Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide

Rosine Jozef Perelberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134637874
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Although there is a vast literature on aggression, comparatively little has been written on the issue of violence and even fewer clinical discussions have been published on the violent patient.

This pioneering book presents a collection of case studies on the intensive psychoanalytic treatment of patients who have committed serious acts of violence against themselves or others. Each detailed clinical account demonstrates the effectiveness of the psychoanalytic treatment and furthers our understanding of the nature of violence.

The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide also contains a comprehensive review of the existing literature on aggression and violence from America, England and France, presenting major themes contained in this literature which will be of interest to all those working with violent and suicidal patients.

Introduction to chapter 1

This first chapter was originally pre-circulated to the Colloquium at the Anna Freud Centre in November 1994. I had undertaken a bibliographic search on the issue of violence and was able to trace some 130 papers and a number of books on the issue of aggression, but very few on violence.

The chapter discusses some of the main positions in the debate on aggression in America, Britain and France. The paper then returns to Freud to look at the way in which Freud himself used the notion of violence and suggests some differences in the way he used the concepts of ‘aggression’ and ‘violence’ in the body of his work.

1

Psychoanalytic understanding of violence and suicide: a review of the literature and some new formulations

ROSINE JOZEF PERELBERG

Introduction

Since Freud postulated aggression as a drive in 1920, this theme has been a source of profound debate among psychoanalysts. Few ideas in psychoanalytic theory have generated more controversy (Blumenthal, 1976; Mitchell, 1993; Perelberg, 1995a, 1995b and Chapter 4 in this book) than the question of whether aggression is a fundamental or irreducible human instinct, whether it is innate or reactive to the environment.

A perception of aggression as a drive has been followed by many psycho-analysts, including Klein (1957), Abraham (1924), Solnit (1972), Kernberg (1984) and Shengold (1991, 1993). Others have considered aggression to be reactive to the environment in the tradition of studying the impact of deprivation and trauma on children following Ferenczi’s paper (1933), which focused on the effects of abuse on children (see also Gardiner’s accounts, 1977).

Aggression has thus also been seen as a reaction to an experience of danger, such as breaks in attunement (Stern, 1985), impingement (Winnicott, 1971), negative affective experiences (Osofsky and Elberhart-Wright, 1988; Osoffsky, 1993), or as a defence against threats to the psychological self (Fonagy et al., 1993a). Parens (1973, 1979) also found aggression to be reactive. For Kohut (1967, 1971) aggression is related to the experience of empathic failure. Fairbairn (1990) viewed aggression as a result of the infant’s deprivation and lack of gratification (see also Stone, 1971; Stein, 1972; Usdin, 1972; Marcovitz, 1982; Ortmeyer, 1984). Some authors have explored the relationship between murder and suicide (Reichard and Tillman, 1950; Weiss et al., 1960; West, 1966; Maltsberger and Buie, 1980; Lester, 1987).

The term ‘aggression’ has been used to cover a wide variety of behaviours, from self-assertion to destructiveness. The various theories of aggression cover the plurality of psychoanalytic formulations, from drive theories to ego psychology and object relations theories.

Issues which permeate the literature include the following: (a) whether aggression is an autonomous drive or a reaction to anxiety or narcissistic injury; (b) whether aggression implies the notion of a death instinct; (c) the importance of aggression in the process of individuation-separation. This discussion leads to the distinction between healthy and pathological aggression; (d) the connection between aggression and a pattern of ‘transmission’ in the environment; (e) and connections between the concepts of aggression and violence which have only been raised relatively recently; (f) this more recent literature presents a renewed concern with the role of the father, in the mind of both the child and the mother, as well as a concern to ‘reconstruct’ the environment provided by the primary parental objects.

I will begin by presenting Freud’s views on aggression. In subsequent sections I will present a review of some of the main positions in the debate on aggression in America, Britain and France. In the sixth section of the chapter I return to Freud: to look at the way in which Freud himself used the notion of violence and suggest some differences in the way he used the concepts of ‘aggression’ and ‘Violence’ in the body of his work.

In the final section I will formulate my hypothesis that there may be a core phantasy in violence which is related to the individual’s phantasy about his or her own creation. This definition moves the conceptualisation of violence from the descriptive level to include the level of mental representations.

1 The origins: Freud’s formulations of the drives

Freud continuously modified his views on the aggressive or destructive instincts (Akbar, 1993). In his initial theoretical formulation (1905a) the aggressive impulses were considered to be derivatives of a drive for sexual mastery. This view was not modified for some ten years. In ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, Freud traced the origins of the instincts to sources of stimulation within the organism. His central thesis was that ‘the true prototypes of the relation of hate are derived not from sexual life, but from the ego’s struggle to preserve and maintain itself’ (1915a, p. 138). One of the vicissitudes of sexual instincts is the reversal into its opposite, love being transformed into hate. At that point Freud postulated that the drive for mastery, in conjunction with other drives, served self-preservation and was part of the self-preservative instinct.

It is important to indicate that, even at this point in the elaboration of his theory, Freud characterised hate as an ego function, directed towards an object: ‘the attitudes of love and hate cannot be made use of for the relations of instincts to their objects, but are reserved for the relations of the total ego to objects’ (1915a, p.137).

Further elaboration in Freud’s formulations stems both from conceptual and clinical developments. Freud had identified the role of aggression in his clinical work (for instance, in his analysis of Dora, his understanding of Dora’s conflicting feelings towards himself (Freud, 1905b)) and in his conceptual framework, such as his formulations on the Oedipus complex, as already in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900; see also Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985). The main theoretical problem Freud faced, however, was how to reconcile an impulse which leads to self-destruction or to the destruction of the other with the frame of reference that postulated the duality of libido and self-preservative instincts.

