Violence: Biological Need and Social Control

This paper discusses the possibility implicit in psychoanalytic theory that on an instinctual basis, destructive impulses may be irreducible in man's nature. Attempting to still and deny them, therefore, will only aggravate their ill effects. Once this is clearly recognized, they can be acknowledged instead and ways can be found to express them symbolically in socially useful institutions. Periodic attempts to abolish war have found remarkably little success. But workers for permanent peace trudge doggedly on, apparently unaware that there might be meaning other than ill will in the history of failures to establish peace. It is usually assumed that treaties, disarmament agreements, or, on a more sophisticated scale, restructuring of institutions like the economy and the military force, can somehow, by adequate effort and ingenious innovation, work. Little attention has been paid by peacemakers to the possibility that the nature of man includes destructiveness in a quintessential way such that the existence and dynamics of that destructiveness must be understood and faced on their own terms before overt expressions of violence can be ameliorated or brought to an end. It has oftener been the conservatives and the cynics who have accepted destructiveness as basic, and these people have not seen the possibility of making any constructive use of their insight. If there are destructive impulses in some irreducible way, in the human personailty, then war has always served as an effective outlet (morality and ethics aside) for them, for participants and onlookers alike. Most attention that intelligent people devote to worrying and wondering about war is directed to political and economic institutions enabling wars to be declared and fought. Expansionism and Lebensraumn, the seeming imperatives of dictatorship and economic gain, focus most analyses of war and wars. While their importance must never be minimized, it is time to emphasize investigations of social psychological meanings of war in order that we may eventually integrate them with economic and political considerations. This problem can be expanded to include questions about the nature of all violence, not just war itself. Why do people eagerly read of violence, watch it on television, gather in mobs to see or join it? And what do they feel ? Even intellectuals, who deplore the cheap sensationalism of the metropolitan press, follow border skirmishes, coups d'6tat, and political in-fighting with no less absorption than other people in their preoccupation with tabloid tales of arson, murder, and rape. The educated in our society denounce Westerns and detective: thrillers on television, not because of repetitive stories of killing, but for lack of subtlety in the telling of them. Shakespeare offers as much murder and intrigue as current channel fare. "Sophistication" lies in the use of language and articulation of psychological and social development and complexity, not in the presence or absence of destruction as a theme. There is clearly an attraction to violence, no matter what one's level of education or social class. Why? Is it avoidable? Can we come to terms with it? DESTRUCTIVENESS IN FREUD' S THEORY OF PERSONALITY The theory of human motivation proposed by Sigmund Freud offers the possibility of an explanation of destructiveness and, in a way, offers an outlook for its moderation. Psychoanalytic theory postulates that the energy of the mind is a biological endowment serving largely or partly the demands of innate drives. These forces which operate to This content downloaded from 157.55.39.136 on Thu, 01 Dec 2016 05:44:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms