Is Violence Ever Justified?

Some reflections on suffering and projective identification

"If you want people to behave thoughtfully to others, then you have to give them the experience of being thought about. Without this experience, enactment, becomes their only means of communication, where people are only taken seriously due to the apparent thoughtlessness, or violence of their actions, when in fact they are merely responding or indeed emulating a world that appears thoughtless and has been felt to act thoughtlessly upon them” - David Morgan

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"People are only as mad as the other people are deaf" - Adam Philips.

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You might have noticed that the distribution of wellbeing is uneven and as time goes by it inevitably concentrates in the hands of few lucky people. In the same way unhappiness - misery, frustration, anger - can concentrate in some less lucky people; we fail to see this systematic polarisation because we all assume good and bad are equally distributed among us, but that is just an abstract idea, far from the reality.

When I worked with violent patients (I don't anymore: ‘why work with feral cats when there are domestic ones needing help?’), it seemed clear, that for some, the pain and tedium of being a have-not, from successive generations of have-nots, meant that at some point their powder keg of loveless emptiness and have-not-ness would explode into a drive to evacuate their experience into someone else.

This was well illustrated in a paper by Murray Cox a consultant psychotherapist at Broadmoor Hospital in his paper ‘I Needed a Life So I Took One”: the title says it all. A profound failure to mourn, because there is nothing good enough to allow the process to begin, leads to an enactment where loss is transferred usually bodily into another. One thinks of the murder of Sarah Everard at this moment.

A well-publicised case at the time was an erstwhile patient who had been denied admission, despite his desperate search for help, by many hospitals. When at some point after all these negative responses to his need, he was refused a light for his cigarette by another man, who appeared to have everything that this seriously ill man lacked, he attacked and killed him.

Another well-known case at the time was a young boy abducted and murdered by two other young boys many miles away from any help that might have intervened. It was clear, as I had some therapeutic involvement with the workers involved with the killers, that they too were psychically dying a long way from any help that might at some point have intervened to prevent the underlying need to enact this horror - their internal horror - on the mind and body of another closely resembling themselves.

No analyst is going to condone violence, but as we can see from today's splendid papers sometimes we do have the means to understand it, which does not mean, (the great paradox of our profession and historians) that we can change it, giving the lie that if we do not understand the lessons of history we are doomed to repeat it: they are doomed to repeat it even if we do.

For instance, we can often see that violence could be, if not a justified action which I will suggest later has moral problems, it can be felt to be necessary, a reaction to unbearable internal conflict in our patients and/or various unbearable social and political climates in what is felt to be an impenetrable and implacable world.

Bion says these evacuations are primitive modes of communication on which ultimately verbal communication depends.

Also, I think we have all been, at times close to violence. It’s not ‘us’ and ‘them’, patients or activists: it's us. What stops us from acting it out, if we do?

Personal violence

My own experience of being close to murderousness was when, having bought a house from an acquaintance, I discovered that not only had he covered up 20,000 pounds of dry rot in the house but had bribed the surveyors to cover it up. I felt both humiliated by this betrayal and murderous. I wanted to get away from the feelings of confusion, vulnerability and pain this experience had caused myself and my family by getting it back into him, but however much I tried to imagine retribution, I could not think of any solutions to get some relief, not even legal ones, which at the time were expensive and useless. Eventually I had to process it and move on. I had just started analysis and you can imagine what a Kleinian analysis, with weeks of my fury about dry rot, might have been like: ’No, I don't think you or the setting is full of rot and nor do I feel betrayed by you, it’s my fucking house!’

Every act of violence can feel justified, as my unexpressed murderousness did, to the perpetrator. The issue, for me at the time, was to find ways of thinking about that violence so that enactment might become unnecessary, or if necessary as it must occasionally be at least at a social/political level, limited. I had inner help then, to my own radical wish for revenge but many do not: they feel disenfranchised and helpless and their miseries unheeded. [Case studies from the conference.]

One can experience a murderous rage to witness NHS staff blaming themselves for the failures of an underfunded and overstretched healthcare system which violently exploits them for the values that they hold dear. They are underpaid and undervalued in a world that appears to value commodities over people. This failure in our settings is beyond interpretation and requires addressing forcibly at a state or political level, I will go into this later.

Violence in the individual

So, I want to get rid of -and I won’t at the same time- what I can’t stand knowing about in myself, through externalisation of pain into the minds and bodies of others. As we have heard from previous papers the core complex is a theory often used at the Portman to explain the sudden rush of violence that some people feel in proximity - claustrophobic proximity - to the other, or as in agoraphobic aloneness, as an over proximity to oneself, in the absence of others.

I would add to this theory the idea of inflammatory projective identification. I hope to illustrate this as I always felt the core complex never explained what to do when, instead of avoidance, things move into the transference. Does the analyst have the equipment to process this any better than the patient does?

Case Alan

Alan was in the law industry who was struck off for making a murderous attack on his builder, he is like Teddy in the play, humiliation was at the core of this enactment. Briefly, he came from a fairly well-off family but they were abandoned by a father early on in his and his brother’s childhood. Alan put away childish things and became the man in the family, went into law like his father, the latter was more intent on pursuing his own pleasures rather than take care of the family. Alan was nevertheless successful and worked in his chosen profession often with violent people, an intelligent man, thoughtful and kind to his children, hard-working. He was making changes to the family home inherited from his mother, and naively gave a builder a large sum of money to buy some equipment, the builder absconded. He never saw him again.

One day ten years later due to the internet he discovered where the builder lived and went around to his house with a knife and stabbed him. It could easily have been fateful but wasn’t.

