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This book, which essentially consists of the proceedings of the 25th Margaret Mahler Symposium held in Philadelphia in April 1994, should be read only after
the reader is familiar with the material in the Akhtar book reviewed in the first book review presented here. It raised an immediate link in my mind to the American Psychiatric Symposium on “Dynamics of Violence” held in Chicago in 1971. In the published proceedings of the latter (Dynamics of Violence, edited by J. Fawcett, American Medical Association, ) is included a paper by me, “The Psychotherapy of a Terrified Communist,” as well as papers by a number of then outstanding figures in American psychiatry and psychoanalysis, such as Lawrence Kolb, Roy Grinker Sr., Jerome Frank, and others. A broad spectrum of approaches to hatred and violence was presented, including the psychoanalytic. For example, the case I presented was of a borderline patient who was a revolutionary Maoist advocate of total revolution and Stalinist assassination of millions of people, who used communist political ideology as well as obsessive-compulsive symptoms to ward off a full-fledged paranoia or homicidal loss of control of himself. It is unfortunate that the present book under review does not refer to the Chicago Symposium at all, and does not contain any papers from a self-psychology point of view. The narrowness of approach in the Mahler symposium as it appears in this volume is the only complaint I have!
All of the papers in the book are of interest and expertly written. At a time when U.S. youths are being sent into harm's way in Bosnia, a place where hatred and violence has festered for 700 years, what would be more timely than Kramer's short opening paper focusing on the hostility of parents to their children and the tendency of middle-aged or old men making wars for young people to fight and be killed? We are then offered a major paper by Blum, presenting a traditional psychoanalytic view of hatred and aggression based on dri