Dialogues on Aggression with Charles Strozier
Heinz Kohut’s Theory of Rage, Aggression, and Violence
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Friday, October 29, 2021
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The webinar will be 2 hours long.
My presentation will discuss Heinz Kohut’s ideas about aggression and rage and their meaning for a general theory of violence. Kohut’s work left some fascinating, even ground-breaking, ideas about rage and aggression, but they remain scattered and incomplete. He was in a rush during his last decade of intense creativity, which was also a time when he struggled with lymphoma and other serious illnesses. He never had the chance to formulate his ideas into a general theory of violence as a part of human psychology. I extend Kohut’s ideas to make a self psychological theory of aggression and rage more comprehensive. Psychoanalytic drive theory fails sufficiently to distinguish the differences between aggression and rage and confuses the meaning of both. I suggest that aggression is basically life-affirming and that rage and violence emerge in the context of “a fragmenting self”, that is, a self that is experiencing psychological disarray or breakdown. In his initial formulation in 1972, Kohut stressed that the basis for rage was the self’s lack of control over what he called the “archaic environment” in which the significant other was located. Toward the end of his life — in an interview with me — he added the idea of fragmentation as significant in the sequence of steps leading to rage. My work builds on that idea and seeks to define systematically the psychology of rage.
Bio
Charles B. Strozier is a Professor Emeritus of History, John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a practicing psychoanalyst. He has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His books include Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April, 2001, paperback from Other Press in the spring of 2004 and now translated into Italian, Japanese, and Hebrew, with a translation into Mandarin in progress); The New World of Self: Heinz Kohut’s Transformation of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2022); Apocalypse: The Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Beacon, 1994); The Fundamentalist Mindset (Oxford, 2010); and many other books and scores of articles.
Dialogues on Aggression
This online series, hosted by the Neuropsychoanalysis Association, convenes experts from a number of disciplines – evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychodynamic psychiatry, developmental psychology, sociology and criminology, for a fascinating exploration of this timely topic. Aggression is a fundamental human impulse, and violence an extreme manifestation of it. While aggression is an enduring and universal phenomenon, it has taken different forms throughout history, and in different cultural and societal contexts. The unique challenges we face in the 21st century require more community and global collaboration than ever before. And yet, the stability and harmony of families, communities, and society at large are dangerously undermined by the rise of interpersonal violence, mass shootings, xenophobia, and radicalization.
CPD credits: 2
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