MAY 2024
The Violence Committee 

Formed in 2018, the IPA Violence Committee is one of the IPA committees in the Community & World and a member of the steering committee chaired by Mira Erlich-Ginor. 

We were particularly pleased that the IPA saw the need for a committee dedicated to examining how psychoanalysis could contribute to addressing the global problem of violence. 

The mandate given to the Violence Committee thus facilitates a psychoanalytic examination of violence in its many manifestations, including everyday forms of violence in ourselves, extreme individual violence, small group violence such as gangs, large group violence, national and international violence, including genocides, as well as internet-driven violence. As such, the Violence Committee, therefore, addresses the most appalling aspects of human nature, including violence perpetrated that has historically provoked retributive or vengeful responses, with resulting cycles of violence.

Members: Carine Minne, Chair; Veronika Grüneisen, Timothy Keogh, Suzana Fortes, Maria Pia Conte. Consultant: Armien Abrahms. 
Photos from left to right. 




Our committee's approach has always been to provide a psychoanalytic understanding of the external world, not just the internal one.  Our first task was to develop a knowledge base of what was available in the psychoanalytic literature on the subject of violence. This data bank is being constantly expanded.

The activities of the Committee and its members have been extensive. Examples of our activities include our involvement in two IPA webinars (one on Lone Wolf Terrorists and one on Racism) and the preparation of a series of clinical webinars around the assessments and psychoanalytic treatments of extremely violent patients. This is with the hope of interesting more psychoanalysts to work with such patients.  These extreme cases are very useful to all clinicians as the findings from such cases can be extrapolated to more common cases in psychoanalytic practices.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we also held several meetings entitled Free Associations, which are currently being prepared as an article concerning the reflections of the Violence Committee during this global event and its ramifications.

We also intend to produce a series of publications addressing the issue of violence in our current world. These publications will examine topics ranging from human rights violations and atrocities across all continents, societies’ neglect of the mental health needs of infants, children, and adults, gun control laws, violence, sexualized violence, and other violence towards children, women, and men. This will encompass the worsening situation of internet violence and the availability of extreme pornography facilitated by people driven by obscene profit motives. It will also include racist-driven violence, a rise in countries using the death penalty, and a massively widening gap between the very few super-wealthy and the vast majority living in poverty, which we know is associated with increased violence. Our aim, therefore, is to include these in a book series described below.    
 
The Violence Committee is preparing a series of short books, referred to above, on different aspects of violence with a general readership in mind to make more available to the public (and hopefully policymakers) a psychoanalytic understanding of these very common but least favourable aspects of human nature. The hope is that our psychoanalytic understanding could gradually contribute to, for example, more civilized approaches to criminality and criminal justice systems. We all know that most prisons all over the world are filled with people traumatized in their babyhood or childhood, and yet, this is so often overlooked in how offenders are managed.

Given the alarming rise in international conflicts and violence worldwide, our committee is also working to strengthen links with other NGOs. In doing so our committee hopes to propagate Freud’s wisdom in his correspondence with Einstein in 1932:

All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote. These ties are of two kinds. First, such relations as those toward a beloved object, void though they be of sexual intent. …The other bond of sentiment is by way of identification. All that brings out the significant resemblances between men calls into play this feeling of community and identification, whereon is founded, in large measure, the whole edifice of human society (Why War? SE, 22: 197-215).

Therefore, a third aspect of our committee’s work has been linking our studies of violent phenomena to prevention, with a stress on the crucial first thousand days in everyone’s life and the importance of keeping up with neuroscientific research and findings. 

A further planned initiative is to develop a regular psychoanalytically underpinned ‘newsflash’ regarding any aspect of violence happening somewhere in the world or reflected through the arts. We hope this will function as a regular update from this committee and stimulate interest and dialogue. 

Our approach to our work retains a focus on examining ourselves and our own violence as a way to avoid the all-too-common psychic defences we are all capable of, splitting and projecting, using – ‘them’ versus ‘’us’ – locating all the badness conveniently in an ‘other’. As we know from centuries of history, this can lead all too swiftly to the dehumanizing of entire populations and eruptions of atrocities.

One of our privileges is working with the other committees in the Community & World, especially given the inevitability of overlap between these committees and where violence always has an obvious or hidden presence, no matter what area is being discussed. We have also developed close links with the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy (IAFP), a multi-disciplinary organization focussing on offenders and staff working with them in different settings. The Committee was therefore delighted that Harriet Wolfe, IPA President, gave the opening address to the IAFP 30th anniversary conference in London in May 2022. We strongly support the need for us to work alongside other relevant disciplines, enabling cross-enrichment. We hold a monthly clinical seminar (The Sohn Seminar, after the late Dr Leslie Sohn), where clinicians from different backgrounds present cases, followed by a psychoanalytic discussion and formulation.

Our committee is aware that addressing the problem of violence in all its awful manifestations is daunting and necessarily multidisciplinary. Nonetheless, we hope to make a difference, no matter how small or how slowly, by demonstrating the value of psychoanalytic ideas and concepts to this enterprise.

We therefore value this opportunity to inform our colleagues of the important work of our committee.


Some of our international presentations:

• London, UK, May 2022 
  IAFP 30th Anniversary Conference.
• Sydney, Australia, Nov 2022
  Timothy Keogh: Plenary speaker at Memorial Conference to Neville Symington (Author: Response Aroused by the Psychopath); Carine Minne also spoke.
• London, UK, Nov 2022
  Carine Minne: Plenary speaker at Restorative Justice for All, Conference on Violent Radicalisation. 
• Genoa, Italy, Dec 2022
  Maria Pia Conte: Organiser and speaker at Memorial Conference to Gian Luigi Rocco, Psychoanalyst and Forensic Psychiatrist. Massimo de Mari (Psychoanalysis and Law Committee) & Carine Minne both presented papers.
• Delhi, India, Jan 2023
  Timothy Keogh, Presenter representing the Violence Committee.
• EPF Cannes, France, March 2023
  Carine Minne, Veronika Grüneisen, Massimo de Mari (Italian PA Soc & Law & Psychoanalysis Com), Camilla Bargum (Finnish PA Soc). 
  Presentation of Violent Patients & Illusions, Through Delusions and then Disillusions.
• Salvador, Brazil, April 2023 
  Suzana Fortes: Presentation at 5th PA Portuguese Language Congress - Slavery & Freedom Crossings of Body & Soul.
  Violence, Education & Psychoanalysis Project started in 2007 and is continuously active.
• Cartagena, Colombia, July 2023
  Carine Minne: Under Fire in the Consulting Room.