What’s Going on Around Here? Psychodynamic Thinking on Guns, Violence, and Youth in America: Aggression, Depression, and Destruction

ABSTRACT

In May 2022, a gunman entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX and shot and killed 21 people, including 19 children. Section II (child and adolescence) of the American Psychological Association, Division 39 (the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology) responded by organizing a two-part conversation series, titled, “What’s going on around here? Psychodynamic Thinking on Guns, Violence, and Youth in America,” a heading we hoped would capture the intention to think together about these issues, which themselves are difficult to define and label. This paper is a manuscript of the first of these conversations, with discussants Shana Grover, PhD, Ali Khadivi, PhD, and Larry Rosenberg, PhD, who were invited based on their clinical and professional experience working with young people who are considered at-risk for perpetrating violence, as well as those who have themselves been victims of violence. The conversation centered on the ways that psychodynamic thinking can inform how mental health professionals conceptualize what underlies an individual’s threats or acts of violence, approach risk assessment and intervention, and formulate an understanding of these horrific events at an individual, and cultural and societal level, to guide our responses both inside and outside of the therapy room.

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Danielle Lefkowitz for her assistance with preparing this transcript for publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Shana Grover, PhD is Associate Chief Psychologist at BronxCare Health System and specializes in psychological assessment with children and adults. She currently supervises and teaches psychological assessment at the New School for Social Research. Ali Khadivi, PhD is board certified in assessment psychology and fellow of Society for Personality Assessment. He is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He also teaches clinical and forensic psychological assessment in multiple hospitals and university settings, and conducts violence and risk assessment for various institutions. Larry Rosenberg, PhD is a member of the Adjunct Faculty at the Postgraduate Programs, Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University. He previously served as the Clinical Director of the Child Guidance Center of Southern CT, where he developed and directed training programs in psychology and social work. He is a co-editor of the section on Childhood of the second edition of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM-2), and is a past-president of Section II of Division 39.

2. Peter Langman’s work suggests there are three types of school shooter: the psychopathic, psychotic, and traumatized. His 2009 paper is based on a sample size of ten, which the authors believe is too small to draw meaningful conclusions. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2008.10.003.

The work of Flannery, Modzeleski and Kretschmar suggests there is not enough data to yet have a reliable profile of a school shooter.

3. Adrienne Maree Brown author of Grievers, Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office.

4. Laurel Silber, Ph.D. is past president of Section II. She runs a private practice in Bryn Mawr, PA.

5. The authors of this report wish to highlight this point made by Dr. Grover. It’s essential that we realize that violence against the self and violence against others exist on a co-occurring spectrum. This is often overlooked in our field.

6. This description of personality organization or level of personality functioning can be found in further detail in the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual.

7. According to World Population Review, a data merging resource, Spain had a school shooting in 2015. According to the same webpage, Spain has not had a single mass shooting in 2022. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-shootings-by-country. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shootings-by-country. Spain did have at least one mass shooting in December, 2021. Importantly, while four people were wounded, no one was killed. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/jailed-shooter-with-death-wish-is-euthanised-spain-2022-08-23/.

8. While there are no mass shootings as we define them in Yemen, Yemen has been devastated by internal conflict since 2015. Over 10,000 children have been either killed or maimed and an estimated two million are internally displaced. https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/yemen-crisis; https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/n-africa/yemen.

9. There is anecdotal evidence that this is true; however, the authors could not verify it with official sources. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nazis/readings/halbrook.html.

10. Switzerland has the highest gun ownership rates in Europe and continues to have very low shooting rates. This is largely attributed to his many gun laws and regulations, and a national culture of gun ownership.

https://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gun-laws-rates-of-gun-deaths-2018-2; https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/florida-school-shooting_what-can-the-swiss-teach-the-us-about-guns-/43923350; https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/switzerland

11. The French constitution was rewritten in 1958 with amendments through 2008. There is currently no constitutional right to bear arms or to gun ownership. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/France_2008.pdf?lang=en.

12. Writes Altman, “The poor in America also serve as containers for the suffering, the sense of limitation, constraint, and vulnerability that tend to be disavowed by middle-class Americans, especially in manic defense mode. Toni Morrison (1993) points out that European immigrants came to North America to feel free, religiously and economically. Once here, they may have found religious freedom, but they soon enough encountered one or another of a whole new set of constraints, as is the lot of humankind. They found new opportunities but also disease and death, war with the native inhabitants, the trials and tribulations of trying to turn forested land into farms, crop failures, and on and on. In the face of the limitations and vulnerability inherent in human beings, what better way to hold on to the sense of freedom, asks Morrison, than to enslave a group of people defined as other? Slavery and genocide, from this point of view, are part and parcel of the American self-perception of this nation as the land of the free and the home of the brave. The psychoanalytic perspective, with its elucidation of unconscious processes, dissociation, and projective identification, shows how we maintain the contradiction between the fact of slavery and oppression and the ideology of America as the land of the free, indeed how we could not have the one without the other.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jordan Bate

Jordan Bate, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the School-Clinical Child Doctoral Program at Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University. She also maintains a private practice with children, adolescents and adults in Manhattan, NY. She is the most recent past-president of Section II of Division 39.

Joseph Mikulka

Joseph Mikulka, L.C.S.W.-R. is a graduate of the psychoanalytic certificate and the child and adolescent psychotherapy programs of the William Alanson White Institute (WAWI). He is faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) and WAWI. JT is the current president of Section II of Division 39. He is in private practice in New York City.

Larry Rosenberg

Larry Rosenberg, Ph.D., is a member of the Adjunct Faculty at the Postgraduate Programs, Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University. He previously served as the Clinical Director of the Child Guidance Center of Southern CT, where he developed and directed training programs in psychology and social work. He is a co-editor of the section on Childhood of the second edition of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM-2), and is a past-president of Section II of Division 39.

Shana Grover

Shana Grover, Ph.D., is Associate Chief Psychologist at BronxCare Health System and specializes in psychological assessment with children and adults. She currently supervises and teaches psychological assessment at the New School for Social Research.

Ali Khadivi

Ali Khadivi, Ph.D., is board certified in assessment psychology and fellow of Society for Personality Assessment. He is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He also teaches clinical and forensic psychological assessment in multiple hospitals and university settings, and conducts violence and risk assessment for various institutions.

Jill Bellinson

Jill Bellinson, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York and a psychoanalyst from the William Alanson White Institute. She is currently an advisor to the board of Section II of Division 39.