Dangerous Dissociation: Origins of violence, childhood development, and the public good

• In Event: Parents and Personalities: Standardizing children's socioemotional development in the 20th century

English Abstract

This paper looks at how theories of violence, healing and rehabilitation during the 1980s and 1990s rested on notions of dissociation and unhealthy childhood socioemotional development. I will begin by looking at how studies of “violent sexual offenders” described violence as a problem of development, turning to the role that trauma, fantasy and the construction of a sense of self played in creating “violent” people. Building from the sociologist Erving Goffman’s ideas of the presentation of the self and the role of shame in face-to-face interactions, psychologists of sexual violence understood it to emerge from a type of strong dissociation that began in childhood and which alienated an individual from reality, including from others and from oneself. The paper then goes on to consider how locating violence in childhood development influenced proposed solutions to violence and trauma in American society by looking at how adolescence was recognized as an indicative stage for the development of violence, filled with both “risk” and “potential.” Studies compared the violent offender with “potentially” violent children (adolescents) using antisocial disorders like antisocial personality disorder and oppositional defiance disorder to identify children in need of immediate intervention and support. Psychologists also wielded the increasing visibility of ideas like neuroplasticity to emphasize the urgency of the problem and debate whether prevention was the only viable solution, or whether rehabilitation was possible with violent individuals. I argue that the connections between socioemotional development, dissociation and violence became fundamental to how trauma and violence were described as both public health and public safety problems in the last two decades of the 20th century, attending to how this unwittingly racialized, classed and gendered conversations on “dangerousness,” “deviance” and public risk in ways that continue into the 21st century.

Author

• Angelica Barbara Clayton, Yale University