It’s interesting to note that on his way round he stopped to use the facilities at a McDonalds and was found by the manager, later, to be trying to mend a leaky toilet bowl. If the manager had been a therapist he might have recognised that the real leak was in this man's psyche looking for a repair of a rupture that threatened to spill out into his life.

Alan then went around to the builders and tried to kill him. This replayed at many levels aspects of Alan’s life. The builder was aggressive and Alan used the knife he had brought with him allegedly for defensive reasons in an act of violence missing his victims' jugular by centimetres.

There had been no previous history of violence, but this ended his career. He came to NHS therapy after prison.

It is always risky to assume you have the equipment to manage enactments with words, and it carries some level of omnipotence with violent patients that is unacknowledged.

One aspect of working with violent patients which may seem obvious to my sophisticated audience here, is that at some point the violent enactment or psychotic pocket will emerge in the transference. I was aware of this and as part of my work to defuse this time bomb, I explored his feelings of abandonment and my potential unscrupulousness, etc, however, as can happen it found another more startling inchoate way to emerge.

In a disturbing session, he told me that for the last six months that he thought I had been deliberately trying to drive him mad, by leaving an electric wire connected to a light on my desk, in a tangled-up state.

However, his need to explore in me his fundamental belief that this time I was like the builder who didn't do things properly was being explored. It is important at these concrete times I have found to invite an exploration of the patient’s reality, rather than defend one’s position too much.

I always remember a story about an old Jungian analyst who, on being threatened by an adolescent patient with a knife, retorted “do not put your dirty little penis into my clean white breast," on which his erstwhile assailant dropped the knife in astonishment.

With Alan, the frightening possibility of my being a cruel sadist doing things to him felt real enough. I said in response that this thought, that I was cruel, was a disturbing thought and it reminded him of other people in his life who did this sort of thing: the builder or his father, whose loose wiring and promiscuous behaviour let him down so much, and now he was concerned that I too might be like this, he felt this tangled feeling was now in me, as he now felt there was ample evidence I was neglectful of things that disturbed him. The difference being I was here and we could explore it.

I said if he had real concerns he could go to a higher authority such as the clinic director, so this was not quite the same, but yes, serious enough for us to think about. His mental toilet was leaking: was I able to manage it?

He in fact seemed helped by my willingness to accept his perception of me in this rather concrete moment. We finished the session agreeing to carry on the discussion in the next session assuring him that I would be there. He later called the clinic apologising for having accused me, he knew I was a good man and that he had become preoccupied with something which to him now felt mad.

Similar events occurred several times in his sessions, but this first was a turning point in his treatment.

Like many violent patients (and I will say later socio/political explosions), people who have been exposed to violence or who have perpetrated violence, there will always be a moment where you the therapist are put in the corner to see if you have any more equipment, to put into some words or thoughts, things that have usually for them been enacted. Silence in these situations is the real crime.

A woman who had been abused and would put herself into violent abusive situations on Camden Town path at night needed to be able to explore her view that all men were potentially abusive of women, I would explore her vision of me as yet another person who did not know the difference between abusing or seducing people and taking care of them. After many sessions, she brought a dream in which she found my pussy cat, chopped it into pieces and left it for me to find on the couch. This beginning of her need to explore her own aggression and anger towards vulnerable aspects of herself and me, was essential if she was going to be able to move out of abusive relationships.

Another patient became very frightened by his dependency on analysis, which he felt was a violent intrusion. He had dreams of being trapped in the Tube, or drowning at sea. He had previously been violent toward his wife, and in response to his growing self-awareness became preoccupied in his sessions with the idea that he would violently impregnate his wife against her will. A prophylactic interpretation was clearly required, that he was understandably anxious about his emerging vulnerable self in his analysis and his dependency on me, he was trying to take this outside the sessions and put them into his wife in the form of a baby, his nascent baby child self, which he feared I would force into him, rather than look after him. He then dreamed of being in a house with his wife that felt overrun with children and of being on a film set that was on fire but rescued by the Prince of Wales.

These situations, which I’m sure we are all familiar with, are controlled explosions looking for a place to occur, to be defused. They are dangerous moments, like the bomb disposal expert in Hurt Locker, where defusing with understanding unprocessed fear and misery, rather than enactment can take place.

As we know, in the setting of the analysis, although frightening, this can sometimes happen. But it puts great emphasis on the analyst’s ability to find the words that otherwise remain inchoate in the enactment, including living with what is projected. Fear itself is an important factor in the countertransference experience of the original terror.

Unfortunately like with Alan and his builder, this usually happens outside, triggered by a syntonic event, like in Leslie Sohn’s paper ‘If that black dog hadn't crossed the road I wouldn't have had to kill him’ e.g. his victim covers his territory.

We all remember the frightening stabbing and killing of Steve Zeto by a patient on Finsbury Tube. The patient, rejected for admission by 5 or 6 hospitals, sees his victim with a group of friends (and therefore ‘belongs’) and asks him for a light: on being rebuffed he pulls out a knife and stabs his poor victim.

The latter became a casualty of the failure of our overpressed and underfunded care services. We can try and help through consultations but sometimes have to admit they are corrupted, due to economic underfunding, that is, they as containers are not contained, by a careless society, this is socially created violence.

It was humiliating for him after so much rejection by someone who is clearly ‘at home’ and belongs. Something I am reminded of with the refugee.

Violence and humiliation

The victim/perpetrator dynamic leads as we know to a sadomasochistic quality, the victim growing up in an environment in which the currency of communication is the exchange of pain. It is possible that no other currency of communication can be imagined. Hence, the dynamic can be perpetuated down the generations.