In 1915b, with his work on ‘Mourning and melancholia’, an important break-through occurred in Freud’s theoretical frame of reference, as he, for the first time, gave an account of an object relationship based on projection and identification:

We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others, but we have never been able to explain what interplay of forces can carry such a purpose through to execution. The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object—if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world…. In the two, most opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.

(1915b, p. 252, my italics)

We will discuss later in this chapter how suicide and violence against others may be viewed as attempted solutions to this experience of feeling overwhelmed by the object.

It was with Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and the discussion of the death instinct, that Freud allowed for the emergence of an autonomous aggressive drive (Aggressionstrieb). Aggression against the external world represents an externalisation of the death instinct, with the help of the muscular apparatus. This non-sexual aggressive drive is present from the beginning of life and works continually to unbind connections, in contrast with Eros, which seeks to bind. Freud also distinguished the non-erotic function of the death instinct from sadism and proposed the notion of a primary masochism, a state in which the death instinct is turned against the self, but bound and fused with libido (Freud, 1924; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985, p. 245). Sadism would designate a fusion of sexuality and violence against others. Laplanche and Pontalis point out, however, that this distinction between violence and sadism is not always maintained by Freud himself. We will return to this discussion later in this chapter (section 7).

In 1937 Freud stated:

If we take into consideration the total picture made up of phenomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative therapeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many neurotics, we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental events are exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the presence of a power in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction according to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death instinct of living matter.

(p. 243)

With the development of the structural model of the mind containing the distinctions between the ego, the id and the superego (Freud, 1923, 1926), the ego could not be perceived as being equipped with drives of its own as they were to be conceived as stemming from the id (Hartmann et al., 1949). The development of the concept of the superego also postulated a powerful unconscious critical force, made up of the child’s internalisations of the parental prohibitions. Aggression now became a characteristic of the way the different parts of the mind relate to each other.

Psychoanalysts have tended to equate the opposition between the life and death instincts with that between sexuality and aggressiveness. As Freud himself did not develop the concept of aggression in the same way as he developed that of libido, psychoanalysts have tended to trace parallels between libido and aggression. The concept of the death instinct, however, contains several related ideas which are connected not only with aggression, but also with passivity, as in the Nirvana Principle (Clancier et al., 1984), and the repetition compulsion, which has no special affinity with aggressive behaviour (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985).

In An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938a), Freud postulated two basic instincts—Eros and the destructive instinct.

The aim of the first of these basic instincts is to establish ever greater units and to preserve them thus—in short, to bind together; the aim of the second is, on the contrary, to undo connections and to destroy things. In the case of the destructive instinct we may suppose that its final aim is to lead what is living into inorganic state.

(p. 148)

In ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’ (1937), Freud also introduced the concept of ‘free aggressiveness’. Aggression was ‘floating’, ready to attach itself to any instinct whenever it chose to do so. This concept explains the coexistence of love and hate for one and the same object. In ‘Why war?’ (1932), Freud suggested that an instinct ‘scarcely ever operates in isolation; it is always accompanied…with a certain quota from the other side, which modifies its aim or is, in some cases, what enables it to achieve that aim’ (p. 209). Thus the instinct of self-preservation, on the side of Eros, must have a certain degree of aggressiveness at its disposal, in order to fulfil its purpose. In his letter to Einstein, Freud also distinguished between the death instinct—directed against oneself—and the destructive drive, directed against others.

It is important to stress the importance Freud attributed to aggression in the development of the individual. It has a propelling function essential for the construction of life. I think that this essential view of aggression was later lost in some of the psychoanalytic literature.

In 1924 Abraham explored the roots of destructiveness relating it to the aetiology of mental disturbances.

2 Developments in Britain

An analysis of the psychoanalytic literature in Britain uncovers a debate between those who have emphasised aggression as innate and those who emphasised the importance of the mother—child dyad and the traumatic nature of the primary relationships in the shaping of aggression. We thus find both notions of aggression, that is, as a healthy part of development and as a result of pathology.

In his 1915 paper Jones stated:

It should be evident that if an adult were to display the same disregard for the rights and feelings of others, the same indecency and cruelty, and egotism as that characteristic of the infant, he would very definitely rank as an asocial animal…. There can be no doubts that the asocial impulses we are discussing are part of the inherited characteristics of mankind, and it is throughout intelligible that both the infant and the savage stand in this respect nearer to the animals from which we descend.

(Jones, 1915, pp. 77–78)

For Klein the unconscious is there from the start and has specific contents, namely the unconscious phantasies (Isaacs, 1943; Klein, 1952b). These are perceived by her as constitutional and universal, particularly derived from the death instinct (Klein, 1930, in 1977a, p. 61). The external environment has a fundamental role in the amelioration of persecutory anxiety. Here lies its importance, as emphasised by Klein: ‘The fact that a good relation to i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Psychoanalytic understanding of violence and suicide: a review of the literature and some new formulations
• 2 Towards understanding violence: the use of the body and the role of the father
• 3 The role of the father in a pre-suicide state
• 4 A core phantasy in violence
• 5 Narcissism and its relation to violence and suicide
• 6 Technique in the interpretation of the manifest attack on the analyst
• 7 The paradox of suicide: issues of identity and separateness
• 8 Final remarks
• Index