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By Anthony Storr. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1972. 127 pp.
LICENSED MASS MURDER. A SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF SOME SS KILLERS. By Henry V. Dicks. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1972. 283 pp.
Both of these books are products of the Columbus Centre, formerly the Centre for Research in Collective Psychopathology. This fact is important in evaluating Anthony Storr's work which is a presentation of the contribution he believes psychoanalysis can make to the Centre's task: 'to investigate how persecutions and exterminations come about; how the impulse to persecute or exterminate is generated', etc. In a manner of speaking, one might say that in accord with the conceptions of Melanie Klein, Storr postulates that hatred and fear of retaliation permeate the beginning of our psychic existence and that ultimately their adult manifestation, 'the ubiquity of paranoia', reveals most about 'normal' hostility and destructiveness in man.
In keeping with its role in the project, Storr's book does not attempt to present new material so much as to offer its thesis in an interesting, informative, and readable fashion. Otherwise, he might have attempted to bridge the apparent gap between the definition of aggression in its original sense and in its 'acquired' meaning of destructiveness. Psychologists, he notes, sometimes use the word in its original sense of 'active movement towards'. This would certainly fit the behavior of the protozoa or other lower animals in their efforts