This need to evacuate this into someone, as in Angela’s patients’ case, can be seen in action with someone powerless like children, who represent the most vulnerable parts of the patient. In my cases, they were adults unlikely to understand that an underlying misery was being projected into them in an inflammatory way.

One way of managing intense anxieties about the survival of one's self is to put these anxieties into the mind of another. With the violent suicidal act or violent assault, the other is left to process life and death anxiety.

Terrorism and political inflammatory projective identification

This schadenfreude, or relief from evacuating pain or fear or some other feeling - like impoverishment - into another: this happens at a politico/societal level as well. This question is often felt to be a living transgenerational history replayed in my patients, which I have had to explore when faced with the plight of Whistleblowers and Refugees, who I have now worked with extensively, the former in my consulting room, the latter in an institution. They were victims of an uncaring or corrupt society or institution. This work allowed me to witness how fundamentalist groups form and understand why.

The first words a refugee said to me once were "You're an analyst, Freud was Jewish, you must love the jews!" At the time I stuttered that indeed there might be Jewish people that I love, but that this seemed in their mind to obviate any love or appreciation of any other.

It is difficult not to be reminded of these experiences in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, by Jihadists - overshadowed at the moment by the pandemic. A loner can be preyed upon through the internet by manipulative religious fundamentalists, who hold a grievance - real or imagined, probably both - toward the West. Lone attackers are clearly manipulated and used to enact acts of terrorism for interested parties. These individuals are vulnerable men, often with some history of violence who are excited to overcome their internal disorders and discomforts, through externalisation into others.

They commit criminal acts, turning against the societies they live in to murder and maim their fellow countrymen or others abroad, moved to join what they see as a holy war predicated by highly subjective interpretations of ever malleable religious scriptures.

They are different to bombers of some organisations like IRA, motivated by political ideology and a wish to unite Ireland, although I would suggest that these IRA foot soldiers were again easy targets for leaders to use for terrorist ends, however, justified those ends and means were felt to be.

The religious fundamentalist offer pie in the sky rewards for acts of terrorist atrocities, providing imagined heroic activities as a distraction from otherwise sad or isolated lives.

As one young man I met in a migrant centre said, “Growing up as a po'boy in Staines, working at a telephone call centre? Or becoming a Jihadist with a gun, ‘a hero in my time’, defending my brothers? No contest!”

Closer to my own spiritual home the depressed and violent young Welsh firesetter that I saw at an NHS Clinic, affronted by my Welsh name and English accent, told me that the ‘Sons of Glendower', a nationalist group dedicated to burning down second homes in North Wales, were the vanguard of a Welsh resurgence to rid his land (and probably as he said mine) from the foreign invader.

He said his village had become a dormitory for holidaying wealthy people from Manchester, and London, who put little into the village and had caused the pub to go gastronomic depriving locals of their traditional watering place.

Every age has its hopes and fears, and one can find individuals who feel threatened by the present and shun the world for the eternal promise of being reunited with some ideal. They harbour grievances and a dream of a return to some prelapsarian state, mirroring the dream of a lost Eden, for example, the lost caliphate, that seems to motivate believers in the Middle East. We are actually in a period of profound economic crisis where the human industrial system could threaten to destroy all traces of tradition, certainty and belief.

You can’t defeat an ideology, when it feels based on a justified grievance that belief systems are under threat from the modern world and a wish to regress from the advances of modernity, which seems to lack all spiritual awareness except that of materialism. As I heard one religious fundamentalist say “One episode of the Kardashians and I want to get my gun".

These individuals also struggle against their own repressive internal regimes, which can only find relief through attacks on externalised representations.

In his paper ‘On the psychology of religious fundamentalism’, Lord John Alderdice states we are in a period of communal violence that can be likened to the most difficult stages of psychotic illness, when the only response is one of containment and trying to minimise the damage. I would add like with Alan we have to acknowledge the real or imagined damage we are felt to have done.

In his paper called Paris, Terrorism and Psychoanalysis, Mark Vernon wrote: “We are now the unwilling containers of these projectiles and we have to understand what we have been perceived to have done to deserve this” (2015, p. 2). What is our valency in this?

I think we have two conflicting regimes at war with each other: religious fundamentalism in the form of a particularly virulent form of Islam, which most Muslims do not of course adhere to. The other is an unfettered fundamentalism, a form of Neo-liberal secular market economics, that promulgates a vicious form of Social Darwinism. "We are all revolutionary in our shopping habits now," that most of us don't want to adhere to this idea - but unwittingly play a part in it - and until we realise the damage to climate change and the plight of refugees.

It is awful to admit that the horrific attack on the twin towers was also a mad assault on the symbol of this secular religion, of ‘a winner-takes-all culture, by a fundamentalist minority, who felt they had the right to enact murderous revenge for the perceived wrongdoings on the part of the West and specifically America, safe democratic communities were taken over with powerful feelings.

What is being evacuated and put into the body of the other are, as Alderdice explains, experiences that represent the deepest traumas and these traumas can be dealt with through concrete retaliatory primitive evacuation?

"As they pulled the trigger they looked into our eyes and said ‘look at me, look at me’" reported a victim at the Bata-clan Ballroom, Paris. The victim is forced to face the unthinkable, the unthinkable parts of the perpetrator, which the perpetrator themselves cannot face within themselves, forces his victims to bear fragmentation and fear.

