Editorial

This issue of the journal is devoted to what I believe is one of the most important and valuable forms of applied psychoanalysis, namely, the application of psychoanalytic theory and practice to the understanding and treatment of violent behavior. I need hardly stress the importance of the human propensity to engage in acts of violence as a human problem, especially in this age of thermonuclear and other “weapons of mass destruction.” The danger it poses to our very survival as a species is all too obvious. In fact, even before the most powerful of the weapons I just referred to had yet been invented, Freud recognized as early as 1929 how central this problem had already become not just to the future of humanity, but to the present. In the famous last paragraph of his prescient essay on Civilization and Its Discontents, he observed that

The fateful question of the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent the cultural process developed in it will succeed in mastering the derangements of communal life caused by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. In this connection, perhaps the phase through which we are at this moment passing deserves special interest. Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this - hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. (Freud, 1930/1961, p. 145)

That is among the reasons why I welcome the opportunity to edit and introduce this special issue on the application of psychoanalysis to the problem of violence, which has been given the descriptive title of “forensic psychotherapy” by Dr Estela Welldon and her colleagues. The word “forensic” in that phrase refers to the fact that one cannot deal with violent people as a clinician without doing so in a context that is conditioned by the legal system. But I would add that the violence