Stopping School Violence

It gives us great pleasure to present another issue of our Journal focused on education, this time addressing the serious social problem of violence in our schools. School consultation has been a regular part of the work of many clinicians for many decades, and psychoanalysis has a history dating from its origins of a strong commitment to the education of children as our last issue on education elegantly captured (Volume 4, Number 3, July 2002).

The current issue collects a variety of ways psychoanalysts and nonanalysts, sympathetic to psychoanalytic ideas, have applied their thinking to the challenge and dilemmas inherent in the complex problem of school violence. The preeminent British psychoanalyst, Peter Fonagy, then discusses these papers from his unique perspective informed, not only by his clinical experience in the psychoanalysis of children and adults, but also by his deep commitment to attachment research, an approach that promises a fresh angle on this difficult and complex multidimensional problem.

The papers cover such varied topics as suicide and depression in school children, the need for interdisciplinary communications when assessing children who threaten homicide, school bullying from an international perspective reviewing culturally appropriate and very different forms of school intervention in these contexts, ways to promote wellness and healthy development in children, social and ecological factors that make it difficult to implement violence-prevention programs, and finally ways of conceptualizing and handling social aggression in school, with a preliminary report on a psychoanalytically conceptualized program to reduce violence in elementary schools.

The perspective that seems an ongoing thread in these papers is that although individual psychopathology and genetic endowment of the child impacts how they interact with others, the expression of violence and difficult-to-handle behavior in schools is always heavily influenced by its int