The threat to faith and fundamentalist thinking that is threatened with disintegration in the face of the apparent unlimited freedoms of secularism, with its liberal attitudes and the dominance of materialism over spiritual and religious observation.

Moving from an eternal authority, Allah, God, Jehovah, to an internal conscience capable of self-regulation and morality is a road fraught with great difficulty. Religion and nationalism always provide succour to the hungry, nothing can really salve an empty stomach or deprivation like zealous hatred of an unbeliever or a flag to stand under or a gun to put one’s own fear sternly back into another, reversing feelings of diminishment and loss. For the beleaguered individual afraid of his internal world, having no equipment to manage insight, evacuating pain and horror of himself into the other will do the trick.

Alderdice agrees with the notion of trans-generational trauma going back many generations, particularly when that past is marked by hurt and abuse. The emotional impact, in these situations, of the past is felt as powerfully today in the present, especially when it has not been acknowledged or understood by anyone. Further, there are few past experiences that have more purchase on the present than those of humiliation. The desire for vengeance and the righting of wrongs can shape an entire life. They also have a particular power to generate violence because of the need to reverse the experience of humiliation that the aggressor is perceived to have inflicted.

The victim/perpetrator dynamic leads as we know to a sadomasochistic quality, the victim growing up in an environment in which the currency of communication is the exchange of pain. It is possible that no other currency of communication can be imagined. Hence, the dynamic can be perpetuated down the generations.

There is a socio-economic aspect as well, people who enact these attacks, the lone wolves, are often people at the lower end of the economic spiral, they feel resentful about their position and take refuge in a fundamentalist attitude be it Islam, Christianity, nationalism and then feel justified in taking or negating the lives of others.

The tragic victims of terrorism are not the real targets, the victims are a way of getting at an authority, usually a government.

An ex-terrorist I saw said "Joining a terrorist organisation was consciously seen both as a way of protecting their community and satisfying the wish for revenge for the death or injury or marginalisation of their loved ones"

Alderdice prefers the word ‘primitive’ to fundamentalism, he says "like that of a child who refuses to be comforted and screams out of sheer rage”. More complicated still, the child may grow to enjoy its rage because it delivers a secondary gain: being able to control or even kill in fantasy the parent." In this way, he suggests the terrorist derives a secondary gain where they can overcome feelings of impotence by being able to reverse these feelings through violent acts, what I’m calling inflammatory projective identification, that commands a great deal of attention. It reminds me of the arsonist who with a very small match can create such mayhem.

Alderdice "that whilst there may be the need at times to contain the terrorism with violence, violence that is presented as punishment or vengeance will not work. This is because of the need in terrorism to avenge perceived humiliations. So, such actions by a strong government feed the rage of the self-perceived weak, and further, makes the actions of the weak seem all the more honourable in the minds of those who share the humiliation."

He says optimistically that a "stage will arrive when it is possible to think more clearly and act constructively, and then everything must be on the table; be capable of being talked about. There mustn’t be any no-go areas. This radical honesty and openness lay behind the successes of the truth and reconciliation activities in South Africa Northern Island and is lacking - he says - in the Middle East. Although I would argue this is more complex as I think our involvement in economic expansionism and exploitation of raw materials - specifically oil - in the Middle East has been utterly thoughtless and mendacious. An acknowledgement of these tangled wires would help.

Unfortunately, we have not learnt experiences from Alderdice and the Northern Ireland conflict. Instead of listening to the grievances arising from the Middle East, we in the West continue to employ professional soldiers to perform what might seem acts of state-sanctioned terrorism in the name of foreign policy such as the invasion of Iraq, still a highly peculiar response to the 9/11 attacks.

Aren’t those attracted to the armed forces also laying down their lives to enforce dubious policies of their countries (see US involvement in Vietnam, Soviet involvement in Afghanistan)? These young men, volunteering to put themselves in a firing line, are also the victims of manipulation of distant senior political figures, driven more by economics than humanitarian concerns.

Are they that different to the religiously motivated zealots of fundamentalist Islam? How many of us for instance would think it was worthwhile for anyone's sons or daughters to die in the service of keeping the Falklands Islands British, or during the invasion of Iraq, whether this action is seen as an atrocity or ‘liberation’.

The greatest acts of violence in the last century have in fact been perpetrated by western colonialism and economic expansionism, we are now arguably reaping the backlash of those policies. As Noam Chomsky states in ‘How to Create a Terrorist’ (YouTube, 2017), if you want to create a terrorist with legitimate grievances, look no further than the US and UK foreign policy, they have been long time supporters of brutal dictators in the Arab world and still are.

We in the West have a long ignoble history of actually supporting extreme radical jihadist Islamist states, as a barrier to foil Arab secular nationalism, which is what has been really feared. When these West sanctioned dictatorships fall, due to western invasion as in Iraq or the hopeful Arab Spring, there is nothing substantial to take their place, as social democracy in these countries has not been encouraged by western foreign policy. When these regimes inevitably fall there is no opposition to take their place except the fundamentalists with their return to ancient regimes and religious sharia law. It was the same in Chile, with the repression and overthrow of the legitimate Allende government and the support of the brutal dictator Pinochet, and in many other theatres of foreign policy like South Africa where local interests were repressed for the long term economic or strategic interests of the West.

There were similar actions by US and UK governments in South Africa, in support of the Apartheid government against the ANC, the same in Pakistan where the most fundamentalist regime was supported and the most relevant in the current jihadist problem the shameful support of a truly hideous regime in Saudi Arabia, that is known to finance virulent Islamic fundamentalism.

