Learning to love violence: Identification with the aggressor and the reproduction of violence in everyday life Anthony Collins UKZN / Rhodes University

Implicit understandings of violence What are our assumptions about violence, and what are the consequences of these ideas? Developed in forthcoming book “One bloody thing after another: understanding violence in South Africa. Common assumptions: Most violence is related to property crimes There is a relatively clear distinction between violent offenders and ordinary, decent, law-abiding citizens Most South Africans would prefer to live in a less violent society

Counter-argument Most South Africans support and are deeply invested in the use of violence for social negotiation and problem solving: Childrearing: corporal punishment (>90%) Sexual negotiation: social, psychological and physical coercion (60%) Intimate relationships: violence for managing jealously & frustration, establishing authority Law enforcement: death penalty (70-80%), harsher punishments, police brutality, vigilante violence Labour disputes and political contestation: violent protests, assassination of rivals Economic assertion: xenophobic and criminal violence Defending dignity, honour and self-worth

Why do South Africans endorse violence? Learned by observation, modeling and reward. Normalized Justified by dominant explanatory systems Absence of alternative frameworks for achieving those goals Absence of popular critiques of everyday violence But people really don’t like being victimized and living in fear! Being opposed to being victimized in not the same as being opposed to violence: indeed the primary justifications for violence are precisely to defend against various kinds of victimization.

Psychodynamic theories Idea that victims become perpetrators Unlike social learning model, psychodynamic theory explains this in terms of repression and return of the repressed. Traumatic experiences are forced out of conscious awareness because they are too painful. Even while outside consciousness they still exist and powerfully effect how people think and feel. This can lead people to re-enact their traumatic experiences, either in the role of victim or perpetrator (repetition compulsion, to work through or master the experience). Can also lead to destructive eruptions of panic or rage

Identification with the aggressor Why do people who have been victimized go on to think positively about people and processes that harmed them? Stockholm Syndrome: after release, hostages defend their captors Abused women often defend their abusers Abused children tend to idealize their abusive caregivers Psychodynamic formulation of Identification with the Aggressor misattributed to Anna Freud, actually developed by Sandor Ferenczi. He argued that it should be called “introjection of the aggressor”

Where a terrifying experience threatens to completely overwhelm the consciousness, it must be eliminated from consciousness. Done is by repressing awareness of experience of being an overwhelmed victim, and instead imagining oneself into the position of the threatening aggressor. Psychologically fleeing from the experience of the victim, and instead taking refuge in the perspective of the perpetrator. the emotional connection to the aggressor can thus be sustained: avoids feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, abandonment

Underlying feelings of fear and vulnerability are managed by identifying with powerful, controlling, invulnerable positions. Threats to the self (frustration, jealousy, humiliation, vulnerability, loss) dealt with by appealing to violence which re-asserts strength and control Repressed rage that could not be safely be expressed towards perpetrators in instead displaced onto external targets (other social groups: criminals, foreigners, other ethnicities, sexual orientations) Social leaders who advocate violence and embody forcefulness are idealized

Conclusion People want to avoid victimization, but hold on to violence. Violence provides a range of strategies for managing social interpersonal and psychological problems. These strategies are ineffective, as the place the users in danger They are undesirable because they increase the overall levels of violence in society. They are incompatible with democracy because they exclude negotiation towards collective social good.