The Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology has invited Dr. Peter Fonagy and Dr. Stuart Twemlow to share their expertise regarding this critical issue confronting our communities. The most fundamental assumption of psychoanalytic theory and practice is no longer a matter of scientific debate. Critics cannot continue to make pronouncements about the lack of scientific merit in psychoanalytic ideas without themselves offering scientific counter-evidence. Dr. Westen backs up such assertions with compelling empirical evidence. It is as if the possibility of these behaviors in themselves created such intense fear and helplessness that the mere act of thinking about them comes to be inconceivable.
Violence is impossible to contemplate precisely because it is ultimately an act of humanity.
We wish to avoid that which is potentially a part of all of us. We therefore, err on the side of over- elaboration, create mystiques, intrigues, or dramatize and glamorize the acts. This serves to detract attention from their ordinariness, and ultimately meaninglessness. Or, alternatively, we demonize the violence, creating monsters who depart from normality to such a degree that by definition, they must elude human comprehension. Both the glamorization and the denomination of violence serve to make the ordinary into the extraordinary - to make us feel distant from an experience that may not be far from any of us.