Violent Emotions and the Violence of Life: Some Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Violence

Speaker: Avner Bergstein, Faculty member and Training and Supervising Analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Society with over 30 international publications

 

Introduction: Nilofer Kaul

Chair: Mallika Akbar

 

The encounter with life and with all that is entailed in the contact with other human beings, creates an emotional turbulence. The complexity of psychic reality, saturated with contradictions, paradoxes, uncertainties and doubts subverts psychic equilibrium, threatening the personality with overwhelming turmoil. Violence seems to be an outcome of a quality of excitation that the individual cannot elaborate mentally. Psychoanalytic work aims at facilitating growth of the mind, so as to allow the personality to bear the psychic pain entailed in the encounter with reality and so mitigate the violent discharge of emotional excess through action

 

(Collaboration: Indian Psychoanalytic Society, Delhi Chapter)