Prologue to Violence: Child Abuse, Dissociation, and Crime

167 Pages·2006·76.82 MB·English

by  Abby Stein

Prologue to Violence
Child Abuse, Dissociation, and Crime
Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series

Volume 5

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Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series
DONNEL STERN, PHD., SERIES EDITOR
Volume 1
Clinical Values: Emotions That Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment
Sandra Buechler
Volume 2
What Do Mothers Want?

Contemporary Perspectives in Psychoanalysis and Related Disciplines

Sheila Brown
Volume 3

The Fallacy of Understanding / The Ambiguity of Change

Edgar A. Levenson

Volume 4

Prelogical Experience: An Inquiry into Dreams & Other Creative Processes

Edward S. Tauber and Maurice R. Green

Volume 5
Prologue to Violence: Child Abuse, Dissociation, and Crime
Abby Stein
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Prologue to Violence
Child Abuse, Dissociation, and Crime
Abby Stein
THE ANALYTIC PRESS
2007 MAHwAH, NEW JERSEY LONdoN
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Names, dates, locations, and other unique characteristics of
crime scenes and criminals have been changed to shield the
identity of subjects.
Parts of this book previously appeared in Contemporary
Psychoanalysis: Vol. 37, #3, July 2001, pp. 443-451; Vol. 39, #2,
April 2003, pp. 179-197; and Vol. 40, #4, October 2004,
pp. 495-517.
Dedication quote on page v is from Gerrard, N. (2003). Holly and
Jessica-We'll never know. Obseroer, Sunday, December 21.
Parts of this research were funded by the Harry Frank
Guggenheim Foundation.
© 2007 by The Analytic Press, Inc., Publishers
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form-by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any
other means-without prior written permission of the pub­
lisher.
Published by
The Analytic Press
10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, NJ 07430
www.analyticpress.com
Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stein, Abby
Prologue to violence: child abuse, dissociation, and crime!
Abby Stein.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-88163-416-7 - 0-88163-416-6 (cloth)
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Pedophiles are other people; rapists are other people; murderers
are other people. It's hard for the mind to know itself as wicked.
It tells itself a different story, keeping the darkness at bay.
-Nikki Gerrard
v
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Contents
Foreword by Donnel B. Stem ix

Preface xv

1 Who Me? Locating Agency in Violent Narratives 1

2 Conversing with Mutes 19

3 Criminals' Bad Luck 39

4 Maximum Perversion 61

5 Dreaming While Awake 87

6 Conclusion: Consciousness, Culpability, and Control 113

References
131
Acknowledgments
143
Index
145
vii
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Foreword
I edit the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and that is how I learned about
the work of Abby Stein. Perhaps you can imagine how unusual it is for remark­
ably insightful, creative, and beautifully written submissions from unknown
writers to come in over the transom. Such events are among the best things that
can happen to an editor. You begin to read, without any particular expectations,
and suddenly, to your surprise, you find yourself in the firm and confident
authorial grip of someone you have never heard of. Who is this person? On the
very best of these already rare occasions, you are taken to a place you did not
know existed. Abby Stein's writing came to me that way; and I was taken by it
that way, too. After the second or third of these papers from Stein, I proposed
to her that she write a book on the subject that she was digging into more and
more deeply with every installment of her work.
And what a subject it is! In the book that resulted, Prologue to Violence, which
you hold in your hands, Stein addresses one of the most daunting problems of
contemporary life: the role of childhood trauma (and she means serious trauma:
violent, physical, sexual) in the creation of violent adolescents and adults (and,
again, she means violence in the most serious way-beatings, rape, and mur­
der). The existence of this developmental picture is hardly news, of course. We
all know that violence in one generation begets violence in the next. But Stein,
having studied violent adults, both in person and in the files of law enforce­
ment agencies, draws a radically unfamiliar set of conclusions from this dis­
tressingly familiar developmental history. The key observation Stein makes,
over and over again, is that violent crime is very often carried out in a state of
dissociation. The offender either does not know he has done the crime or feels
as if someone else inside him did it; or he presents in a kind of daze about the
act. Stein quotes such a profusion of utterances of this kind from her subjects
that the reader is left with no doubt at all about the dissociative processes
involved.
All by itself (that is, even without the heart of Stein's argument, which I will
get to), this observation amounts to a challenge to the most common interpre­
tations of criminal violence. Most often, Stein tells us, violent criminals are not
conscienceless; they are not, in other words, what we are used to thinking of as
psychopaths or sociopaths. They are not simply evil; or rather, if they are evil,
ix
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