In these Pages…

Only within psychoanalysis does hurt and its consequences for personality development and subjective experience receive the clinical/theoretical exploration they merit.

In psychoanalysis, we mostly struggle to apprehend how the stops and pulls of seemingly ordinary living contribute to mental disorder. Yet as we sort out these matters, we may realize that we have been blind to hurtful things we never recognized. This may not be a personal blindness of our own, but instead may be a blindness we share with our culture. With our culture, too, we may react defensively, avert our gaze, and find justification for doing so.

In other issues of this journal, we have joined in a new discovery of incest, recognizing it to be a far more common hurt than we know. Also, we have considered how tacit rules of discourse may limit comprehension and profoundly distort our capacity for compassionate understanding—;another source of hurt. In the current issue, we consider the simplest hurt of all: banal physical violence. Then, perhaps too quickly, we flee to the comparative gentility of our usual psychoanalytic fare.

Hence, we begin with the 1992 Karen Horney Lecture of Elissa Benedek, a leading figure in American psychiatry. Benedek argues that violence is analogous to malignancy, that we woefully underrate how much violence hurts. Domestic violence, for example, has emerged only recently from a cultural blind spot generated from consensual ignorance, fear, and helplessness. Spousal violence, along with child and elder abuse, are recent discoveries. Benedek places the matter squarely before us as “the ultimate human degradation.” In his discussion of Benedek's paper, John Oldham draws attention to the complex relationship between violence and mental illness, concerned that this frequent pairing too often turns into stigmatization of the mentally ill. He also reminds us not to overlook the crippling impact of nonviolent emotional abuse. In so doing, he returns us to the relative peace of