If you want to create a terrorist ignore the effects of these policies on indigenous peoples and you create a legitimate grievance that can lead to acts of violence on western targets, effectively reversing the sense of helplessness, by evacuating it back into the perceived aggressor.

Nelson Mandela was deemed a terrorist, not a rebel with great cause, he remained on the US terrorism list most of his life. Reagan and Thatcher both viewed Mandela as a threat. Indeed, he was at first involved in necessary violent guerrilla actions against the apartheid state.

We accept that no one has the right to take another's life, however, justified their grievances, however, it is true that some people can feel that their own identity, country, belief system, is so under threat that the annihilation of the other, to preserve their own belief systems is sometimes justified.

To alleviate the seduction of these fundamentalist states of mind is to alleviate the misery, the tangled wires, that leads people to hold them, poverty and ignorance, to encourage an evolution to more symbolic forms, as a way out of dogma, but this can only occur in situations that are conducive to thought, or as we might see it toward a capacity to bear uncertainty, improvisation and flexibility.

So to create a violent attack firstly ignore the underlying factors, poverty inequality and western exploitation, the severe effects of climate change, global warming, arguably caused by unscrupulous western economic policies.

We have had other examples of this from other young men, who are not from an Islamic background, doing similar randomised acts, in America, in the form of James Jackson against black people, Dylan Roof on Afro-American Christians, Ali Sonboly on gay people, and in this country Thomas Mair on an MP. I think these people are basically looking to evacuate parts of themselves that they find disturbing, the causes that they become wedded to, or are encouraged by, provides them with the vehicle that they need to turn murderous thought into action.

In a world where there are disadvantages, neglect and unfairness, there will always be collective and individual activity to reverse the inferior position, by finding other bodies and minds to carry it.

Is violence ever justified?

This brings me to the question: is violence, that is political violence as opposed to pathological violence, ever justified?

Like the patients I mentioned previously, who are driven to act violently on and into a thoughtless world, many live in the impoverished, oppressed corners of our world and country, are also as unlikely to find minds who want to convert their feelings into thoughts or actions that provide relief, through understanding their misery and alleviating it, often they are faced with even more neglect. Nothing relieves inner suffering like becoming identified with a cause or flag or religion that can be used to reverse it. Sometimes this violence will be felt to be utterly justified.

The real violence here could be said to be the original sin of economic expansionism. As Marx outlines, the underfunded care home the treatment of nurses - and more generally the poor in our society - are all examples that stem from the phase of primitive accumulation: capitalists - or as we see now, those driven by monetarist policies - destroy the remnants of earlier production, by forcing ordinary working people to operate within a market economy; quantity takes over from quality. This exploitation of the poor by the neoliberal economy is one huge factor in social and state violence, which leads to wars and militarism, with again ordinary people as its victims; this is also reinforced by the state, with police and the army. This system still leads to the suffering of millions and destroys the mental health of many of our patients.

Coline’s paper looks at the atrocities of the Nazis in particular towards the Jews, and the collective guilt and racial hatred, arising from these post genocidal impulses, lying dormant or repressed, and then once again rearing its head when large groups become anxious about identity and survival, turning to right-wing fascist alternatives to democracy.

For instance, Renee Danziger’s her new book Radical Revenge beautifully illustrates how the repressed guilt of slavery leads to the demonisation of immigrants by the right-wing, most recently Trump. This again is an aspect of inflammatory projective identification using fundamentalist states of mind to evacuate painful self-awareness, guilt, shame etc into more vulnerable or dispossessed people.

Some violence in the past has been used for revolutionary purposes, think of Che and Fidel in Cuba, Mandela in South Africa with the noble revolutionary aim, that of reducing the destructiveness of an uncaring state, that is, Batista and Apartheid, ideally paving the way for a more democratic egalitarian peaceful society.

Violence here is therefore seen as belonging to the sphere of economics: attacking sanctioned state violence and oppression resonates with Fanon’s ideas of the cleansing nature of violent revolt against colonial aggression.

Even Psychoanalysts in these situations do have to question their neutrality at critical times.

We are not immune to the pressures of history, In Argentina psychoanalysis has had to be a politically engaged practice, even a dangerous one. During the 1970s and 1980s, military dictatorship psychoanalysts became one of the main targets of state terror and persecution. The dictator believed that psychoanalysis would destroy the Christian concepts of the family. A great number of students of psychoanalysis disappeared, tortured and kidnapped or assassinated. After Trump was elected many analysts who expressed their disquiet were severely censured by their institutes in the name of maintaining scientific neutrality and not upsetting their analysands who might find out their analysts did not share their political views. But it raises the violence of neutrality and the limits of it and of non-political psychoanalysis.

So, at times there might be some moral justification for violence or at least in its less aggressive form: social disobedience. Even analysts might have to violate their principles, lest they collude with cruel regimes by their silence, when all else fails, action is required, even at times what might appear to be violence?

Think of the Jewish ghetto, Algeria, Mandela, as a way of reversing the humiliation of apartheid, Palestine? Which can hardly be mentioned without reprisal.

I would add the miners' strike, earlier the Levellers, the Peasants revolt, were all aimed at reversing, sometimes with violence, a cruel status quo that otherwise remained and remains impermeable. That is, class struggle, apartheid, the attack and destruction of native peoples in American, aborigines in Australia, who go passively into extinction.

So it’s not too difficult to imagine scenarios and contexts in which one could come up with pretty good arguments as to why violence might be justified or necessary. However, if you’re thinking about political violence as an institutionalised practice, then this becomes harder.

