The phenomenon of violence, which has existed since the existence of humans, reveals a very complex structure with individual and social elements and their relationships with each other. Therefore, it is not easy to define or classify violence.
Violence can be defined as the power arising from an insult, the use of brute force against those with opposing views, brute force, and excessive emotion and behavior. We can consider violence from many perspectives; psychological, sociological, social processes... Today, the aim of this article is to bring a more analytical perspective to violence and to examine the social and individual processes of violence.
According to Freud, every human being has the urge for sexuality and aggression, and humans cannot be purified from these instincts. According to Freud, violence is related to the death drive. According to Freud, the death drive is a biological force that inevitably directs the individual to destruction and death.
The transformation of the aggression inherent in human nature into masochistic aggression and the fact that this transformation occurs with the integration of life, that is, the acceptance of the law, distances the human being from pure violence. While this aggressive instinct emerges in some people through destructive behaviors such as harming others, in others it finds a different direction through self-destructive behaviors such as self-harm or through the activation of different defense mechanisms. Whether the subject inflicts this violence on himself or on someone else, this includes the violence we experience and is directly linked to the violence within us.
One of the most important propositions of psychoanalysis is that violent behavior is motivated not only by reality and external traumas, but also by unconscious fantasies. It is emphasized that it is very important to consider subjectivity in psychoanalysis by taking group belonging into consideration. Perhaps the most important basis of this idea is that spirituality is formed between subjectivities. “I”ness arises from a “we” state. We, the group, have a unique spirituality, which is different from the sum of the spiritualities of the individuals that make up the group. In fact, the internal groups we all have come together and act as the organizer of the spirituality of the group we are a member of. In short The individual unconscious and the group-specific unconscious structures are in a complex mutual relationship and cannot exist separately from each other.
When we begin our examination of how this occurs, we need to go back to infancy. At first, the baby cannot distinguish itself from its mother, its boundaries are blurred. In the relationship with the mother, the baby gradually begins to realize that he is a different person from his mother. From the beginning, he collects images about this relationship, himself and the mother in his inner world. The sum of these images creates designs. Initially, good and bad self-representation and good and bad object representation are separate. In other words, while a mother who feeds is a good mother; A mother who hinders is a bad mother. Integration of good and bad self and object representations occurs around the age of 3. Core identity, a person's internal sense of who they are, a solid sense of internal sameness, begins to develop around the age of 3 when these good and bad self-representations merge. The concept of object relations has a very important place in this respect. Not having this core identity, not having the same inner subject of sameness all the time, is like psychological death. Another important issue that is as important as this integration process is identification.
Although identification begins at a very early age, it becomes stronger with the separation of object and self-representations and later with the combination of good-bad representations. Object images and related ego functions are brought in and assimilated from the outside. Thus, one's identity is enriched. In addition to adaptive and development-promoting identifications, unhealthy identifications may also be possible. The nature and object of identifications are different in each developmental period. The nature of the core identity continues to be updated with different identifications in each new period. According to psychoanalytic theory, the core identity is formed by the end of adolescence; Although subsequent experiences may enrich or deprive this core identity, it does not change its general nature.
Group identity is also established in this core identity at a very early age. Just as individual identity is the person's constant feeling of sameness, group identity is the strong sense of sameness and togetherness that the person experiences with other members of the large group.
Child psychoanalyst and researcher Emde (1991) b He explained how group identity is formed starting from infancy with the "concept of weness". This is an idea in the child's mind that the baby acts in harmony with its caregivers and parents; It states that the infrastructure of this idea exists psychobiologically. The large group identity merges with the core identity with the child's increasing relationships with the environment and the outside world; This fusion process lasts from the baby's first days until the end of adolescence. We mentioned that around the age of 3, designs are integrated and object permanence is achieved. So, does it always happen like this?
