of the girls speaks about her daughter, saying, “She was different. She dreamt of becoming a nun.”

Alice Locicero is Past President and Co-Founder of the Society of Terrorism Research, as well as Chair of Social Sciences at Endicott College. She is a certified Clinical Psychologist, and has been a faculty member at the Center for Multicultural Training and Boston Medical Center, as well as at Suffolk University. In earlier roles, LoCicero served as Senior Psychologist working with families at Children’s Hospital, Boston, and as Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School. A member of the Massachusetts Behavioral Health Disaster Responders, she provides mental health services to family members of victims of terrorism and other man-made and natural disasters. She traveled to Sri Lanka in May and June of 2007 to learn about conditions that make terrorism an appealing idea to some youths.

(This post was originally published in the ABC-CLIO blog.)