Preventing Violence

By James Gilligan, MD
Harvard Medical School

Chapter 1: Shame and the Death of Self

In the course of my psychotherapeutic work with violent criminals, I was surprised to discover that I kept getting the same answer when I asked one man after another why he had assaulted or even killed someone: "Because he disrespected me." In fact, they used that phrase so often that they abbreviated it to, "He dis'ed me." Whenever people use a word so often that they abbreviate it, you know how central it is in their moral and emotional vocabulary. References to the desire for respect as the motive for violence kept recurring, with remarks like, "I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed a gun at some dude's face." On another occasion, I could not understand why one of the prisoners was engaged in a running battle with the prison officers that resulted in his finally being sentenced to solitary confinement and having every privilege and possession taken away from him. I asked him, "What do you want so badly that you are willing to give up everything else in order to get it?"—because it seemed to me that that was exactly what he had done. In response, this man, who was usually so inarticulate that it was difficult to get a clear answer to any question, astonished me by standing up tall, looking me in the eye, and replying with perfect clarity: "Pride. Dignity. Selfesteem." And then he described how the officers were, he felt, attempting to take away his last shred of pride and self-respect by disrespecting him, and said, "If you ain't got pride, you gotnothin'."

These experiences, and many others like them, convinced me that the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation—a feeling that is painful, and can even be intolerable and overwhelming—and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride. I will use these two terms—shame and pride—as generic terms to refer to two whole families of feelings. Synonyms for pride include self-esteem, self-love, self-respect, feelings of self-worth, dignity, and the sense of having maintained one's honor intact. But pride must be in much shorter supply than shame, because there are literally dozens of synonyms for shame, including feelings of being slighted, insulted, disrespected, dishonored, disgraced, disdained, slandered, treated with contempt, ridiculed, teased, taunted, mocked, rejected, defeated, subjected to indignity or ignominy; feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, incompetency; feelings of being weak, ugly, a failure, "losing face," being treated as if you were insignificant, unimportant or worthless, or any of the numerous other forms of what psychoanalysts call "narcissistic injuries." As Franz Alexander wrote in "Some Comments," (1938), the psychology of narcissism is the psychology of shame and its equivalent, feelings of inferiority. Envy and jealousy are members of this same family of feelings: people feel inferior to those whom they envy, or of whom they are jealous. People become indignant (and may become violent) when they suffer an indignity; language itself reveals the link between shame and rage.

In my previous book, I spoke of shame as the pathogen that causes violence just as specifically as the tubercle bacillus causes tuberculosis, except that in the case of violence it is an emotion, not a microbe—the emotion of shame and humiliation. It is because this emotion is so powerful and pervasive, and so central to the experience of many people, especially those who are predisposed to violence, that there are so many synonyms for it, just as the Japanese and the Chinese have dozens of words for different varieties of silk and silkworms, because of the centrality of these in their culture.

When I first realized what I was hearing from the violent men I was working with, I began to think that I had discovered something original—something previously unknown. Then I happened to reread a passage in the Bible, the story of the first recorded murder in Western history, that I had read many times before without actually understanding what it was saying. It had never been clear to me why Cain killed Abel. But having sat down and talked with people who had actually committed murders, and asking them why, I was at last able to "hear" what the story of Cain and Abel was saying. The Bible makes it very clear why Cain killed Abel: "The Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain. . . . he had not respect." In other words, God "dis'ed" Cain. Or rather, Cain was "dis'ed" because of Abel—and he acted out his anger over this insult in exactly the same way as the murderers with whom I was working.

As I read further, I began to realize that this insight has been expressed centuries and even millennia ago, not only in the great myths of our tradition, but also in the writings of the great philosophers and theologians. Both Aristotle (Rhetoric, 1378-80) and Aquinas (Summa Theologica, I-II Q. 47, II-II Q. 41), for example, stated very clearly that the cause of the desire to assault or injure others is the anger that is caused by feeling that they have been "slighted" by them, and therefore feel justified in getting revenge for the slight. Both of those thinkers make it clear that what they mean by "slighting" is exactly what I am describing here: insulting, ridiculing, disdaining, dishonoring; in short, any behavior that shames people by treating them with contempt and disrespect, as though they are unimportant or insignificant. In other words, the hypothesis regarding the psychological cause or motivation of violence that I thought I had originated has been around in one form or another for a very long time. On the other hand, if it is a valid hypothesis, it would be surprising if earlier thinkers had not also discovered the same thing; for after all, violence has been with us since the dawn of history, and it would be surprising if the greatest minds and the most perceptive observers in history had not also noticed the same regularities in human behavior.

More recent examples would include Hegel, who identified the desire for recognition as the central motive force behind all human history. "Recognition" is a synonym for respect, which means, literally, to be looked back at (re-spectare) , or re-cognized, so it is also a synonym for honor, pride, attention, and all other forms of narcissistic gratification. And history itself, as Hegel and many other philosophers of history have noted, is largely the history of violence—wars, assassinations, revolutions, and so on. Although Marx turned Hegel "on his head," as he put it, he agreed with him to the extent of noting that shame is the emotion of revolution (shame being the emotion people feel when they are not recognized, or respected).

