Can psychoanalysis explain why people can be so cruel? Klein and Mitchell
This post a little different. Not the experience and treatment of psychic trauma, but psychoanalytic accounts of why people seem so eager to hurt each other is its focus. If most studies of psychic trauma are concerned with the experience of being traumatized, this account is about why people traumatize others. Aimed at people with a little knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, its main point is available to anyone. That’s why I post it here. You can read my view on Mitchell’s contribution to trauma theory in another post on this blog.
When I look around the modern world, I see progress, such as the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the peaceful end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But for me, at least, it is the genocides that stand out: The Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Rwandan genocide, and the genocide in Darfur. The list is incomplete, and not up to date, but the point is simple: people seem to be driven to hurt and kill each other. Is there any hope that psychoanalysis could help us understand why people do such horrible things to each other? (https://genocideeducation.org/resources/modern-era-genocides/)
Melanie Klein
The only psychoanalytic theory that might possibly make sense of all this is the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein. But here’s the problem: while Klein helps us understand the terrible things people do to each other, hers is not really a very good way to help people in psychological pain. I would hate to be treated by a traditional Kleinian analyst, of whom few remain. Nonetheless, traditional Kleinian theory makes the best sense of the larger world. Do we need two theories, one to explain the world, another to help people who suffer psychic pain? Maybe.
