Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the psychoanalytic treatment of six patients who have committed acts of violence, four patients having been violent towards others and two having attempted suicide. It contains a review of the existing literature on aggression and violence from America, England and France and presents some of the main themes contained in this literature. Mental and physical processes tend to be confused so that violence becomes an attempt to obliterate intolerable psychic experience. Internal phantasies and external facts become confused with each other. The suicidal patient also sustains the conviction that a part of the self will survive, the ‘surviving self’, in Campbell’s term. Violence and suicide are to be understood as expressing difficulties in thinking capacity. Campbell stresses the need for the analyst to constantly monitor his countertransference.