On Violence, Development, and Culture

Since the beginning of the year, the Detroit area has been gifted with offerings in developmental psychoanalysis that seem to put the recent grotesque expressions of aggression in young people in some perspective. The Michigan Psychoanalytic Council held a conference on Violence and Aggression in Children on February 20, 2000 in Ann Arbor. Jack and Kerry Kelly Novick, psychoanalysts well known for their published work in the area of sadomasochism and for their foundation of an analytically informed preschool in Allen Creek, Michigan (Ann Arbor), opened the conference with “The Early Childhood Roots of Aggression and Violence.” Both Jack and Kerry were trained at the Anna Freud Center and are supervising analysts with the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Jack is also a supervising analyst with the New York Freudian Society.

Based on the truism that a picture is worth a thousand words, their paper actually provided captioning for a remarkable video presentation. Mildly reminiscent of the 16 mm. Rene Spitz 1940s “hospitalism”/ anaclitically depressed orphan and the “refrigerator mother” movies of undergraduate days, the video demonstrated the making of a psychopath in a very dynamic and chillingly subtle way. The camera was focused on a mother-infant pair, living in a home for unwed mothers, who engaged with each other in a gradually more disturbing way.

The mother, who had emerged from a profoundly abusive background, could not help but allow her noxious objects to infest the relationship with sadistically interruptive behaviors. She dislodged her baby from his play scheme, displaced his attention, and constantly shifted and offset the sense of relatedness both to her and to the (potentially transitional) objects within the small world around them. Her thoughtless behavior seemed obligatory as she whispered increasingly degrading and malicious remarks to her infant-toddler son in a sweet and seductive way while fostering an unsettled disquietude within the play space.