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In 1966, Mike Wallace interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. on 60 Minutes. It was 3 years after the March on Washington and his “I Have a Dream Speech,” and less than 2 years before his assassination. During a discussion about the widening divisions within the civil rights moment and the summer riots of 1966, King stated: “I contend that the cry of black power is at bottom a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the negro. I think we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard” (“MLK—A riot is the language of the unheard,” CBS News Productions). He noted that it was the urgency within the oppressed community for change and the failed response of those in power to heed that need that dynamically generates the push toward more violent expression. As the interview continued, he clarified that “my hope is that it will be nonviolent, I would hope that we can avoid riots because riots are self-defeating and socially destructive” . In many ways what King was highlighting was the mode of communication that violence may serve, particularly when what it attempts to communicate is denied or disavowed, thereby strengthening its possible persistence.
King's interview raises a question that has plagued philosophers, theologians, and the field of psychoanalysis throughout time. To what extent is violence an inborn human drive or trait and/or is it a reaction against something intrapsychic or interpersonal? This debate is still current, with a panel discussion article appearing in the August 2023 edition of Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association titled “Thanatos: Is Freud's Concept Still Relevant?” (Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 71[4]). This article describes Freud's concept of Todestrieb, including the germination and rise of the concept in Freud's theorizing and writing in the 1920s and his expansion of the concept in Civilization and Its Discontents to include a wider swat