Violence and Group Dynamics in the High School: The Columbine School Shootings

What prompts adolescent boys to murder, terrorize, and commit suicide within the confines of their school building? How can they perpetuate these crimes against their peers? What is their motivation for violence against those individuals who make up their adolescent community? These are the questions that find us grappling with the dissonance of confusion, misunderstanding, and denial. The most common wish among parents and professionals is to believe that there is some pathological reason for the actions of an adolescent perpetrator. This wish empowers us to study the psychology of the individual. What went wrong with the adolescent? Could it be psychosis, drugs, lack of parental involvement, or access to guns? Delving into the individual psychology saves us from asking scarier questions with less tangible answers. However, the events perpetrated by adolescents in recent years implore us to investigate more closely the myriad issues beyond the scope of the individual. By committing violent acts against peers and themselves in their school buildings, teenagers such as Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of Littleton, Colorado demonstrate the need for an investigation into the impact of group dynamics within adolescent communities.

In this paper, we will present selected key concepts from the psychoanalytic literature on groups and apply them to the school shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.1 More specifically, we will describe how the group's unconscious processes led to the development of particular roles for Dylan Kleboid and Eric Harris. We will use psychoanalytic concepts such as projective identification, the defense mechanism of splitting, basic assumptions groups, and the social defense system to develop the position that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were the recipients of the group's projections and, further, that the group was complicit in developing their role as offenders. At the same time, we will consider the impact of groups in the par