Some good or bad self and object images may remain unintegrated in each person. Dealing with unintegrated self and object images is a psychological necessity that an individual will deal with throughout his life. One of the most effective ways to cope with this is externalization. In order to maintain a realistic and balanced self-representation, it is necessary to externalize both bad and good unintegrated self and object representations, this is a part of the healthy individual development process.
The unconscious anxiety, fantasies, and perceptions of the mother or an important person in the child's life. The intergenerational transition occurs when the child externalizes his expectations about the outside world, his self and object representations of another person, and his traumatized self into the self representations of a developing child. We often see generational transmission at the individual level in clinical studies. The child unconsciously tries to carry the past story, to grieve that the family could not realize, and to repair the psychological damage of the family.
Just like individuals, large groups also pass on the traumas that they could not resolve or handle to the next generation so that they can deal with them instead of themselves. While individual members of the traumatized large group have their own unique identities and all have their own unique responses to trauma, members of the entire group also share mental representations of the group's major tragedies. Mental defenses against painful or unacceptable feelings and thoughts are also included in this design.
The passing of traumatized self-images is the psychological DNA of the younger generation through the object relationship of the younger generation with the previous generation. It's like being planted on its own. The psychological DNA passed from one generation to the next influences both individual identity and subsequent adult behavior.
Freud's depiction of the struggle between life and death instincts confronts us with the reality of inherent human destructiveness and the dangerous problems it brings with it (Freud, 1920). There is often a desire to deny this fact of life and find the destructiveness in others. Accepting responsibility for destruction creates feelings of guilt; This painful situation ultimately causes denial and reflection.
In order to better understand this part, it would be appropriate to examine "enemy images" and their processes; In the case of ethnic hostilities, children who are members of one group externalize their unintegrated self and object images through another group. While in good times, two neighboring groups experience their similarities through their positive stores, in times of conflict, two neighboring groups exaggerate small differences and externalize their negative parts to the enemy group in order to protect their own identity.
For example, the phenomenon of war; The identification of the enemy with evil ensures that little or no conscious guilt is felt when the enemy is attacked. There is a general decrease in criminality in contrast to a greatly increased destructiveness in war. This is a successful paranoid defense against guilt. The significant decline in suicide rates in wartime is seen as a result of this general decline in criminality and the focus of aggression on the enemy rather than on the self. The same processes can be clearly observed in terrorism, which attributes evil to the victims of attacks who deserve to die. In addition, we see the same process in political systems that create polarization by attributing evil to certain groups that are despised in society and externalizing inherent characteristics to other groups.
Whether the violence is directed at oneself or against another, violence is actually aimed at absolute difference. Violence wants to make everyone and everything the same; First of all, our inability to accept the difference within us. The inability to tolerate this difference, combined with power, leaves behind great massacres and genocides. But It means destroying the other or making them the same as the stronger one.
Whatever the difference, any intolerance towards that difference can bring violence. For example, violence against women, children, elderly people, homosexuals... In fact, the reason for all of these is directly related to the person's inability to embrace his own difference, which is in his original structure. In the first encounter with the other, he cannot complete the identification that will form his personality and identity and cannot say "I am this" to the point where he cannot say "you are that" to someone else.
Although this article focuses more on the individual processes of violence, in fact violence is both individual and It is a social problem. Perhaps one of the main factors in being able to combat this problem more effectively is for the individual to be aware of and accept the differences within himself and thus experience acceptance of others more easily. Apart from this, one of the most important phenomena seen especially in violence against women is that men apply this violence to women as a sign of power. The arrangements that need to be made in legal processes related to this are beyond the scope of this article. In addition, perhaps one of the most important points that needs to be done is to work on gender inequality and to stay away from discourses that marginalize women and the female body in our daily lives, on social media and in written language. As mentioned in the psychoanalytic process, although the externalizations we use are a part of the individual process, when we direct these externalizations to negativity, we unintentionally become a part of the delusion that creates gender inequality and puts women in a lower position.
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