L’uso della violenza come ricerca dell’impossibile. Ipotesi interpretative per un intervento psicoanalitico

Violence as a means for searching the impossible. Interpretative hypotheses for psychoanalytic intervention - As pointed out by Renato de Polo, "Violence can be used as an instrument to achieve impossible goals. Each human group wants to reach its own absolute purification and does so through the projection of evil, attributing total guilt to the other". The ongoing conflict between the Israeli and Palestinian people not only has economic and geopolitical reasons, but psychological antecedents as well. As de Polo stresses, this is a particular situation in which two opposed groups are involved. Each group is unable to perceive its projections because it is directly involved in the dispute of power. Through the attribution of evil and destructiveness to the other group, the main goals for the members of either of these two groups are purification and freedom from their own potential malignity, which could even harm the people they love. This paper further reflects upon the fact that religious fanaticism sets the groups in a perspective of victims/perpetrators: since the other group is guilty, the victims are the only ones who can reach purification, and therefore acquire the right to kill the enemy according to God’s will. In this fight against the enemy, the group tries to expel the danger of death; it assumes the power of killing in the name of justice, becoming a kind of divinity. In fact, the group constitutes the source of a fundamental dream, which gives the illusion of transcending the limits of individual death. In this context and with its own setting, psychoanalysis can contribute greatly towards an understanding of the subject, and thanks to its concepts regarding the unconscious, projective processes, and transference it also offers tools that can help regulate conflicts between groups. To make this contribution useful it is necessary to eliminate hate and the concept of the right to kill.

Keywords: Violence, searching for the impossible, group purification, killing in the name of God, projection of guilt, psychoanalytic intervention.

Gianni Fantuzzi, L’uso della violenza come ricerca dell’impossibile. Ipotesi interpretative per un intervento psicoanalitico in "GRUPPI" 2/2009, pp 119-126, DOI: 10.3280/GRU2009-002013