Mizen, Richard. ‘The so-called mindlessness of violence: violence as a pathological variant of aggression’.  Global Crime, November 2009,  10, 4, pp.  416-31.

In this thoughtful paper, Richard Mizen explores violence as a state of mind, ‘a psychological phenomenon that may have behavioural corollaries and not as a behavioural phenomenon with psychological aspects’ (p. 416). His view is that violence is not, as is commonly supposed, a form of mindless action, an expression of an absence of mind, but rather, an ablation of mind, a way of eliminating emotional experiences that are experienced as intolerable and are therefore felt to be unmanageable. This implies a defensive function, and I shall come back to this later, to explore some of the implications of this perspective.

But first, I would like to highlight the fact that, in taking this view, Mizen places ‘overwhelming and unmediated affect’ (p. 417) at the heart of the phenomenon of violence. He argues that many models of violence assume that the violent individual is capable of a highly developed and sophisticated level of cognitive functioning, when these capacities are, in reality, lacking. In particular, the ability to conceive of oneself and others as having a mind and a sense of self-agency are developmental achievements that can fail, leaving the individual at the mercy of unconscious affects that he or she cannot think about, moderate or manage. Mizen highlights some of the key research on the role of mentalization; it is worth noting that Fonagy and Luyten (2009) have