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Psychological violence—a violence located in the interior world—is viewed as a necessary antecedent to all violent behavior. This internal violence is described with reference to two conceptual models: first, in terms of the perversion of meaning; and second, in terms of a model of pathological defense organization that institutionalizes internal violence against the self. In the first instance, perversion of meaning constitutes a form of violence not always readily observable; but it can be recognized at the sociopolitical level, for example, in the discourses of propaganda, wherein political acts of actual violence are euphemistically recast as useful, practical, or harmless events. At the individual psychological level, it can be recognized in the utterances of serial killers perversely justifying their violence in terms of a higher calling or purity of purpose. In each case one may observe the perverse function of dehumanizing the victim. Actual violence facilitated by perversion of meaning can thus be observed both in the individualism of the perverse murderer and in certain types of political cultures, such as Nazism.
In discussing individual psychology, the author makes reference to certain Kleinian conceptions to illuminate the phenomenon of psychological violence: Bion's formulation of attacks on linking, whereby emotional links are destroyed and thinking loses its symbolic function; and following Bion, the model offered by a series of authors who wish to describe a type of pathological organization that constitutes an internal tyranny (Steiner), one in which destructiveness of good objects is embraced, promoted, and rationalized, often in the guise of doing right (Meltzer), or in the form of submission to an internal “gang” in what Rosenfeld called “destructive narcissism.”