So, I ask the question: does political violence ever achieve long term goals or does it simply perpetuate violence? For example, in the second world war, that the Allies justified the use of violence stand against nazism is surely unarguable.

When the state is violent, is violence justifiable? I think I agree with Zizek, that violence exercised by a state towards its citizens of an extent and degree that threatens human existence, means that a violent response in this case is an important necessity as opposed to justifiable, or is this just semantic nuance?

In her Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir - and in a similar way Jean-Paul Sartre in his Dirty Hands - wrote extensively about the idea that the means of violence may defeat the ends for which the violence is being practised, and the question is: is there any way out of that paradox?

What happens when we tolerate the intolerant? And when we spare the life of a killer? Do we become their enablers? Isn’t precisely this mechanism what gives psychopaths green light? Horror might be the key: it is usually experienced facing the presence of another species that threatens ours, but we as a species got to a point where we do experience horror among humans: when some of us prey upon other humans. In so doing they place themselves out of the human realm and other humans would be justified in behaving accordingly: fight or flight. But then again this discourse can be misinterpreted and misused as it is too close to racial discrimination, as there are endless pretexts other than religion or ethnicity to justify the segregation, deportation and extermination of a group of people who can be experienced as a serious threat to the humankind.

Philosopher Günther Anders, trained in the phenomenology tradition, had been a pacifist and champion of nonviolent struggle when one day he wrote an article on Tageszeitung called ‘Is nonviolent protest enough?’ where to everyone’s shock for the first time he encouraged violent actions as warnings against the accumulation of weapons for mass destruction. It was 1987 and Anders was thinking of Ronald Reagan: “We have to threaten those who threaten us” he wrote. This new stance was so radical that he considered those like Reagan as preys, whom anyone could kill. But then he went on to say: “I will never forgive those who forced me to break the ‘do not kill’ taboo”. To which anti-American anti-capitalist terrorist Horst Mahler replied - in the same newspaper: “Is your courage to kill really so great? Where are you looking for Reagan, at the White House? Why not within yourself?” Meaning, Reagan and his sort were there because we had elected them, we had supported them; even Hitler was given the power he had. All are responsible and no one is.

Anders’ article was an incitement to terrorism against the real terrorists who not only escalate their arsenals, but also build nuclear power plants - it was the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, 1986.

Understandably Anders was accused of exaggerating. Unlike his teachers (at the most Husserl would suspend judgement) Anders would intentionally exaggerate and deform in order to make invisible monsters visible: in that instance, it was the threat of annihilation of our civilisation.

I don’t think there is some easy sort of option here that you can somehow end up not corrupted when you are engaged in political violence. Until today, have we witnessed any example of political violence that did not in some sense corrupt its users? The second world war and apartheid in South Africa do stand out. Yes, violence in South Africa did contribute to regime change and the fall of apartheid!

Another argument is that some violence is more rational or ethically justifiable than others, such as surgical strikes, or limited warfare, the use of things like drones, [Mary Beard] has become very common. The remote drone operator carrying out clean surgical hits allegedly in our name. The pleasure of an Isis general being blown to pieces.

Is assassination a more justifiable form of political violence than war, or other sorts of collective practices of violence, which inevitably take many innocent victims with it?

Another confession, I fantasised of someone doing this to Trump or Thatcher at the height of his madness or Thatcher as she unfolded her neoliberal programme with all its inherent cruelty with which we arguably still suffer from today. The idea that you can have a nice clean strike, like with my house seller and his dry rot, that will somehow sort things out without any kind of repercussions is highly problematic.

Philosophers have argued that the types of violence that are essentially rational, ethical and justifiable are the types of violence directed at those people who have effectively forfeited by their actions their rights to self-defence. Justifiable political violence is the situation of the innocent person who is defending themselves or the policeman who is defending the innocent person against an aggressive attacker. The aggressive attacker here has forfeited their rights and therefore it’s okay to attack them to kill them or to hurt them?

I don’t have a problem with this unless, of course, I think of Bin Laden, who thought that a strike on the twin towers was justified due to Western insurgence into Arab lands. In retaliation, the USA thought that killing Bin Laden strategically, rather than bringing him to trial, was justified. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn, who was the one lone voice, suggested we brought him to trial, lest we became as barbaric as those we seek revenge on.

The ethics of selective assassination as a tactic in warfare has not really been given much of consideration until the invention of drones, and with it appears the acceptance, increasingly that you can execute people before you have tried them.

This has become a much more live question within an ethical and moral debate. It is the case of whistleblower Julian Assange: look what violence has been done to him, he is now a non-person, almost disappeared, although some defenders of whistleblowing, I’m glad to say, are trying to keep his case alive.

So, in conclusion, can any form of violence be justified? Violence as I said at the beginning, is the imposition of will by one person or group of persons on another person or group of persons, backed up by physical force. It is a threat to what Hobbes describes as security and commodious living. Freedom is a form of human flourishing that we can only develop or aspire to acquire in relationships with other people.

Violence destroys, undermines the kind of person I want to be as a self-directing person, but it also undermines and destroys the relationships to others that I need in order to develop as a free person. Violence is destructive of the great fabric of human association that I need in order to develop as a free person.

Civil disobedience as opposed to violence is very important, if the state doesn’t fulfil its promise to enable and enhance the liberty of its citizens and what happens if it actually violently undermines any possibility for individuals to develop as free persons?

When the state is violent, is violence justifiable? I think I agree with Zizek, that violence exercised by a state towards its citizens of an extent and degree that threatens human existence, means that a violent response in this case is an important necessity as opposed to justifiable, or is this just semantic nuance?

