Sexuality may be the coin of the realm, but it is violence that organizes society (Girard, 1977). We may assume that the endlessly proliferating representations of violence in the arts and popular culture are fueled by the need to contain and transform the possibility of raw violence. But these symbolic renderings of violence – through metaphoric language, narrative portrayals, play, myth, legend, fiction, artistic depictions, dramatic re-enactment, ritual, and ceremonials – nevertheless do not succeed in cleansing or exorcising violence. On the contrary, the work of symbolic transformation is effective only to the degree that it brushes up against the real. When violence is in urgent need of containment, blood might have to be spilled, if not by one’s own hand then by proxy. Perhaps this is why, along with the strenuous cultural and ideological work of domesticating and controlling violence through language and symbolism, society always makes provisions for the practice of actual violence, subcontracted out to what Bion called “specialized work groups” (the army, the police, the prison system, contact sports, etc). Likewise, local subcultures provide more-or-less attenuated opportunities for actual violence (fight clubs, hazing, gang-banging), which is in myriad ways a feature of domestic and work settings as well.
The fact of violence is, therefore, never a settled matter; its subsists as an incipient destabilizing presence in social and psychic life, like an unthought known (though the unprotected in society are always more in touch with it). Social or political upheaval, indeed any disruption of the psycho-social status quo, will evoke the lure – and the terror – of unconstrained violence. This leads both to an increased symbolic frenzy – the need to revive and ramp-up icons and tropes of violence – and to a quest for the catharsis of actual violence. The visceral appeal of sectarian movements and political cults that glorify violence lies not just in their trumped-up differentiation of the sacred from the profane, but in their power to revivify an embodied sense of connection with the collective and the cosmic. Proximity to actual violence consecrates this experience, fulfilling a deep need for transindividual embodied connectivity. Turning now to the clinical situation, psychoanalysis early on had much to say about hate and aggression but little about violence which, after all, could not be
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observed and engaged in situ. Just as abstention from having sex is a precondition for therapeutic work, so is the prohibition on actual physical violence (Winnicott said that you cannot do analysis if the patient brings a gun). So violence would be dealt with entirely through its representations – its metaphorical and symbolic guises, the ways in which it is hidden, defended against, and felt in the transference. This prohibition on actual violence makes obvious sense: No possible meaning can be made in the midst of violence, and trauma and terror often lies in its wake. All the same, if a treatment is to be real rather than a sham, actual violence cannot be treated entirely in abstentia but must inevitably be lived in analysis. How might we understand vicissitudes of real violence in the clinical encounter?
Actually, violence is by no means absent from psychoanalytic models of the formation of psychical life. It is there in Freud’s conception of primal repression, in the oedipal threat of castration; in the superego’s actual violent impact on the ego, to the point of suicide; in Lacan’s elaboration of the “cut”, which forces an actual change in the psychic makeup of the human child, installing the Symbolic Order of the Law as basis of subjectivity. In other words, before one has a mind with which to symbolize violence, violence gives rise to the need for a mind. Klein’s recognition of splitting also suggests the centrality of actual psychical threat of violence (posed by the destructiveness of the death instinct). Bion’s took this further in his theorization of psychotic splintering of mental space/time, where “attacks on linking” are not symbolic representations of violence, but real psychical attacks, rendering the psyche changed and maimed.
It is in the context of the post WWII turn towards intersubjectivity that actual violence began to be understood in the therapeutic interaction, initially conceived of in terms of projective identification, whereby the analyst’s mind could be violently disrupted. It is notable that in Bion’s groundbreaking initial description of the importance of the analyst’s taking-in the patient’s projection (in On Arrogance, 1958), he also warned that the analyst’s insistence on making verbal-symbolic meaning can violently disrupt the patient, with potentially catastrophic effects. Winnicott (1963) similarly described the violent effects of being violated by psychoanalytic interpretations, which can only result in drastic dissociative withdrawal, if not fragmentation. What was coming into view, beyond just the unconscious destructiveness of the patient (or analyst), was the way violence actually affects psychical make-up all the time.
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More recently, psychoanalysis has turned its attention to the dissociative compartmentalizing of self-states that result from excessive individual trauma (cf. Bromberg), as exemplified in PTSD-like symptoms or a DID-like personality organization. Following Winnicott, I would suggest the importance of a more universal, everyday use of a psyche-soma dissociative mechanism, whereby individuals manage everyday experiences of impingement, encroachment, and overstimulation by titrating the degree of embodiment – by a sensitive and nuanced detachment from feeling too much (Goldberg, 2020). Unlike splitting and repression, which make use of phantasy systems and relational strategies, body-mind dissociation (or dis-location) makes use of hypnoid mechanisms (distraction, auto stimulation, auto-hypnosis) to manage external environmental threats and intense emotions by altering our states of consciousness and by regulating sensation and embodied perception. This very useful transient type of psyche-soma dissociation is capable, however, of mutating into a fixed structure of body-mind detachment, a rigid and unyielding institution in the personality, resulting in deadening alienation from body aliveness that is nevertheless sanitized and assimilated into a functional pseudo-sane false self, a facsimile of normality, thus rendering this dissociative regime silent and relatively invisible. This specifically dis-locating type of body-mind dissociation is, I think, the psychic mechanism most likely to be activated in response to social trauma – i.e. in response to impersonal threats of violent impingement (in contrast to the impact of up-close experiences of personal trauma). Social trauma, which includes the perceived fraying of social containment as well as perceived violations of human rights and threats of ecological catastrophe, activates this silent estrangement from one’s own embodiment and, along with this, loss of crucial access to what might be called the sensory commons – the communal domain of shared psycho-sensory states, lying beyond the constraints of the individual ego, where one learns ways of being in the world, including ways of coping with violence. This type of dissociative structure, that develops as an adaptation to impersonal threats of loss of an embodied human environment (very much reinforced, also, by disembodying forms of social media contact) leaves the individual internally displaced, prone to depersonalization, and in a kind of sensory isolation. Here one’s own body becomes a site of incipient violence, and hence the object of tenacious regimes of control.
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Psychic hunger for connection, the longing for a return to embodiment through collective experience, provides a powerful incentive for the resurrection of political ideologies that valorize and sanctify the use of violence, whether it be communal or state violence, or the targeting of vulnerable groups in society. By these means, personal isolation and dis-place-ment are assuaged, and a sense of being located restored to the individual body as well as to the body politic. This is a challenge for the culture of a liberal society: The ever-present reality of violence cannot be contained and transformed by symbolic or by rational means alone, but crucially requires venues for participation in shared experiences of sensation and embodiment. This is how we learn to live with our own violence and that of others, and it is also surely a vital component of what goes on in the therapeutic encounter.
References:
Bion, W. (1958) On arrogance. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39:144-
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Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore and London
Goldberg, P. (2020) Body-Mind Dissociation, Altered States, and Alter Worlds. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 68:769-806
Winnicott, D.W. (1963) Communicating and not communicating leading to a
study of certain opposites, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, Hogarth: 1965
