Social Context and Violence in Adolescence: An Ethopsychoanalytic Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article is an attempt to understand youth violence considering its alarming increase. This violence arises from the confluence of the helplessness of children of vulnerable single mothers with an environment that is far removed from the one in which we evolved 2 million years ago, inscribed in our ethogram. This unfortunate confluence generates violence that increases through “violent imagination” in what is experienced as an “unlawful world.” The loss of an expectable environment relates to Winnicott’s understanding of antisocial behavior and antisocial personality now embedded in the neo-liberal economic paradigm that has predominated in recent decades. Finally, I explore the function of the moral third, embedded in the social fabric, as a guarantor of social and cultural environmental provision and when this is lacking, it is necessary repair to deal with youth violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescence
• violence
• ethological unconscious
• upside world
• moral third
• democracy

Introduction

The increase in youth violence in our countries, alarmingly associated with drug trafficking and consumption, is a concern at all levels. Although this violence has had a moderate decrease in Chile during the last three years in frequency, the violence of the crimes has not. The latter violence has increased notably. (Technical Document: Teenage Pregnancy; https://hablemosdetodo.injuv.gob.cl/ 2020–2021.)

I am assuming that juvenile delinquency and the crime rate in adolescents are the tip of the iceberg of criminality at large and as such one of the main causes of the overall increase in delinquency and crime in our societies.

The progressive and explosive increase in child delinquency related to the high frequency of unwanted teenage pregnancies and the precarious socio-economic situation of vast strata of society, seem to be hallmarks of our Latin American reality in which a neo-liberal model¹ has been adopted without implementing many of the rights associated with a progressive liberal model; for example, the right of women over their bodies and to a welfare State that provides adequate and egalitarian standards in health, education, housing and pensions. We will return later to the unwanted pregnancies.

What do I understand by social violence? I think it can be understood as the opposite of sublimation. In the latter, it is an impulse diverted from its goal and object toward an action or product accepted as valuable and desirable by the social body and that comes to add and enrich the cultural baggage of a community. Social violence, on the other hand, deals with acts that destroy the cultural baggage, which includes the valuation of life, and thus impoverishes the community. This last assertion must be relativized when taking into account that on many occasions a dominant group, which practices what has been called state terrorism, qualifies as social violence with its destructive connotation, what for another group, which does not hold power, is qualified as a legitimate rebellion against oppression, injustice, arbitrariness and brutality.

It is worth asking whether there is any violence that is not social in the broad sense of the term. The word violence derives from the Latin vis and its polysemy covers in our present world terms such as “subjection, subordination, domination, imposition, arbitrariness, fragmentation, authoritarianism, tearing, force, forgetfulness, deliberate amnesia of the community, discrimination and prejudice” (Rosenberg, 1999). As can be seen, the polysemy of the word alludes in most cases to social relations. We, humans are political animals, our environment is the polis and it is in it where violence is exercised.

What characteristics should this environment have and how does it relate to violence in adolescence?

Before proceeding with my argument, and as a basis for what I am going to lay out, it is necessary to transmit the account made by Stevens (1993), Jungian analyst, of an event that happened in the London Zoo in 1925. In this zoo there is a concrete embankment surrounded by a canal known as Monkey Hill. It measures approximately 30 meters by 18 meters. In 1925 the zoo authorities placed 97 hamadryas baboons on this mound with the expectation that they would settle peacefully and entertain the public. This should have been an all-male population, however, by oversight, 6 females were included. The males outnumbered the females in a ratio 15 to 1. Dominance battles broke out between the males and within two years 45 were dead. But the baboons seemed to be unhappy and to cheer them up the zoo authorities decided to place thirty additional females and 5 adolescent males. The violence exploded again. In less than a month 15 of these females had been dismembered. In 1930 only 39 males and nine females had survived and that year three males and four females died. The author wonders what this says about the psychology of baboons: Are they vicious brutes incapable of controlling their passions? If so, how has this species survived?

The cause that was discovered to explain this violence was that the zoo authorities did not know how to provide the qualities of the natural habitat of these baboons taking into account the ethogram² of the species. This fact frustrated the environmental expectation for which their members are biologically and psychologically designed. It turns out that the environmental needs of these primates involve much larger tracts of land on which males can establish territorial dominance, establish social hierarchies and, when successful in these achievements, gather a harem of females. A group of 100 baboons would have required fifty square kilometers and not the 540 square meters of the zoo and a male to female ratio far removed from that implemented in the zoo.

