ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show that the psychology of revenge has extensive applicability and those previous findings and conceptualizations in extreme cases resonate with the more general everyday victim-perpetrator relationships in the realm of violence. Memory, in state of the art psychology, is not simple storage; rather, it resembles a construction process, combining abstract entrammels with subjectively convincing mental images, resulting in what is experienced as a vivid recollection. A child with a psycho-biologically deregulating parent who initiates but poorly repairs shame-associated misattunement has these failures stored in his or her memory, largely outside conscious awareness, as a prototype for all future interactions. Later studies confirmed that early childhood trauma predicts disorganized attachment style, which in itself proved to be an important factor in all kinds of adolescent and adult psychopathology. The most characteristic feature of traumatization is the oscillation between psychic equivalence and pretend mode of experiencing the internal world.
