ABSTRACT
When Philip M. Bromberg coined the phrase "standing in the spaces", he fashioned a brilliant theoretic toggle. His word string demoted the minable, linear Freudian subject who had epitomized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and instead privileged the myriad internal characters that both cantilever and sabotage subjectivity. What gave Bromberg's assertions clinical power was that he managed to address the way that people dropped defensive anchor in a protean internal sea, even as they responded to shifting externalities that revealed their own fractionation. Michael Stone, analyzing the life histories of two hundred and seventy-eight murderers, found that seventy-five had been horribly abused in childhood. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study tells us that battered boys are especially at risk of committing crimes when they grow up, and that this effect is magnified by poverty. Dissociated violence is almost destined to be replayed in an endless, and thoughtless, loop.
