Violence is a complex matter, and understandingly perhaps, it is the objective, behavioral aspects that are commonly focused on. Here, however, it is the subjective psychological and especially affective substrates of violence that are brought to the fore. Psychoanalytic perspectives provide a way of thinking about these that also sets them in a human-developmental context. In this essay, psychoanalytic ideas about aggression and violence are considered, and what they have to say about the relationship between states of mind and behavior is critically reviewed. There also is an exploration of the ways that some recent findings in developmental science and neuroscience can refine and augment an understanding of these relationships, facilitating the construction of a psychobiological model, which may be placed in a social context. From this biopsychosocial perspective, aggression is seen as a heuristic concept that encapsulates numerous interacting elements that in ordinary development integrate and serve to promote optimal organism survival: By contrast, from this perspective, in humans violence may be understood as a pathological variant of aggression.

Problems in the establishment of the sense of a 'psychic' skin, in the ways described by Bick and Meltzer for example, commonly give rise to distortions in the capacity for self-experiences as a consequence of difficulties in relation to projective and identificatory processes. These latter may acquire a markedly adhesive character as a defence against the anxieties that arise. This makes for considerable technical difficulties in an analysis. This essay addresses the nature of these problems and considers some of the ways in which they may be approached clinically.

This essay differentiates ways the word 'psychoanalysis' has been used. Freud's (1912) clinical method required analysts' 'evenly suspended attention' and patients' 'free associations'. Importantly, the direct application of prior knowledge, in the clinical situation, is regarded as an impediment to understanding for both analyst and patient as such 'knowledge' may support intellectual, obsessional defences against overwhelming emotional experiences. Frequent sessions over a long time are therefore required in order to understand patients' defences and the anxieties and affective states which led to their creation. The need to discover anew each patient's emotional states as they are lived in the transference-countertransference relationship may be impaired by recourse to prior knowledge. The optimal employment of this method is subject to limitations, however, imposed by a variety of factors, internal and external, to both analysts and patients. Freud (1919), recognizing this, acknowledged that the discoveries made by psychoanalysts undertaking 'unalloyed' analysis had created a body of prior knowledge which might be legitimately used therapeutically to undertake modified treatments of a more directive kind. Unalloyed analysis might need to be combined with 'the copper of suggestion' to provide 'applied' analytically informed treatments more widely than would otherwise be the case, for example, less frequently. However, having used the word 'psychoanalysis' to describe both unalloyed analysis and analysis alloyed, Freud also used the term in a polemical manner and as a kind of 'brand-name'. This paper confines itself to these rather different uses Freud made of the term psychoanalysis often without distinction, and the confusions and contradictions which have arisen as a result. These different uses may be largely uncommented upon but have exerted, and continue to exert, an important influence upon both the historical and contemporary analytic discourse. © 2013 the Author. British Journal of Psychotherapy © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and BAP.

This paper considers some of the difficulties that exist in reconciling the 'treatment' and the 'cultural' aspects of analytic ideas and practice; the extent, for example, to which analysis is both ordinary, and extra-ordinary in more than one way. The implications for this for the place of analysis and analytical psychotherapy in the mental health services is considered along with the ways in which there is a diversity of views about the importance of maintaining the presence of analytic ideas and analytic practice in hospitals and clinics. Some of the limitations of analysis are discussed where analytic ideas and methods move away from their application to patients and patients' material into the wider world.

This paper considers Fonagy et al's concept of mentalization and contrasts aspects of this with aspects of Bion's model of the mind. The author argues that although mentalization adds to our understanding of mind it has limitations; that it may tend to over-emphasize certain types of external interaction between infant and carer and under-emphasize internal psychobiological processes. What is at issue here is the way in which an infant's carers facilitate the development of meaning out of experience. Bion's concept supposes a relatively 'interior' model in which, in important ways, the carer enables the infant to derive the meaning of his or her experience, whilst on the other hand Fonagy et al tend to talk more in terms of the ways in which the carer endows the infant's experience with meaning. Reference is made to Fordham's concept of states of 'Identity'. Fordham has pointed out that Freud's model is one in which mind is conceived of as evolving out of an infant's complex identifications with his or her carer(s); Jung's model envisages developmentally early states of identity as the means by which inherent capacities are realized.

This article proposes that violence may be most usefully thought about as a psychological rather than a behavioural phenomenon. Violence, it is contended, is a pathological variant of aggression, where 'aggression' is used to describe a particular part of the range of affective endowments possessed by human beings. We might think about aggression as a 'set' of which violence is a subset. As an affective endowment, aggression requires integration during development and this is supplied initially by an infant's primary carers and later by other important objects and institutions in the environment and culture in which the growing child lives. In the absence of the required conditions for enabling psychological integration to take place, rather than integration, disintegration holds sway with the aggressive affects denied or dissociated from. In this instance the affects do not become part of the affective repertoire upon which the individual can draw in order to orientate him or herself to their environment and in particular objects in the environment. Instead the affect is experienced as exterior and other and in some circumstances as violating. In this circumstances violence is resorted to as a way of escaping from the experience of overwhelming affects, for example by evoking in another affective experiences that cannot be tolerated within the self. Clinical case material is used to illustrate this. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

This paper considers some of the clinical and theoretical problems contingent upon the imprecision and lack of clarity with which the word and concept 'violence' is used. A definition of violence is proposed, which separates the concept of violence from the related concept of aggression and sees the former as a particular form of the latter. This definition also proposes that violence must always have a psychological component aspect. It is contended that clarity is important clinically so that analysts can distinguish psychologically destructive from psychologically creative elements in their patients, in their own psychological functioning and in the countertransference. The phenomenon of violence is considered in the light of Fordham's model of development, in particular that violence may be viewed as a consequence of a failure to integrate normal, aggressive aspects of the personality. Violence is seen as uncontained, split-off aggression, subjected to psychological projection. It is proposed that a particular quality of the experience that is being projected is an uncontained sense of violation. The notion of 'mindless violence' is considered.