Mental Health Needs of Victims of Violence

Abstract

Professor Harnois, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, It is a great privilege for me to give this overview on “Victimization” at our symposium. Two world congresses ago, that means in Mexico in 1971, the scientific committee arranged a plenary session on “Aggression”. Several distinguished lecturers among others Karl Menninger himself and Erich Fromm, discussed the topic. Like a sparrow among hawks, I was invited to this prominent panel, but I must admit that I caused almost a scandal, because I did not discuss the topic proper, neither the psyche of the aggressor, nor the psychodynamics of aggression, but simply according to the line of my research during three decades “only” the victims of aggression. This was considered a “faux pas” nearly by the prominent psychiatrists. Aggression and the aggressor had become the pet of psychology and psychiatry, and were considered as the most important problem in connection with the steadily growing violence in our time. Arthur Schlesinger writes that we must acknowledge the destructive impulse, if we are to survive. He continues: “Let us not indulge in Utopian fantasies about its abolition. It is safe to predict that there will never be a non-violent human society. As we identify these anti-human impulses as we strive against them, whereever they appear, we create a chance of defying the winds of unreason”.