ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic thinking on aggression has been distracted by the controversy over the relative importance of innate destructiveness and environmental influences. The form of aggression which we are describing here can readily be differentiated, phenomenologically, from sadism, where a capacity to imagine the feelings of the other is probably essential to full enjoyment. Glasser has made a similar distinction, between what he calls self-preservative violence and sadism or malicious violence. In many cases of violence, there is aggression towards both other people and the self. Habitual violence towards either the self or another may reflect a failure to meet the fundamental need of every infant to find his mind, his intentional state, in the mind of the object. The search for alternative ways of mental containment may, we suggest, give rise to many pathological solutions, including taking the mind of the other, with its distorted, absent or malign picture of the child, as part of the child’s own sense of identity.
