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The title of this book is somewhat misleading. While published in 2021, its emphasis on radical revenge rather than mass shootings might well fail to attract readers who want to know more about the psychology of mass shooters than about revenge, whether radical or average in type. Under this title, however, the reader will find a great deal of material about mass shooters that seeks to illuminate their inner lives and what drives them to these acts of mass irrational destruction. Why are there so many mass shootings? The public wants to know; the media consults with experts for their opinion but the experts selected are seldom psychoanalysts. We, as psychoanalysts, do have access to a special kind of understanding of murderous rage that goes beyond making a diagnosis of mental illness as a determining factor in producing a mass murderer. But what we understand is complicated and not so easy to communicate to those who want and need an explanation because a combination of emotions and character deficits have to coalesce in order to produce a murderous individual and then he must, absolutely must, have access to semi- automatic weapons. We persistently resist coming to terms with the probability that we in the United States will have to live with the occurrence of still another mass shooting, often of school children, from weapons that not only kill but decapitate and mutilate bodies beyond recognition of the murdered child or adult. And yet we do know that these events will continue to occur with full visual coverage on television starting as soon as the shooting has stopped and sometimes even before that point as the police move in on a shooter situation.
To her great credit Renée Danziger, a British psychoanalyst with an interest in the phenomenon that is an American specialty, has written a book that takes us deep into the territory where mass shooters come from. Radical Revenge: Shame, Blame and the Urge for Retaliation seeks to reveal the inner life that typifies