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The authors of this stimulating and useful book begin with the proposition that violence and aggression need to be clearly differentiated theoretically and that the distinctions are important, not only in our thinking but for clinical diagnosis and treatment. They put forward the proposal that aggression is an innate and inevitable component of the early affective repertoire which orients the organism to its environment. In normal development aggression is integrated via projective and introjective processes resulting in the development of self-consciousness and the critical ability to separate. The point is emphasized that aggression should not to be considered synonymous with destruction in a pathological sense. However, without the necessary provisions for integration, given by an environment capable of containment, and of accurate and sympathetic attunement, it is subject to disintegration and the resulting aggressive phantasy is left without a mind to think about it. The organism is then exposed to a violating self experience, a phenomenon called violence, that can be too painful to bear and which has pathological consequences. These include the evacuation or ablation of a mind that can think about the experience and the appearance of violent defensive behaviour that utilizes aggressive patterns. In the consulting room this constellates, utilizing splitting and projective identificatory processes, as a means by which the overwhelming affective states can, in phantasy, be evacuated into an object, often the analyst, who can feel controlled, helpless and abused. In the authors’ proposition violence is not innate nor inevitable, neither is it a matter of the degree of aggression and it is wrong to consider it to be ‘mindless’. From this framework the analyst in the consulting room must struggle to think about the need for containment of the previously undifferentiated and unmodified affective experience that comes painfully alive in the countertransference.
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