You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Violence, in its many expressions, is an obvious and urgent issue in contemporary culture. The psychological and sociological aspects of human relationships generating violence are many, and sometimes (not often enough) interdisciplinary. The growing liberalism, individualism and consumerism of post-industrial and informational societies clearly are contributing common trends that lead to disinvestment in solidarity and collective political agendas, stoking intolerance to difference and a reactive dogmatism in many aspects of social life.
The basic conflict between social and individual demands, regarding desire and its limits, is a crucial concern for applied psychoanalysis (Freud, 1930/1955, Campos, 2011). In this long-range sense, psychoanalysis, since Freud, has been updating this discussion, especially as to changes in psychopathological symptoms as human subjectivity is more deeply affected by the modernity crisis (Birman, 2014, 2019). On the other hand, psychoanalysis, at least in some hands, has shifted towards a stance of an implicated clinic in order to consider the political, social and economical dimensions of subjectivity (Rosa, Estevão, & Braga, 2017).
Plenty has been written about the role of repression and superego in the civilizing process, and the failure or limits of these functions (Bauman, 1997, Lustoza, Cardoso & Calazans, 2014, Saroldi, 2015, Birman, 2019). Cultural critics also have examined narcissistic influences acting on personality and social bonds (Lasch, 1979, Amaral, 1997, Lebrun & Melman, 2002, Reino & Endo, 2011), but few discussions properly have addressed helplessness (Menezes, 2005, Oliveira, Resstel & Justo, 2014), taking it as a key means to understand contemporary vicissitudes, and not only be regarded as a result of them. Our theoretical essay stresses this point, discussing violence and helplessness as a means to defend difference and otherness as foundations of social relations, and therefore of human subjectivity