The same conclusion as to the psychological cause of violence has also been reached by contemporary scholars from the whole range of the behavioral sciences: clinical psychoanalysis, experimental psychology, social learning theory, sociology, anthropology, criminology, even law enforcement. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, for example, wrote: "The deepest level to which psychoanalysis can penetrate when it traces destructiveness [is to] the presence of a serious narcissistic injury, an injury that threatened the cohesion of the self" (The Restoration of the Self, 1977). Another analyst, Gregory Rochlin made the same point when he emphasized "the relation of injured narcissism to aggression [and of] humiliation to violence," and concluded, "The question is, what makes people so prone to feeling vulnerable and humiliated, and therefore ultimately what causes violence" (Man's Aggression, 1973). Herbert Thomas in "Experiencing a Shame Response" (1995) schematized the steps leading up to an act of violence as beginning with a rejection, which elicits intensely painful feelings of shame, to which the person responds with anger, which he then expresses or acts out with an act of violence.

Experimental psychologists have reached the same conclusion. Many individual studies and several reviews of the published research literature have been devoted to the study of aggressive behavior and simulated violence elicited under experimental conditions in psychological laboratories. These concern, for example, experiments in which an attempt is made to induce the subject to press a button that he is told will administer painful and potentially injurious or even lethal electrical shocks to another person. The consensus that has emerged from this work is that the most potent stimulus of aggression and violence, and the one that is most reliable in eliciting this response, is not frustration per se (as the "frustration-aggression" hypothesis had claimed), but rather, insult and humiliation. In other words, the most effective way, and often the only way, to provoke someone to become violent is to insult him. Feshbach, in "The Dynamics and Morality of Violence and Aggression" (1971), for example, after reviewing the literature on this subject, concluded that "violations to self-esteem through insult, humiliation or coercion are probably the most important source of anger and aggressive drive in humans." (It should be stressed that coercion, as a violation of autonomy, also produces feelings of shame, as Erik Erikson stressed—pride is dependent on being independent.) Geen, in "Effects of Frustration" (1968), concluded that personal insult was more powerful in provoking aggressive behavior than frustration. Sabini, in another review of the literature, generalized:

Frustration per se does not lead to anger. If frustration is not the cause of anger, what is? According to Aristotle, the perception that one has been insulted leads to anger. . . . Curiously, when psychologists have tried to produce anger in the laboratory, even when they have written about their results in terms of the consequences of frustration, they have not relied very much on frustrating people but have much more commonly insulted people-possibly because it is very difficult to make adults angry just by frustrating them ("Aggression in the Laboratory," 1978).

The only situation in which frustration without deliberate insult was found to elicit anger was when the frustration was unjustified (e.g., a bus driver deliberately bypassing a bus stop). This does not constitute an exception to the principle that anger and violence are caused by feeling shamed, however, for the perception that one has been a victim of injustice elicits feelings of shame: over being valued so little by the other person, and for being too weak to make him treat one fairly (which is why Marx's insight into the motivation for violent revolution, mentioned above, makes psychological sense). In fact, the Latin word for injustice, iniuria, also means "insult" (as well as "injury"). One does not need to add insult to injury, or to injustice; it is already contained within both of those experiences, as it is in the words used to refer to them. The perception that one has been a perpetrator of injustice, by contrast, elicits feelings of guilt.

A number of sociologists have arrived at the same explanation of the psychological roots of human violence. Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger, for example, in Emotions and Violence (1991) wrote that "a particular sequence of emotions underlies all destructive aggression: shame is first evoked, which leads to rage and then violence." The criminologist David Luckenbill in "Criminal Homicide" (1977) analyzed the step-by-step escalation of the confrontations between victim and perpetrator that led to all seventy murders that occurred in one California county over a ten-year period, 1963-1972, and found that in all cases the murderer had interpreted his violence as the only means by which to save or maintain "face" and to demonstrate that his character was strong rather than weak, in a situation that he interpreted as casting doubt on that assessment of himself. The opening move that started this process was some behavior by the victim that the perpetrator interpreted as insulting or disparaging to him and that would cause him to "lose face" if he "backed down" rather than responding with violence—even when the victim was only a child who refused to stop crying when ordered to.

Another sociologist, Elijah Anderson has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in ghetto areas of Philadelphia for many years, studying the causes of violence currently devastating many urban neighborhoods. He discovered that:

The street culture has evolved a "code of the street," which amounts to a set of informal rules of behavior organized around a desperate search for respect, that governs public social relations, especially violence. . . . At the heart of the code is the issue of respect—loosely defined as being treated" right" or being granted one's proper due, or the deference one deserves. Respect is viewed as almost an external entity, one that is hard won but easily lost—and so must constantly be guarded. . . . Something extremely valuable on the street—respect—is at stake in every interaction. . . . For people unfamiliar with the code this concern with respect in the most ordinary interactions can be frightening and incomprehensible. . . . Many feel that it is acceptable to risk dying over issues of respect. . . . There is a general sense that very little respect is to be had, and therefore everyone competes to get what affirmation he can from what is available. The resulting craving for respect gives people thin skins and short fuses (Code of the Street, 1999).

