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This is an extremely interesting critical review of the concepts of violence and aggression as applied in psychoanalysis. It is an ambitious work that covers very difficult and uncertain ground since, in the process of tracing the origins and development of aggression and violence, it casts light on the origins of the mind in the body, the process known as mentation. It is therefore relevant well beyond the fields of forensic psychiatry and psychoanalysis in which the authors are undoubtedly deeply experienced. It is also fresh and original whilst bringing into focus and context, particularly in the chapters on transference, countertransference, violence against the self and sex and violence, most of the conceptual information indispensable to the present-day psychoanalytic therapist whether in his consulting room or other settings.
The main aim of the authors is to diversify and broaden our understanding of aggression and, in particular, to remove violence from the peculiar status in which it is often kept in psychoanalytic thinking, as somehow taken for granted as having a mindless, bodily nature. In the initial chapters the authors discuss the possible reasons why the psychoanalytical exploration of aggression and violence is relatively underdeveloped.
One reason would be the preponderance initially given by Freud to sexuality as the instinctual basis of the mind. Although in later writings he modified this position with the introduction of the death instinct, aggression continued to find an uneasy home in psychoanalytical developmental theories. It eventually resulted in a radical dissociation in the analytical movement between those who accept the existence of a primary innate aggression as fundamental to development and those who regard aggression as strictly secondary to deprivation and frustration. It is thus that the nature and origins of aggression became, in the words of the authors, a ‘totemic’ element to signal allegiance to one or other of the streams of