It is worth pointing out that this episode was the basis of a series of flawed conclusions. One tabloid stated: “men are a peaceable race, once you eliminate the women.” But what was maybe more important was that the “scientific” observations by Solly Zuckerman, zoologist and research anatomist at the London Zoo at the time, were afterward the basis of his renowned book “Social Lives of Monkeys and Apes” published in 1932. It dominated the field of primatology during the next three decades. In this book primate relationships are pictured as fitting into rigid “… male dominated hierarchies maintained through coercion intimidation and bloodshed. The only thing that prevents the chest-thumping testosterone fest from descending into complete chaos is the prospect of copulation. Whenever conflict arises … females offer sex to proper things over. When that fails; alpha mates resort to murder” (Christopher, 2016). Although Zuckerman cautioned not to generalize these conclusions to humans, many did so considering that the bedrock of human nature consisted of a raw murderous and sex oriented motivation to be contained by the rules and norms of civilization. What wasn’t realized was that the hamadryas baboons were living in a completely upside artificial world.

Can we also be living in an upside world? Let us listen to what Galeano (1998) has to say in his book “Patas Arriba. La Escuela del Mundo al Revés”³ in which he ironically describes the environment in which we live in the following terms: “In the world as it is, the world upside down, … the most successful industries are those that poison the planet the most; and the salvation of the environment is the most brilliant business of the companies that annihilate it. … Walking is a danger and breathing is a feat in the big cities of the upside-down world. Who is not a prisoner of necessity, is a prisoner of fear: some do not sleep because of the anxiety of having the things they do not have, and others do not sleep because of the panic of losing the things they have. The upside-down world trains us to see our neighbors as a threat and not as a promise, it reduces us to loneliness and consoles us with chemical drugs and cybernetic friends. We are condemned to starve to death, to die of fear or to die of boredom, if some stray bullet does not shorten our existence.” Galeano’s description is ironic and maybe realistically pessimistic. Perhaps not so far from the experience we can imagine the baboons had on Monkey Hill in London Zoo.

Now, it is absolutely legitimate to argue that humans also carry at birth the expectation, inscribed in our genes by evolution, of an environment in which to develop, grow, decay and die. We can in this sense postulate an ethological unconscious carried in our genogram that will manifest itself consciously and unconsciously as an ethogram.

Indeed, Winnicott and the entire independent English group, under the powerful influence of Darwin, recognize that humans are born adapted to an environment for which we have been selected. Failure to meet this environmental expectation, as in baboons, generates frustration and increased aggression and a sense of the ominous, what should be familiar is strange and filled with fear and perplexity. We can study and describe the natural habitat of baboons, but we can discover something similar for our human condition. How can we know what this expected environment is, and how much of it would actually agree with the ethogram of homo sapiens sapiens?

Fox (1989), an anthropologist at Rutgers University, has argued that in order to understand humans, anthropology can no longer consider only the so-called historical period, the written history, but must also contemplate our biological equipment and the history of the evolutionary adaptation of the species. This author suggests that we can thus determine our natural environment as that in which our species culminates its period of adaptation, that is, the late Paleolithic, between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago. This is the “environment of evolutionary adaptation.” We can infer this environment from the social structure of today’s hunter-gatherer communities. This social environment consisted of communities of 8 to 19 males, twice as many females and about 20 youngsters and children wandering around hunting and gathering food. This adds up to a number of approximately 40 individuals, constituting the typical demographic structure of a band. All these groups maintained relationships with other groups of a kind.

The onset of glaciation profoundly altered the human social habitat related to two facts:

1. The concentration of the population in the Middle East and South Western Europe as a result of the invasion of glaciers.

2. The domestication of animals and the discovery of agriculture. The increased density led to the emergence of certain social realities that did not previously exist, such as institutionalized religion, religious castes, power elites, social hierarchies and the exploitation of man by man, and of women by men.⁴

From this Darwinian perspective, our species has not been “at home” for a long time and the symptoms of this estrangement are painful, since we would be trying to recover from an illness. The issue is not to confuse the recovery process with normality. We can think of symptoms as part of the healing process, as Freud (1914) thought of the symptoms of schizophrenia and Winnicott of antisocial behavior. The symptoms highlighted by Fox (1989) are: “the epidemics of ignorance, teenage pregnancy, divorce, juvenile delinquency, drug addiction and terrorism” (p. 232). (Teenage pregnancy, for example, could be an expression of desire and reminiscent of a social system in which births are accepted and contained by the community without major conflicts and in which the onset of sexual activity coincides with biological maturation.)

