ABSTRACT
Aggression is viewed differently within various fields of inquiry and epistemological frames of reference. Russell Geen (2001: 1) documents the difficulty of establishing a “unitary concept of aggression,” or of providing a single unequivocal definition. Freud (1920), for example, posited that, besides Eros, the instinctive drive toward survival, creativity, and the production of life, there exists an opposite drive toward death, destruction, and a return to the inorganic, Todestreib (later called Thanatos), which is partially behaviorally externalized as aggressiveness, often directed to others ( Freud 1930/1962: 310). Behaviorists and stimulus–response theorists tended to define aggression narrowly. For example, Arnold Buss (1961: 1) defined aggression as the “delivery of a noxious stimulus to another individual.” It gradually became apparent, however, that any adequate definition of aggressiveness should include the perpetrator’s intent to harm, as well as the victim’s attempt to avoid harm or humiliation (Geen 2001: 2–5). Geen helpfully adds two elements to the notion of aggression: (i) the aggressor delivers the noxious stimuli with the intention of harming the victim; and (ii) the aggressor expects that the noxious stimuli will have the intended effect. Thus, aggressiveness is more plausibly defined as behavior “intended to injure someone physically or psychologically” (Berkowitz 1993: 3, emphasis deleted), committed by one who believes that “the target is motivated to avoid the behavior” (Geen 2001: 2; C. Anderson and Bushman 2002: 27).
