The Infantile Roots of Adolescent Violence

1975 has already produced overwhelming evidence of man's continuing inhumanity to man. From Vietnam, Cambodia, Israel, Egypt, and Syria, from the streets of all our cities, through daily newspaper and television reports, we are deluged with violence. Real, living, terrifying, bloody, undeniable violence. In 1967 Laing wrote, “In the last 50 years, we human beings have slaughtered by our own hands coming on for one hundred million of our species… we seem to seek death and destruction as much as life and happiness…. If we can stop destroying ourselves we may stop destroying others. We have to begin by admitting and even accepting our violence, rather than blindly destroying ourselves with it.”1 When there seems no end to violence, is there point in seeking such a beginning?

Any essay on violence must also be an exploration of Everyman. This essay will hopefully serve not only as an indication of the particular propensity for violence of adolescents, but also as a reminder of its universaltiy. The infantile precursors of violence are seen to play a special role which should be recognized, but they are not indicted as the only factors in the genesis of violence.

For each individual adolescent, faced with the developmental tasks of transition from child to adult, there are monumental problems in the control of all impulses, including aggression. The signposts of the adolescent's difficulties are now commonly recognized. For instance, Anna Freud says, “Adolescence produces its own symptomatology which, in the more severe cases, is of a quasi-disocial, quasi-psychotic, borderline order.”2 Through their interpretation of, and response to, these signs, adults signal their acceptance or rejection of the adolescent and also reveal the extent to which their own adolescence remains vibrant or lies inert.

It can be accepted that adolescence is a uniquely human developmental phenomenon. The Committee on Adolescence of the Croup For the Advancement of Psychiatry “questions whether the