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Several important milestones in the recent history of psychoanalytic understandings of violence, including the useful differentiation of affective or instrumental violence (Glasser, 1998; Meloy, 2006; Yakeley & Meloy, 2012), a greater clarity of the concept of psychopathy, understandings about the link between violence and personality disorders (De Masi, 2015; Grenyer et al., 2013; Meloy, 1998) and attachment research have led to a clearer understanding about the differential treatment needs of violent offenders. Other frontier theoretical developments concerning the location of disturbance in violent offenders have also linked some types of violence to primitive mental states (Glasser, 1998; Perelberg, 1995) which are associated with unique predictive “psycho-dynamic risk factors” and point to the victim as representing an undifferentiated object perceived as having an annihilatory potential (Keogh, 2022). These developments suggest the utility of a continuum which describes violent offending from affective to instrumental types of violence associated with different internalised self-object relations. Relatedly, an understanding of the link between violent offending and offenders who have a limited “mentalizing capacity” has pointed to the benefit of short-term treatment possibilities for some offenders (Fonagy et al., 2025).