The Fine Edge of Violence

The setting is a group home for runaway and what may be called throwaway young adults. Two individuals enter the kitchen. One has the key to a pantry containing after-dinner snacks. The other watches as the former opens the pantry door and removes a box of cookies. “Give me some,” says the observer. “No” is the response. A counselor hears the last part of the exchange and watches helplessly as the person who has been frustrated hits the keyholder's head with a large pot and fractures his skull.

Another setting: A class in analytic school. A classmate baits an eminent visiting psychoanalyst who is instructing us. Unexpectedly, he strides to where the student is sitting, bends over him, nose to nose, red-faced with fists clenched, and shouts, “Don't call me stupid!”

The fine edge of violence! Why can one individual be incipiently violent but stop short of physically hurting another person and another feel no restraints against injuring people physically? My interests have led me to work part-time with violence-prone alcoholics and hard-drug addicts. In addition, I work part-time with the New York City Police Department. On the first job I work with individuals paroled from prison, who have mutilated and murdered people. I hope to graduate them from a drug rehabilitation center with the ability to cope with life without the use of drugs and stopping short of violence. In the case of the police, I seek to find candidates who are comfortable with violence but are not violence-prone.

Intellectualizations attempting to explain the multifaceted roots of violence abound in the literature. There have been speculations