Violent emotions and the violence of life

The paper discusses the violence of emotions and the violent retaliation against the mind as a way of protecting oneself against overwhelming pain. Leaning on Bion's thinking, it is suggested that violence may be an outcome of a quantity of excitation that the individual is unable to elaborate mentally. This violence is often dormant, covered by a veneer of civilization. Thus, in analysis we may repeatedly be deluded by the patient's seemingly non-psychotic functioning. Prenatal experiences that were never mentally registered serve as a model for overwhelming, undreamt and undreamable experience, which may be encapsulated in an unrepressed unconscious. Such unmentalized emotional experience may be forcibly discharged, either outward through physical violence, perversions, addictions, etc., or inward into the body. However, it is not only the overwhelming experience that one tries to expel, but also the perceiving mind itself, which is attacked and fragmented in order to evade awareness of an intolerable emotional reality. Detailed clinical material will illustrate the temptation to remain blind to the violent emotions lurking behind, and the massive forces, in both analyst and patient, working against getting in touch with painful psychic reality.