Individual Aggression and A Violent Society*

The first was [a woman], 32, waiting for a bus on San Francisco's Geary Boulevard at 7:57 one evening last week. A man stepped up to her, shot her twice fatally in the chest, and ran back to a waiting dark-colored Cadillac. Ten minutes later and eight blocks away … a retired Coast Guardsman who had turned 69 that day was struck down by three bullets in the back and belly. At 9:15, near Market Street, octogenarian … died instantly from two bullets in his back. Three miles south, at 9:50, [a woman], 45, was cut down as she stood in the doorway of a laundromat. And ten blocks away, at 10:10, [another woman], 23, the mother of a four-month-old boy, was climbing the stairs to her new house when a man walked up and said amiably, “Hi, howya doin’?” [She] turned to reply, and a bullet burrowed through her body to her spine, possibly paralyzing her for life. (“Crime: Nothing Personal,’ Newsweek† February 11, 1974.)

More and more, as psychiatrists and private citizens, we are concerned with the problems of aggression and violence.

In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,¹ Erich Fromm says our society has developed a necrophilous character, dominated by a passionate destructiveness. He attributes this to unrestrained industrialism and moral torpor. Rampant industrialism has created a superabundance of creature comforts such as cars, refrigerators, and boats, and has made man and life unimportant.

These machines have “numbed” man, so that he has become indifferent to violence and destructiveness. While healthy aggressiveness serves survival and growth, destructiveness, taking joy in cruelty and killing, is mediated through social and cultural factors. Fromm suggests that one of the ways to eliminate this destructiveness lies in a renewal of a sense of general religious values.

Dr. Roy R. Grinker, Sr.² sees violence as the result of three basic causes: (1) the biological, taking into account genetic factors, brain damage, and the effects of drugs; (2) the