Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic by James Gilligan

From Naeem's Reviews on Goodreads:

irst and foremost: astonishing book. The theory is radical. The voice in which he delivers it is comes from the heart and from 25 years of experience as a psychoanalytic therapist in maximum security prisons. It messes with most everything we are trained to think.

The theory: violence is a the result of shame and shame about being ashamed -- meta-shame. It is a bit more nuanced than this but this is the jist of it. It reverses thereby the usual analysis that we get, for example, from those who popularize Hobbes: that violence is inherent and it is civilization that represses it. For Gilligan, civilization creates invidious comparison, creates relative deprivation, and thereby produces shame and shame for having shame. Where there is an absence of love, an absence of self-worth, and the presence of shame, there all that is needed is some mundane trigger -- a look misinterpreted, a careless word, a perceived slight -- and boom, we get violence.

Here, Gilligan is doing what Jessica Benjamin is doing in Bonds of Love (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42335... ) inverting the Hobbesian paradigm. But relative to Benjamin there is far less theory and far more exploration of cases.

More...