It is striking that the symptoms of the attempted recovery are similar to the symptoms of the psychopathology of the transitional space “… fetishism, lying and stealing, the origin and loss of affectionate feelings, drug addiction, the talisman of obsessive rituals, etc.” (Winnicott, 1960). Let us not forget that the psychopathology of the transitional space is related to the deficiencies of the “environment-mother.” The latter provides to the infant cohesion of the self and a feeling of trust in a familiar and predictable world through her holding.

The hypothesis is that this “expected environment of evolutionary adaptation” is not only something that is vitally needed at the beginning of life, and once certain developmental tasks have been achieved, we become independent of it. It is an environment that is necessary throughout the life cycle, the difference with childhood is that, with biological and psychological maturation, this environment becomes somewhat more manipulable.

It is conceivable that Jessica Benjamin’s (2018) concept of a “lawful world” points in the same direction. During early infant development, behavioral patterns are generated in which expectations are generated. For example, the breast will come when hungry and mother or her surrogate will assist and soothe the infant when in distress. It has also been found that infants fed on demand synchronize their sleep-wakefulness patterns with those of the mother more quickly than those fed on a fixed schedule. Thus, there is a mutual adaptation to the natural “law” of the circadian cycle that determines sleep-wake patterns. Metaphorically these patterns can be understood as a dance in which the dancers are increasingly synchronous in adapting their rhythms, their breathing, their muscle movements, so that the subject finally becomes the dance itself. In this rhythm both subjects surrender to the dance. These expectations are configured as patterns of patterns and are the early origin of intersubjectivity. It is what Benjamin (2018) calls the “rhythmic third” or the “third in the one.” The ruptures of this third call for its repair, which constitutes what she calls the “moral third.” It is very striking to realize the fact that ethics is rooted in these co-constructed rhythms very early on. It is interesting to postulate that ethics and morality emerge in human beings as a consequence of their capacity to dance, experiencing synchronized relational rhythms, without the need for them to be implanted as a consequence of the burial of the Oedipus Complex in the face of the threat of castration. There is a world of difference between both ways of conceiving the origins of ethics and morality. It is worth noting that democracies include as one of their basic qualities the obligation to defend human rights, which today include social rights, and restitution and reparation to those who have had them violated. Thus, the moral third is embedded in the democratic ethos.

If adolescence is a metamorphosis, and let us not forget that the metaphor is based on what is, in the butterfly, a radical transformation that includes first a profound non integration of the caterpillar within the cocoon, the protective shield of the chrysalis, awaiting integration into a final version, the butterfly (cf. Ogden, 2006). In terms of the self, a de-structuring of the infantile self, which is constituted as a non-integration in the presence of holding, the cocoon, awaiting the future emergence of a cohesive adult, responsible for its own destiny and capable of making contributions to the community. It is to be expected then that the environmental provisions needed by the adolescent are extremely critical for this transformation process to be successful, just as the cocoon is for the chrysalis. It can be thought that the expectation of the “environment of evolutionary adaptation” becomes very active in this period, marked by anxiety in the present, added to the anxiety for the achievement of the autonomy of adulthood that is glimpsed in the future, plus the grief and pain of mourning for the lost childhood that is left behind in the past. For us humans, the time horizon unfolds commanded by the perspectives of the future. The future is constituted as such as long as there is a moderately predictable and reliable environment in which existence is secured. For Winnicott (1965) the capacity to experience time is related to the holding function which is considered as “ … the total environmental provision prior to the concept of living with. In other words, it refers to the three-dimensional space relationship with time gradually added. … It includes the management of experiences that are inherent in existence, such as the completion (and therefore the non-completion) of processes … which belong to infant psychology and take place in a complex psychological field, determined by the empathy of the mother” (pp. 43–44; italics as in the original).

It should be noted that the expected environment includes, in the case of the human species, culture, a set of shared symbols that determine in a powerful way whether or not one is recognized as being part of this set or not.

The adolescent hopes to find and make a place for himself or herself in the culture, but a place that the culture also has reserved for him or her. Hence the importance of the rites of adolescence. In these, the community takes charge of providing a set of symbols that are embodied in the rite and that provide a meaning and a place in the community, in which the one who was once a child can now be recognized and can be recognized as an adult.

