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Men who share an ethnic area, a historical era, or an economic pursuit are guided by common images of good and evil. Infinitely varied, these images reflect the elusive nature of historical change; yet in the form of contemporary social models, of compelling prototypes of good and evil, they assume decisive concreteness in every individual's ego development.
Erikson, “Ego Development and Historical Change”
It is to moments of humiliation such as these that we owe men like Robespierre.
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
What do we make today of Freud's arguments in Civilization and Its Discontents about the genesis and inevitability of aggression?1 How do current psychoanalytic understandings help us understand extreme aggression and cultural violence? Is there some linkage between cultural violence and aggression and masculinity? These are the questions this paper addresses. I suggest that Freud's arguments, though rhetorically and intuitively powerful, need much amendment, that we can draw upon alternative theories and clinical experience for greater understanding of extreme violence, and that there is a complex link between violence-aggression and gender. My thinking is tentative, and, like Freud's, speculative.
Psychoanalytic thinking about violence, necessarily beginning with a reconsideration of Civilization and Its Discontents, must concern itself not only with “ordinary,” normative, collective violence and aggression but also with the extremes of widespread vicious violence, often tied in some way to nationalism and its (tribal, ethnic, racial) equivalents, that we witness today and have witnessed throughout the twentieth century.2 Fifty years after the Holocaust, which still stands as the ultimate standard against which collective cruelty, brutality, killing, and torture can be assessed, we confront death squads, ethnic cleansing, and political rage expressed through torture, murder, and rape, genocidal murders of indigenous populations, and ethnocidal tribal warfar