Prologue: Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Critical Question: Are We a Culture That Glorifies Violence?

The title of this issue, “Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Critical Question: Are We a Culture That Glorifies Violence?”, evolved from the editor’s initial consideration of what is unique that psychoanalysis can contribute to the understanding and reduction of violence in the United States. The contributors of this issue have referred to statistics of the very high incidence of violence in the United States. They have referred to the historical roots of violence in the United States beginning with a Revolution, the killing and dislodging American Indians from their land and damaging their culture, the initiation and upholding of slavery with its aftermath by treating Blacks as they were not human, the gun-slinging individualism of the West, and the grandiosity of its military power. Each of these happenings have contributed to the exulted, violent image of the United States. All the contributors have pointed to the vast social and cultural literature devoted to violence, its causes, and its remedies in the United States.

With this beginning, all the writers use a psychoanalytic perspective that enables them to focus on the inner lives of their subjects, who are continually shifting their emotional attention between looking at an outward reality and an inward state filled with memories and fantasies. Focusing outwardly is more difficult. It involves pain, vulnerability, thinking, organizing, and adapting while focusing inwardly is immediate, safer, and temporarily gratifying. Each contributor emphasizes the human capacity to communicate with language and to create narratives and meaning to deal with the inside and the outside worlds. Communication enables emotional growth and greater strength to keep a focus on reality.

Each contributor implies the presence of a powerful force to repeat, rather than endure, the feelings and vulnerability of the past while feeling alive in the present with vitality and love.

Elisabeth Waugaman emphasizes that within a society that is imme