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In the Preface to this important book Peter Aylward invites you to hold in mind the experience of being both listener and reader, remembering that these chapters started as lectures. He suggests that the readers’ experience lacks an interpersonal dimension. Yet perhaps assisted by their original existence as lectures, Aylward’s authorial voice is animated and engaging and it does not feel as though the reader is being offered a diminished version. The opportunity to encounter these chapters in combination makes for fascinating reading, and the conviction and deftness with which they are written lends a fluency to subject matter which ordinarily defies understanding. And it is understanding that Aylward is asking for. Whilst the book grapples with complex ideas, and even more complex case material, its central plea is a simple one: that violence can and must be understood, even at its most extreme.
Tragedies will reoccur until we as a society are able to reach for true meaning, as opposed to conclusions based on prejudice and dyadic functioning, which replicates the perpetrator’s psychopathology. (p. 176)
His language of tragedy is not sentimentalised or hyperbolic. With rigorous attention to detail, Aylward traces the trans-generational histories of those who act out to catastrophic effect. Victims and perpetrators come to be seen as cast into roles not of their choosing, but performing a pre-written script with dire consequences. But Aylward is no determinist, and he is adamant that such scripts can be changed. The ideas he presents are not so much theories but tools, designed to advance society’s capacity to intervene and help those at risk of re-enacting the trauma of their early lives, and that which they have inherited from those around them.
Theoretically, the book’s starting points are various, but particularly prominent is the work of the Chilean psychoanalyst Matte Blanco (1908–1995). Clinically, they are Peter Aylward’s experiences as a forensic psychotherapi