ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the arguments that have been put forward to explain the origin of violent behaviour and the factors that influence how the individual deals with them. It considers that there is a crucial line to be drawn between “violence” as an act where pain, damage, suffering, or even death is inflicted on another person and “violence” as a thought, a wish, an urge, and yet no more than a fantasy. The literature on violence is simply vast. Long before psychoanalysts began to offer hypotheses to explain it, philosophers, sociologists, religious thinkers—ever so many people have offered ideas to make sense of this particularly disturbing type of behaviour. Psychoanalytic literature has repeatedly debated whether “violence” results from the operation of instinctual forces or whether it is due to the child’s experiences with his or her environment.
