ABSTRACT
At the heart of our problem is violence. The sort of violence that I shall consider here, however, has little to do with people hitting each other on the head with hammers and will not much be about what crazy mental patients are supposed to do. If one is to speak of violence in psychiatry, the violence that stares out screaming, proclaiming itself as such so loudly that it is rarely heard, is the subtle, tortuous violence that other people, the 'sane ones', perpetrate against the labelled madmen. In so far as psychiatry represents the interests or pretended interests of the sane ones, we may discover that, in fact, violence in psychiatry is pre-eminently the violence of psychiatry.