All this occurs against the background of life among the ghetto poor, who suffer the absence of jobs that pay a living wage, and the stigma of racial discrimination. He adds that "in a society where so much economic inequality exists, for the severely alienated and desperate a gun can become like a bank card—an equalizer" in the contest for respect, and for the material status symbols that serve as one of the main bases of respect.

Nor is it only behavioral scientists and academicians who have reached these conclusions. The same findings have been reported by law-enforcement officers who have investigated the motives of murderers and other violent criminals. John Douglas was a "profiler" with the F.B.I. whose career was devoted to studying the personalities and attempting to discern the motives of the most violent and dangerous criminals in the United States. What he concluded was that any ultimate violent act "is the result of a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy," and that these men attempt to diminish their low self-esteem by blaming others for their own real or imagined shortcomings, which were often caused, he discovered, by the way they were treated by overly authoritarian fathers (The Anatomy of Motive, 1999).

The degree to which a person experiences feelings of shame depends on two variables: the way other people are treating him (with admiration and respect, or with contempt and disdain), and the degree to which he himself already feels proud or ashamed. The more a person is shamed by others, from childhood by parents or peers who ridicule or reject him, the more he is likely to feel chronically shamed, and hypersensitive to feelings and experiences of being shamed, sometimes to the point of feeling that others are treating him with contempt or disdain even when they are not. For such people, and they are the rule among the violent, even a minor sign of real or imagined disrespect can trigger a homicidal reaction.

The purpose of violence is to force respect from other people. The less self-respect people feel, the more they are dependent on respect from others; for without a certain minimal amount of respect, from others or the self, the self begins to feel dead inside, numb and empty. That is how the most violent criminals told me they felt, and it is clear that it is the most intolerable of all feelings (though it is actually an absence of feeling, lack of the feeling of pride, or self-love). When people lack self-respect, and feel they are incapable of eliciting respect from others in the form of admiration for their achievements or their personalities, they may see no way to get respect except in the form of fear, which I think of as a kind of ersatz substitute for admiration; and violence does elicit fear, as it is intended to. For example, I have spoken to many violent criminals who spoke of how gratifying it was to see fear in the eyes of their victims.

Feelings of shame and self-contempt are often overlooked by others, because the people who experience them do their best to conceal such feelings behind a defensive mask of bravado and boasting. There is nothing more shameful than to feel ashamed—it reveals that a person has something to feel ashamed about.

Why are these feelings of shame and self-contempt so bottomless, chronic, and almost ineradicable in the most violent men? Because, in the men I knew, they had been subjected to a degree of child abuse that was off the scale of anything I had previously thought of describing with that term. Many had been beaten nearly to death, raped repeatedly or prostituted, or neglected to a life-threatening degree by parents too disabled themselves to care for their child. And of those who had not experienced those extremes of physical abuse or neglect, my colleagues and I found that they had experienced a degree of emotional abuse that had been just as damaging: being focused on as the parents' emotional "whipping boy," in which they served as the scapegoat for whatever feelings of shame and humiliation their parents had suffered and then attempted to rid themselves of by transferring them onto their child, by subjecting him to systematic and chronic shaming and humiliation, taunting and ridicule (Frazier, Aggression, 1974).

On the other hand, everyone gets shamed or slighted at one time or another, yet most people never commit a serious act of violence. In that respect, shaming is to violence as the tubercle bacillus is to tuberculosis, a necessary but not a sufficient cause. Even the most violent people are not violent most of the time. Before people will resort to violence, and it is always a last resort, several further preconditions need to be in place. One is that they have not (yet) developed the capacity for the feelings that prevent most of us from behaving violently no matter how much shame, disrespect, dishonor, or insult we are subjected to, such as guilt and remorse over hurting someone else; empathy, love, and concern for others; and even the rational self-interested fear of the retribution that violent behavior provokes from others.

A second precondition that enormously increases the likelihood that people will respond to feelings of shame by means of violence is that they do not perceive themselves as having non-violent means by which to maintain or restore their self-esteem and self-respect. Most of us have such means, such as education, knowledge, skills, and achievements that are honored and respected by others and by ourselves; a profession or career, and some standing or status in the community and with one's family and friends. It is also important not to underestimate the degree to which the self-esteem of many if not most people, in the very materialist, capitalist culture in which we have all been raised and in which we have to live, is dependent on having whatever minimal degree of wealth or income they need in order to feel that their "net worth" (in the accountant's sense) reinforces their sense of "self-worth" (in the psychological sense). The people who become violent criminals, and end up in prison, are notably lacking in all of those non-violent sources of self-esteem: they are overwhelmingly poor, uneducated (many are illiterate), lacking in any skills that they or others could respect, and of the lowest possible social and economic status in society. As the poor, they are lower class; and as members of minority groups (which often means people of color) they are of lower caste (which increases the risk that they will be poor, or lower class, as well). So when they are shamed, they do not have enough non-violent internal or external sources of self-esteem with which to compensate. Violence is their last resort in the literal sense that it is their last resource. And that brings us to another category among the multiple (but related) causes of violence.