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Why are people violent? Can psychoanalysis help in answering this question? Dr de Zulueta's work is ground breaking; she establishes plausible links between defects in the process of making attachments and violent behaviour; at the same time she demonstrates wider and more far-reaching connections between object relations theories and mainstream psychology, sociology, ethnography, biochemistry, psychobiology and neurology. One hopes it will receive the widespread attention it deserves. She says that human violence springs from how humans develop, and hence from how they see, and what they feel about, themselves and the ‘other’; that violence is a by-product of psychological trauma. She does not disprove Man's ‘innate’ propensity to violence, but she does draw on suggestive evidence from many different fields of study to support her conclusions to the contrary. Though she is generally immaculately scholarly, her conclusions and the intensity of her accumulated arguments betray her underlying passion.
In outline, she starts from Bowlby's work on attachment, and the deprivation, loss and abuse consequent on the failures of attachment. She notes the effects of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, especially in children, on attachment patterns, and connects psychological trauma and child abuse with human destructiveness. Included in this is the compulsion to repeat the trauma, which may be based on an addiction to it. She goes on to describe biochemical patterns which might help to explain why psychological patterns stubbornly resist change. She finishes by reminding us how some cultures sanction adult violence towards children much more than others, and shows how such sanction can be linked with polarized gender roles such that males are perpetrators and women are victims of rape and sexual violence.
This thumb-nail sketch of her original conclusions may whet your appetite, but it cannot convey the range and depth of her thinking, expressed in nearly 300 closely arg