Social Context and Violence in Adolescence: An Ethopsychoanalytic Perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is an attempt to understand youth violence considering its alarming increase. This violence arises from the confluence of the helplessness of children of vulnerable single mothers with an environment that is far removed from the one in which we evolved 2 million years ago, inscribed in our ethogram. This unfortunate confluence generates violence that increases through “violent imagination” in what is experienced as an “unlawful world.” The loss of an expectable environment relates to Winnicott’s understanding of antisocial behavior and antisocial personality now embedded in the neo-liberal economic paradigm that has predominated in recent decades. Finally, I explore the function of the moral third, embedded in the social fabric, as a guarantor of social and cultural environmental provision and when this is lacking, it is necessary repair to deal with youth violence.