Editorial

As we go to press during this particularly beautiful Spring of 1999, the world is much with us. As bombs explode and wreak their havoc in Europe, guns increasingly kill and traumatize our young in their schools—places and spaces which heretofore the culture has been able to maintain as fundamentally physically safe places.

As psychoanalysts, we recognize the need for a fundamentally violence-free space in our schools—violence-free both in the physical and psychological sense—for it is only in an essentially safe, trustworthy, reliable, and predictable environment that optimum learning and growth can occur.

The sense of urgency that is evoked as we witness the young die is borne not only of the tragic dimensions of incidents like the one at Columbine High School, but also of our conviction that psychoanalysts have a great deal to contribute in the prevention of such violence, and, in fact have already begun to do so. We invite all of you who are involved in such work to submit it to the Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies for consideration in our future issue concerning the topic of school violence.

Once more, coincidentally, the three articles selected for this issue reflect the ubiquity of the theme of violence and human aggression, be it expressed and released in the work place, in psychoanalytic institutes or among national/ethnic groupings. These papers, however, all have a distinct relational theme in terms of how aggression is manifested. Rather than being seen as a relatively impersonal, disavowed, innate drive, implied in the drive/defense approach to psychoanalytic psychology, each paper illustrates the unique ways in which aggression is expressed and promoted within an object relationship. In fact, moreover, each paper demonstrates how dialectically created human power struggles lead to an arrest of growth and repetitive pathology in relationships until power struggles are resolved. For example, the complicated interactions of victim and victimizer are