Psychoanalysis and the Question of Violence: From Masochism to Shame

The problem of how psychoanalysis addresses itself to the trauma of violence is arguably one of the most crucial questions facing the discipline at this historical moment. This essay will contend that the critical task of historicizing our ideas about violence holds a key to future theory and therapy. Offering a sustained historical emphasis, this essay reveals the extent to which the ideas that we—as citizens and therapists—hold about suffering and violence inflect the culture in which we live, and vice versa. By tracing the historical genealogies of two focal concepts—masochism and shame—and by examining how they play out culturally, psychoanalysis puts itself in an optimal position to rethink the relation of these culturally significant concepts to the problem of cruelty and violence. An approach to violence is here framed within an approach to masochism, precisely because, as we will see, the latter supplanted the former within a historical and cultural context of American shame in the postwar period, a shame tied to the mediated experience of the Holocaust. The historical account presented here builds to a discussion of the remedies, at once psychotherapeutic and social, required for healing in the aftermath of violence and violation.1

This essay begins the project of examining the production of moral and social consciousness in the American postwar period with special attention to the two decades following the Second World War, a period in which the threshold of shame declined enough to allow the formation of two predominant modes of its expression and analysis, both of which share an interest in reading culture's stake in internalizing and libidinalizing shame. These modes, coming from complementary, if competing, angles are (1) analytic theory—especially combat psychiatry from the Second World War—as it developed to