I don't think so, it makes a huge difference how we then deal with violence, the vocabularies we use if recognising the necessity of violence, are ones of regret, forgiveness, atonement, it does makes a difference, whether we look at our own acts of violence from the point of view of the need to atone, to look for forgiveness, to be regretful for having to do bad things.

A specific act may clearly seem to be justifiable or necessary in a particular context, but it’s the way that war, as an institution, is embedded in the global political economy, in the way that states work that permeates the world that we live in, in lots of ways.

Can there ever be just wars? The answer to that question in a democratic society is almost always going to be “no” because the test of “Is it a last resort” which is one of the tests for a just war, is never going to be reached because there is always in a democratic society, an alternative way of reaching your goal, which is to pursue things through the normal political process. Is this true?

For example, the Taliban was supposed to be crushed by the invasion of Afghanistan; a very similar kind of organisation to ISIS or ISIL. In the end, as John Alderdice has said, they have to be talked to, because they are actually flourishing fourteen years later.

Resistance and occasional political violence toward the sort of governments that are oppressive of civil liberties, violence can be necessary when there are situations in which there is no other way out. It makes it a last resort, although what looks like a last resort often isn’t the last resort and I think we shouldn’t also underestimate the pleasure and excitement that people feel when they’re engaged in violent activity. But when you have to fight, does the way in which you fight need to include pleasure? Is pleasure in violence a sign that the latter is unjustified?

Thing is, no one would ever engage in something that serves the purpose of one’s species' survival unless one found some pleasure in it. But does this concept imply while making the revolution enjoying the violence in the process is okay? Is there really such a convenient separation between a revolution (or rebellion or civil war) and everyday life violence? If so, one has to use a different register for judgement.

When we avoid doing the dirty job to save face, and in doing so we delegate it to someone else who will lose face on behalf of everybody else, we could read it in Jungian terms as the projection of one’s shadow resulting in a kind of scapegoating that occurs when people have failed to integrate all of the various components of their psyche.

Is political violence ever morally justified?

No one should make violence legitimate but the violence of the state sometimes needs to be challenged. But it is really difficult to justify violent actions to others who are affected by them. I couldn’t think of any instance where I could convincingly say to somebody else “Well I really had to act violently towards you for your own good!”

The most pressing question is how do we prevent a repeat of the most violent conflict that humanity has ever seen, the second world war, with the demise of the EU, how we can try to ensure that we don’t get catapulted back to a situation of the 1930s where there were individual states in Europe pitted against each other.

When I was listening to Colene I thought world war two was of course built on world war one: there’s a history here, world war two didn’t come out of nothing.

Could you persuade someone that you were about to inflict violence on, that it had to happen? If you can get a debate between sufficient parties then I think you can start to at least unpack these assumptions and these everyday common-sense ideas, so that turning to violence to resolve problems is obviated.

I’m not saying it’s any kind of easy solution, but I think it is quite interesting to think about dialogue and interaction, as with Alan, as a way of countering the prevalence of turning to violence as a resource, as not being essentially or intrinsically violent, so I think if we want to think about politics in any productive way, we have to assume that there is some form of politics that is not essentially violent. I think psychoanalysis has a part to play.

In The Rebel (1951), Albert Camus provides a substantial ethics: “murder is the limit of rebellion and cannot be justified. If a single master should, in fact, be killed, the rebel, in a certain way, is no longer justified. To murder anyone, even the source of injustice, is unjustifiable. It denies all egalitarian maxims by denying the victim the chance to meet rebellion’s demand.” He doesn’t say this but it occurs to me that the means are the ends, because there are no ends. History will never ‘end’. There will be no classless society or reign of the Just. It will just carry on in the same kind of way. Meanwhile, all we have is the means. The means is how we will be judged.

Think of Syria today in support of the revolution, including summary executions, torture of captives and abduction of civilians to facilitate prisoner exchanges. As such, no unnecessary brutality and no attacks on civilians can be justified. If they are indeed committing these acts, they are negating their own axiom―not simply because they are murdering, but because they are ignoring the limits of their logic and letting it slip into incoherence. They are denying their own legitimacy and losing the possibility of universality.

Core Issue

As Alderdice and my patient Alan demonstrate there are few past experiences that have more purchase on the present than those of humiliation. The desire for vengeance and the righting of wrongs can shape an entire life. They also have a particular power to generate violence because of the need to see an aggressor experience the humiliation that the aggressor is perceived to have inflicted.

Like with Alan at the beginning, the impact of the past is enormous, unexploded bombs emerge, especially those bombs of disrespect and humiliation, which may indeed be in the past but, as Colleen's paper shows, time does not heal.

The point here is that terrorism can feed on identifications with past or historic victims, and/or inner conflicts that the individual carries from the past. These feed a justification of righteous violence. “The sense that the very existence of a community and all that it holds dear has been threatened provokes deep fears and creates a capacity for responses at least as violent as those which it has experienced.”

This radical honesty about the past and misery, and honest openness lay behind the successes of the truth and reconciliation activities in South Africa. Arguably?

The need for certainty is clearly pathological, based on severe trauma, seeking certainty through making the other the enemy, a form of inflammatory projective identification where the threat of personal disintegration is externalised bodily onto the other who then has to experience disintegration and pain and life and death anxiety, particularly if they are perceived as the cause of it, which indeed they might be.

All fundamentalist thinking is dualistic and literalistic; fundamentalists believe in rebirth, have a deep sense of paranoia, have past/present trauma in their lives and are apocalyptic. The dark side: they are vulnerable to conspiracy theory, feel that violence in the name of God or Mammon is justified and are hard to reach outside of the full agreement.

