Dr. Bennett Roth on Violence

Works in Progress Seminar:

“Dr. Bennett Roth on Violence”

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

8:00 pm

Presenter: Bennett Roth, Ph.D.

Dr. Roth’s interest in violence was awakened by the limited devastation of the 9/11 attack in New York City that he viewed. Three responses emerged as he worked with people near the WTC site. His psychological responses were enhanced by his prior psychoanalytic treatment of a man who claimed he killed someone as a child and Dr. Roth formulated the following questions: 1) How did they motivate people to kill unarmed/innocent people? 2) Was there a dynamic link between the interest in survivors as victims and turning away from the perpetrators?

After immersing himself in the enormous literature of the Nazi period, he painfully reflected on the absence of clinical theory concerning violence until recently. This included the dynamics of mass (state directed) murder. Psychoanalytic theory of individuals and groups offered no frame or path to understand the attempts to exterminate the European Jews. Is there a different development progression of violent individuals than offered by classical psychoanalytic theory’s narrow perspective of development and sexuality? If forms of self-interested violence had to be suppressed for collective safety when large social groups were formed, what were the conditions for its appearance in individual and mass violence? The mystery deepened for him and the answers were slow to be revealed. Despite the voluminous literature on the Holocaust and the killing fields of wars, there was an absence of psychoanalytic interest in “killing” and murder until recently. Is there a scotoma for violence and harm?

One deeper psychoanalytic explanation is found in Bion’s concept of hallucinosis. “Hallucinosis” is a term coined by Wilfred Bion in “Transformations” (1965) to denote the psychic act of the ”normal” unconscious part of the personality that transforms an object in reality into useable information. It is a powerful idea of Bion’s and offers an explanation that a false belief can exist in a relatively functional individual or individuals that transforms them and their environment in accord with a focal delusion. Malevolence, danger or an exalted idea is then assigned to a real external entity that becomes a source of threat. Individuals then react to their imaginary threat with violence to remove it. Dr. Roth believes this pattern appears in a wide range of violent behavior, from the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting to mass genocide.

No CME or CE credit offered.

Bennett Roth received his Ph.D. at NYU. He was certified in both psychoanalysis and group therapy. He has written frequently on Bion and on films such as “Lord of the Flies,” “Schindler’s List,”  “Son of Saul,” “The Act of Killing,” and the depiction of violence in Western movies. He also published Getting Away with Murder concerning his analytic treatment of a man who “killed someone” as a child.  Recently he published a book on A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence: The Holocaust, Group Hallucinosis and False Beliefs (Routledge, 2018).