The following is a speculative psychoanalytic account of the underlying processes predisposing an individual or collective group to engage in violent behavior.  It should be kept in mind that this is only a partial account, one which does not address other significant cultural and historical factors contributing to a country’s eagerness and readiness to go to war.  Bertram Karon once told me (when I was preparing a paper on narcissism and the death instinct) that Richard Sterba, a colleague of Freud, told him that part of the reason why Freud arrived at his theory of the death instinct was his observation of the almost jubilant reaction some groups have displayed upon declaration of war.  Another partial interpretation is defense against traumatic feelings of powerlessness and helplessness or the externalization of vulnerability into an outside group and attacking it there in order to kill off one's sense of vulnerability (akin to identification with the aggressor).

There is ancient wisdom in the Biblical saying that before you can take the speck out of one’s neighbor’s eye, one must first see and take out the speck from one’s own eye.  This is part of a process of dialogue which treats the participants as persons in their own right (Buber’s I-Thou relationship as opposed to dehumanizing I-it relationships often ubiquitous in societies imbued with materialism and capitalistic and militaristic goals).  From a Post-Kleinian perspective it means a retracting of pathological projective identifications from the object back into the self.  However, in order to accomplish this, an internal containment needs to be in place.  The resistance to this process is often held in place because the projective processes are warding off persecutory and depressive guilt/anxiety as well as psychotic anxiety involving fragmentation of the self.  I see this clearly in my daily work with individuals whose psychic life is dominated by omnipotent persecutory introjects which annihilate, and paradoxically give coherence to the self (similar to Fonagy’s point about the need for the borderline patient to have an object into which he/she can externalize the alien bad object in order to maintain self-coherence). 

Martti Siirala’s work on collective splitting processes underlying such diverse phenomena as severe mental illness, racism, genocide, drug addictions, etc, is relevant here.  In brief, our nation needs to be able to mourn its losses as well as to come to terms with its own history of destructive policies involving such countries as Central and South America, Vietnam, etc., our own history of racism and discrimination of non-white people, etc., before we can mend our own collective splitting processes.  Often attempts at violence and war are omnipotent compensatory solutions secondary to a deep sense of vulnerability and depressive anxiety and guilt, as well as an attempt to externalize bad parts of the collective self into a scapegoated people, perhaps as a means of shoring up fragmentation of a culture.  And as psychoanalysts have long pointed out, other-directed aggression can be at root, self-destructive, an attack on the self (in the other).

Brian Koehler PhD
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