Discussion of Stuart S. Asch's Article, Some Superego Considerations in Crime and Punishment

Surprisingly, acts of violence are varieties of human behavior rarely studied in psychoanalytic literature. This is how Dr. Asch begins his interesting observations, which range widely over topics of psychoanalytic structural theory, psychology of punishment, penology, and social policy. To be sure, all these fields are related to each other, although their systematic interconnection is not always completely clarified in this paper, which also does not attempt to explain the remarkable reluctance of psychoanalysis to face the problem of aggression with the same sober detachment and realism with which it views other problems of intrapsychic and social life.

It was Sigmund Freud who established the tradition of partial scotomization of aggression in psychoanalysis, but it was also he who broke with it when he “discovered” the

potentially destructive and self-destructive evil in man by conceptualizing the death instinct and aggressive drives. Movingly, Freud described the internal obstacles blocking the recognition of innate self-destructive tendencies and the difficulties of dealing with the various, often hidden forms of man's aggression against himself and others. To this day many psychotherapists refuse to follow Freud in what they consider his speculative, metaphysical aberration regarding the death instinct, which they cannot see clinically and hence consider a superfluous conceptual tool. These “love-only” analysts have no choice but either to deny altogether all biological basis for human behavior (which ultimately also leaves the “hard” scientific facts of learning perception and social influence unexplained) or to consider only progressive growth and development to be normal, genuinely human facts. The biologically equally “given” phenomena of aggression, decay, and death must then be relegated to pathology, or to mishap. Aggression is thus at best considered a symptom, a sign of illness indicating loss of control, while aggression in its strategic, attenti