The root causes are trauma, humiliation, anxiety about the world falling apart, vulnerability to the grandiose notion that one knows the truth, yearning for complete answers.

The classic problem remains with us today, does violence work as a necessary if not justified way of resisting abusive state and power?

Do poor oppressed minorities have a right to arm themselves in the name of defence? Indeed, mental illness is sometimes a symptom of denial of these powerful feelings of anger repressed and turned against the self. Think of the victims of Grenfell, they have disappeared.

In contrast, the general strike which was a social disobedience in 1926 led to the wealth gap between have-nots and have-mores being reduced, the anti-fascist movements stood against the Mosleyites and black shirts in Brick Lane, the Spanish civil war.

There is an individual and a communal aspect to the possibility of a violent challenge of a status quo. Violence can be cathartic insofar as it allows victims to restore their sense of self, it is cathartic and allows an individual to reclaim their humanity. This is what motivates individuals; then their single experiences resonate into one and the same sense of social injustice, and that is when the rule (nonviolence) turns out to be not only intrapsychically, but also morally intolerable. An Aristotelian concept called epikeia, that has already been there for centuries in both philosophy and law: it is the principle in ethics that a law can be broken to achieve a greater good.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes: “the native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner…for if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone” (1963, p. 45).

The impossibility of dialogue with a fundamentalist mindset like that session with Alan, means that fundamentalists select facts from their belief system which they radicalise, all we can possibly do is address the miseries underneath that ideological tradition, especially our depredations, loose wiring.

In Allan, it was his humiliation at the hands of his father, with Alderdice the Irish experience of many years of British colonisation, the Middle East partition, invasion, economic exploitation and disrespect for their culture.

To finish, perhaps the greatest violence in the world at the moment is to my mind neoliberal economics, again itself a symptom of trauma, from anxiety that arose in the wake of the second world war, leading to a belief that government intervention trampled personal freedom, not surprising in the wake of nazism, fascism and the Sovietism.

But the response to these atrocities has not unsurprisingly led to a different sort of violence, e.g. violence could be curbed by advancing the merits of individualism. Ironically, fiscal austerity and free trade are now augmented by direct use of physical force where the invisible hand of the global free market is increasingly clenched into the invisible fist of military US military intervention. seeking a global domain, supports universal assumptions and suppresses heterogeneity as individuals are remade according to the normative image of neoliberal proper personhood, e.g. consumers of commodities. Just as colonialism paved a way for horror with ostensibly good intentions the current economic ideal of a harmonious global village is doing the same.

We need to share our understanding of the cruelty and violence that this economic market logic engenders; over time we must refuse to sit idle before evictors speculating on land, protest vigorously against exclusion from democratic process, strike against exploitative employers for fair wages, save our planet and resist being framed as violent savages incapable of agency. As Patti Smith sings ‘people have the power’.

I would like to finish with a poem by my friend, Congolese poet JJ Bola. He writes about state terrorism and the inhumanity of the effects of war on those that one knows or loves. This poem is set in Congo, but speaks to a suffering that is often unspoken and unknown and can lead to powerful pockets of resentment and rage over perceived aggression and loss. This is happening in many scenarios and they represent time bombs of cruelty that can explode in some form, like Allan, if not addressed, at some time in the future.

For instance, we create refugees with our economics and then blame them for wanting a better life.

Tell them (they have names)

and when they turn the bodies over

To count the number of closed eyes. And they tell you 800’000: you say no. that was my uncle. He wore bright coloured shirts and pointy shoes.

2 million: you say no. that was my aunty.

her laughter could sweep you up like

The wind to leaves on the ground.

6 million: you say no. that was my mother.

her arms. the only place i have ever

Not known fear.

3 million: you say no. that was my love.

We used to dance. Oh, how we used to dance.

Or 147: you say no. that was our hope. Our future. The brains of the family.

And when they tell you that you come from war: you say no. I come from hands held in prayer before we eat together.

When they tell you that you come from conflict: you say no. I come from sweat. On skin. glistening. From shining sun.

When they tell you that you come from genocide: you say no. i come from the first smile of a new born child. tiny hands.

When they tell you that you come from rape: you say no. and you tell them about every time you have ever loved.

Tell them that you are from mother carrying you on her back. until you could walk. until you could run. until you could fly.

Tell them that you are from father holding you up to the night sky. full of stars. and saying look, child.

this is what you are made of. From long summers. full moons. flowing rivers. sand dunes.

you tell them that you are an ocean that no cup could ever hold.

JJ Bola | poet

Maybe if we can put into words the inchoate suffering that often remains unnoticed in pockets of the world and ourselves that are unsung, like the poet, both to individuals who perpetrate the attacks like Allan, but also whole cultures that feel aggrieved by the perception that their experience and belief systems are marginalised, we might yet save ourselves from the ever-present threat of war and the evacuation into others that unexpressed grief and grievance perpetually offers. This includes our realising that our own belief systems are also the result of our own traumatic history.

References

Alderdice, J. L. (January 08, 2010). On the Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism. 305-317.

Beauvoir, S. . (1948). The ethics of ambiguity. New York, N.Y: Philosophical Library.

Camus, A. (1956). The rebel: An essay on man in revolt. New York: Knopf.

Danziger, R. (2021). Radical revenge: Shame, blame and the urge for retaliation.

Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.

Vernon, M. (2015, November 17). Paris, terrorism, and psychoanalysis. https://www.markvernon.com/paris-terrorism-and-psychoanalysis .