Andrew Peto on Crowd Violence

There are so many fine analysts whose lives and contributions remain unknown to most of us. One in this number is Andrew Peto, described by Leo Stone (1978) as a man “who enriched our psychoanalytic community as practitioner, teacher, officer, accomplished scientific writer” and who was distinguished by a “hardy independence and integrity of thought” (p. 3).

Dr. Peto, a tall, elegantly dressed man with a noticeable Hungarian accent, came to Jacoby Hospital when I was a psychiatric resident at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City. He was one of a number of analysts who, in the 1960s, left their Manhattan offices to teach us for a few hours each week—Phyllis Greenacre, Martin Wangh, Robert Bok, and Walter Stewart among them. They were all faculty members of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and most were well-known for their contributions to the psychoanalytic literature. At the conclusion of a clinical seminar that focused on the sexual conflicts of a young patient, Dr. Peto remarked, “Every man has two penises. A good one … and his own.” In one sentence, he shed light on the ego ideal, male narcissism, male development, father-son relationships, and the importance of the body in our psychic development.

Peto, at that time, had other things on his mind besides teaching psychiatric residents. In the half-dozen years before he published his paper “On Crowd Violence: The Role of Archaic Superego and Body Image” (1975), America was convulsed in conflict and violence. In 1967, the largest anti-war demonstration in US history, in which 12,000 were arrested for civil disobedience, ended in rioting (Figure 1). Freedom riders experienced beatings throughout the South. In 1968, peaceful marchers for racial justice were violently assaulted on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. That same year saw mayhem in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic

National Convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey. In 1970, students were