The Treatment and Understanding of Violence in Children and Young Adults: Introductory Paper

I have modest goals and I hope will evoke modest expectations for my introductory remarks. I am simply going to remind you of the background - philosophic, literary and psychoanalytic - of the problem of understanding violence. The problem, implicit in The Iliad, is addressed directly in the Book of Job: what is the origin and meaning of, and justification for, the evil in the universe? Job, you will remember (with apologies for my prejudiced résumé) was subjected to torment at the pleasure of a bad set of parental figures, Jehovah and Satan. The answer that Jehovah gives poor Job to the question of why the worthy suffer and the wicked thrive is: ‘Don't ask! It's beyond your understanding.’ Can psychoanalysts do much more than protest against that? At least we can insist on asking, but wisdom dictates that we keep our hopes humble for a really satisfactory answer (philosophic, religious or scientific).

Hannah Arendt has made the term ‘the banality of evil’ familiar to us, and I think one of the reasons we are having this conference is our awareness of the banality of violence. We have had decades of exposure to the reality of its everyday presence in the world outside our minds, not only from newsprint headlines but from visual action on television. Individual and mass violence have not necessarily increased in this century, but our awareness of them has. I was very impressed as a boy by the reactions of my mother, generally a rational and rather atheistic person, who would cry out at the news of a murder, not uncommon in New York in the 1930s, ‘God! Let the killer not be Jewish.’ She had experienced pogroms as a child before World War I, and their shadow had left the expectations of repetition. I thought of her, following the 1993 massacre of many Arabs by a Jew at Hebron. He may perhaps have been crazy, but the reaction of so many righteous justifiers again showed the banality of violence - what we can all regress to under stress. Here is what the American poet E.E