What place does today’s culture have in store for our adolescents and how does this compare to the “evolutionary adaptive environment”?

It has recently been suggested that in the current neo-liberal economic scheme, access to citizenship is related to the ability to be a consumer. Whoever has the capacity to consume has a citizenship card. To be identified as someone in the cultural system, one must have the capacity to consume. If in the late Paleolithic, as we can infer from the few gatherer-hunter peoples that still exist, the “citizenship card,” the belonging to and the recognition of the community, were given by the participation in hunting or in listening to the stories of the elders or in the common gathering of fruits, nowadays these activities have been replaced by obtaining the money to consume in the mall, the meeting place par excellence of the consumer society. If one cannot consume, one enters into what sociologists have called anomie, the loss of autonomy and identity due to the degradation of social norms when society does not provide the means to achieve the aspirations and ideals valued and stimulated by society itself.

This anomic situation can be thought as isomorphic with an internal dynamic situation in which there is an excessive distance between what I am and what I am required to become in order to be recognized, accompanied by a degradation of moral norms. An unwanted child is especially vulnerable to seek the absent reflection of his or her parent’s gaze in external configurations, which, in the manner of an external scaffolding, give a sense of cohesion to his or her own being. Therefore, adolescents are very prone to assimilate the values of the consumer society in a concrete way, for example, by acquiring their sense of identity and the search for recognition through the use of popular brand-name clothes and shoes.

I believe that Winnicott’s ontogenetic thesis, that is, that antisocial behavior is the manifest expression of the unconscious attempt to recover an environment that was had and lost, can be extended to a phylogenetic perspective. If as a species we had an evolutionary environment to which we are adapted and which is currently missing, this will generate frustration and violence expressed in antisocial behaviors that manifest the unconscious demand for what was had and lost, as in the case of the mandrills. This expectation will become more intense when facing the loss of the protected environment of infancy and childhood, if one had it, and if one did not have it, the pattern of antisocial behavior already generated in childhood will become more active.

There is thus a frustration related to the past, the environment lost. There is another related to the future, that is, not finding a social recognition that allows to have a social sanctioned place and therefore be able to develop as an adult. Thus, it is easy to slip into anomie.

It is no coincidence then that the search for recognition of one’s own citizenship is framed in the consumption of drugs. The adolescent concretizes the sought-after representation of his social self in a concrete sensory-motor symbol, he or she literally becomes a consumer. It is no longer a matter of gathering fruits or grains or preparing for hunting, it is a matter of going out to “hunt” drugs, in the subculture of the gang, a way of gaining access to a world of concretized representations in which one gains access to being someone by being a consumer.

Aggression in itself is not the problem, it will always exist, it is the manifestation of our aggressive nature and we know of regulated violence, for example, in small rural communities. The problem for us is our symbolic capacity. This capacity allows us access to what Fox calls the “violent imagination,” the potential use of aggression in the service of omnipotent fantasies which implies a loss of control over our aggression as a species. The issue is our capacity to imagine and build the atomic bomb and annihilate life on the planet, or the capacity to imagine and implement the technical requirements of the holocaust, or the disappearance of thousands of political opponents during the years of military dictatorships in the southern cone of our continent, or the teenager who murders the other because he looked at him ugly using a gun, a product of course of violent imagination. Let us not forget that gunpowder is one of the steps in the ascent of violent imagination to the atomic bomb. Will we be able in the distant future to destroy whole planets in a snapshot? Violent imagination has already conceived it in Star Wars.

The film “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick pictures the ascent of our species starting from the first bone used as a weapon to attack another band of hominids competing for the same water. In an agitated mood the bone is thrown into the air by one of the members of the band. The bone traveling to the sky appears in a snapshot transformed into a ship traveling in space to the moon. So, as pictured in cinema, the journey of the ascent of violent imagination starts from the first bone used to attack fellow hominids, the beginning of the use of a tool, to a Death Star, a tool that has the power to destroy a whole planet as pictured in Star Wars. Will this weapon be used? Maybe there is still hope that our species recovers from its estrangement in the upside world we have built.

