ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to distinguish aggression, which can assume the form of hate and violence, from destructiveness. It explores the difference between aggressive violence and destructiveness. Aggression can be thought of as a force that carries out a defensive function and that dies away once its aim has been achieved. Dehumanisation, the fascination of the negative, the pleasure in blood and death, and the ecstasy of destruction—all these elements were taking him over and beginning to form part of a new and dangerous personality. The risk in Alfredo's case was that he himself might fall victim to his mad part, from which the fascination with murder and the pleasure of destructiveness stemmed, so that he was liable to attack and harm himself. The chapter describes how pleasure is reached in a perverse mental state, in which it is evident that destructiveness encourages mental excitation that makes evil seem pleasurable and irresistible.
