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This volume, the thirty-third in the New Library of Psychoanalysis, a project of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, includes eight contributors, seven of whom are members of the British Psychoanalytical
Society. The foreword is by Leonard Shengold, whose contribution stands in stark contrast to the others by virtue of its ego psychological, more North American viewpoint. Shengold makes no substantive comments on the other papers in the volume. Whatever his silence means politically, this courageous book represents a distillation of the best British thinking on a topic derived from work by the Young Adults Research Group of the Anna Freud Centre. Six patients are presented, two of whom were suicidal and four violent to others. The clinical vignettes vividly capture the inner life of extremely violent individuals, several of whom it is highly unlikely would ever have been considered suitable for intensive psychoanalysis in North America. These authors are to be congratulated for their heroic efforts with these dangerous patients.
The theme of all the chapters is object-relational. Thus, the relationship with the analyst, in the here-and-now understanding and experiencing of transference and countertransference interchanges, is what is regarded as healing for the patient. The concept of violence is defined to include not only the intentional infliction of bodily harm on others, but also the entertaining of certain violent fantasies that complicate and distort the meaning of “others” to the violent individual. A central issue in the book is the notion of the core complex, an intense longing for union with the caregiving object, leaving the individual with a paradoxical fear of being merged and annihilated and yet with an intense longing for that union. Thus, for all of the authors, violence is in essence an attempt to cope with the experience of feeling overwhelmed by the caregiving object.
The book begins with a literature review by Perelberg, summarizing the v