Explaining the Inexplicable: A Review of Prologue to Violence: Child Abuse, Dissociation and Crime, by Abby Stein, 2007,  Analytic Press,  147 pp.

In Prologue to Violence, Abby Stein tells of a 15-year-old boy who killed a 63-year-old woman. The young murderer described his actions in the following way: “I just started stabbing her. I really did not think about it. I really did not want to stab anybody. It was just bad luck” (reported by Revitch and Schlesinger, , p. 1). Most forensic professionals

would likely focus their evaluation of this case on the teen's conscious intentions, fantasies, and defective sense of right and wrong. Stein, on the other hand, traces the genesis of this and other acts of violence to dissociation, trauma, and reenactment. In making her argument she is thorough in her documentation of violent criminals' histories and accounts of their crimes. Stein provides abundant data, derived from open-ended interviews she conducted with incarcerated inmates, archival data in police files, and quantitative research. As a work of applied psychoanalysis, Stein's book is exemplary.

Stein is equally rigorous in her application of multiple theoretical perspectives to the phenomenology of violence. While she uses a broad array of psychoanalytic, attachment, forensic, and cognitive neuroscience theory to help us understand the many factors that conspire to create humans capable of terrible deeds, she mostly focuses on the power of trauma and dissociation. As she puts it, “[I]t is the pathological disengagement precipitated by early, intense, and repetitive trauma that most strongly facilitates the streaming of an unprocessed violent past into the present” (p. 4). By closely examining the words and histories of these people, Stein shows how violent individuals reenact their childhood traumas in remarkably symbolic, psychologically meaningful ways. Thus psychoanalytically hospitable clinicians will find Stein's basic conclusion highly compelling, if not altogether convincing. Even the most skepti