What can exalt this violent imagination and its concretization in the adolescent process? We observe omnipotence in adolescence, related to the manic defense to overcome the mourning of childhood and infancy, but also related to the surprising discovery of the vitality and beauty of a body and psyche that flourishes and thus expresses the potential that was waiting to manifest itself. And how can the adolescent regulate his violent imagination? I quote Winnicott (1989), in adolescence he says “… the good is not that which is given by the benignity of the parents but that which is forced into existence by the individual destructiveness of the adolescent. The task of parents and society is one of survival and this includes survival without retaliation, that is a containment of what the adolescent brings without being provoked even under provocation” (italics are mine; pp. 237–238). The breakdown of omnipotence and the emergence of the adolescent’s possibility of identifying with society and its values as something real, that is, external to the values and norms that he himself can create, depends on society’s capacity to survive the adolescent’s aggression. Real and good is that which manages to remain more or less unscathed by the adolescent’s attacks since retaliation is experienced as a result of the violence itself and can only generate more omnipotence and violence in the search to find a reality in which to develop and live. Maybe this searched reality, includes the re-encounter of the environment of late Paleolithic evolutionary adaptation. Perhaps the idealization of community life that appears with such intensity in adolescence was not only the need for a group of peers with whom to identify in order to elaborate the disidentification with parents and achieve an identity separate from them, but also the nostalgia for this lost and sought after environment. This nostalgia, which does not fail to have an antecedent in Rousseau, may be one more unconscious motive at the base of the hippie movement and left-wing revolutionary movements of the ’60s or of the current movement of those adolescents who, disillusioned with the establishment, go to live with indigenous communities or poor and marginal populations with the idea of participating in the self-management of original ways to get out of poverty and exclusion generated by the prevailing socio-economic model.

It is difficult for our “establishment” to provide a constructive solution to the violent imagination of adolescence if many more resources are spent on retaliating against juvenile delinquency than on its prevention; if more resources continue to be spent on the prosecution of drug traffickers than on the recovery of addictions; if we do not do what is necessary to prevent unwanted pregnancies in adolescence; if war between nations continues to be implemented as a solution to terrorism; if our current democracies end up leaving in impunity the atrocities committed during the dictatorships and if we do not find a way to fairly distribute the enormous wealth that the capitalist system is capable of generating. It is difficult then to think that our societies are managing to survive adolescent destructiveness.

The health of the individual is indissoluble from the health of a society. As Winnicott (1965) pointed out without ambiguity: “… a full maturity of the individual is not possible in an immature or ill social setting” (p. 84).

Perhaps, without even fully realizing it, we are in a situation similar to that of the mandrils in the London Zoo in 1925. Maybe, we adults should thank adolescents who, with their ideals, arouse in us, adults, reminiscences of a lost world waiting to be repaired, recovered and built. An interpellation to the moral third.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juan Francisco Jordan Moore

Juan Francisco Jordan Moore, M.D., is Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, and Attached Associate Professor, Psychology School Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He was Member of the Editorial Board of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1998–2009; President, Chilean Psychoanalytic Association, 1992–1994; Founding Member of IARPP Chilean Chapter; and Past President of IARPP Chile and actual APPR Chile. He has numerous publications in international and national journals and book chapters, and has been in Private Practice in Santiago de Chile during the last 45 years.

Notes

¹ The neo-liberal model is conceived here as an economic paradigm in which market economy is forced on activities that were mainly thought as not market regulated, as education for example. Capitalism lost its innocence when it realized that many activities could be regulated by the market making the State to retreat as a provider of essential services to cover basic human needs. These are now provided by the “industry” of education, health and pension companies. The State is thus a broadly-based subsidiary one in which everyone has to care for him or herself.

² Ethogram refers to the pattern of actions, e.g. communicational actions of a species included in the genogram, when the latter enters into relationship with the environment, it becomes an ethogram. The ethogram could replace the concept of culture by integrating the biological and the social dimensions dichotomized in anthropology and sociology. The ethogram can be thought of as a set of unconscious fantasies, such as, for example, the baby’s expectation of a breast that becomes real when a mother is there with the desire to be attacked thus generating a relational pattern. This expectation is not derived from drives, but from the evolutionary history of humanity, an emotional and procedural memory, in this sense more in line with the idea of the Jungian archetype.

³ “Feet Upside Down. The School of the Upside Down World.”

⁴ Eisler (1989) in her now classic book, “The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future” called our attention to the fact that although Karl Marx was able to show and denounce the unhuman exploitation of the proletariat, couldn’t realize that half of humanity was exploited and subjugated by the other half.