Three words we confuse

I have to start with a confession: for years, I used the word “violence” in a thoroughly inappropriate way. Before going any further, then, we need to separate three very different notions — a distinction that has served me a great deal in my practice.

Defined this way, the three no longer overlap. Aggressiveness is a capacity; aggression is an act; violence is an intention to destroy. Confusing them is exactly what I used to do — and it is what the person sitting across from us does, most of the time.

Why the distinction matters in the consulting room

I have talked with a great many people who told me they felt they behaved violently. Parents who say they are sometimes violent with their children, or that their children are violent with them. Colleagues, too, who fear that some of their words or actions might “do violence” to the people they work with.

In the vast majority of cases, when someone uses the word “violence”, what they are actually describing is an aggression or an aggressive behaviour. This is not a detail: it bears directly on the inner experience of the person telling us about it. To think of yourself as violent is to place yourself on the side of destroying another. To recognise that you had an aggressive impulse is something else entirely — and it opens up possible work, where the first word only shuts things down.

We are not all equipped the same way

If we accept that aggressiveness is a force in the service of survival, we must also accept that we do not all possess it to the same degree. Some people have a greater aggressive potential than others. Our life experience and our upbringing obviously play a major part in the aggressive competence we develop — but not everything seems to be acquired.

My daughter has been in daycare for a few months, and when you watch very young children you quickly see that some are better equipped than others: some manage to defend themselves easily, others far less. At that age, this cannot yet be explained by what life has taught them. Experience counts, then, but there are probably predispositions as well.

We draw on this competence every day: to assert a position, to make a point of view heard, to avoid being walked over. It starts very early at school and continues throughout life. Look at a meeting room: you immediately spot those who speak up spontaneously, who try to get their ideas across, who will more readily ask something of their managers or request a promotion. Watch a family meal: the picture is the same. One can be well equipped, very well equipped — or even too well — just as one can be under-equipped, sometimes severely so. That scale is what I develop in a second piece.

The faces of violence

Violence itself can take hundreds of forms. Recognising them keeps us from reserving the word for visible marks alone.

• Physical, up to and including homicide.
• Verbal: I have seen people far more damaged by verbal violence than by physical violence.
• Psychological, in countless forms.
• Digital: this is now one of the major exposures of the young, and it starts earlier and earlier. Platforms display a minimum sign-up age, but nothing verifies a declared date of birth; it has become very common to meet adolescents in deep distress over what happens on social media.
• Deprivation of freedom: confiscating someone’s identity card or passport, keeping their bank card, depriving them of financial autonomy — these too are forms of violence.

Is violence natural?

The question may sound odd. It is worth the detour, because the answer determines what we believe possible in terms of prevention and education.

Human history is often presented as a chain of successive evolutions: one species of man, then another, until us. That was my own picture of it, before reading Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari’s popular history. The book has been criticised by some specialists, not least because it rests in places on elements that are not all firmly established. To my mind that takes nothing away from the quality of the argument, nor from its capacity to unsettle our representations — and it reads like a novel, which is not so common for a work of history.

First surprise: several species of humans coexisted on the planet. There was a period when Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived at the same time — the man of the Neander valley, taller, physically stronger, more resistant to cold, present notably across the Asian continent. Homo sapiens was smaller, but had a bigger brain.

A brain, a prematurity, a long dependency

This is where the reasoning becomes fascinating. That larger brain made childbirth increasingly difficult; the women who survived it best were those who gave birth to slightly premature children. Evolution therefore favoured earlier births — and bigger brains.

Of all the species on the planet, we are the only one that needs so much time before becoming even slightly autonomous. It is precisely this prolonged fragility that forced adults to care for their young far longer. Relieved of the immediate concern for their own survival, children were able to develop capacities that proved decisive for the species: spoken language, and above all that singular ability to tell each other stories.

This ability has a considerable consequence: it makes large-scale cooperation possible. Setting insects aside, Homo sapiens is the only species able to cooperate beyond roughly one hundred and twenty individuals. Other great apes, or wolves, form micro-societies that hold together only because each member personally knows the others; beyond that, the organisation collapses. We are different: we need to know neither our baker, nor the person who brings food to us, nor the members of parliament and ministers whose decisions will nonetheless transform our lives. We build shared mental representations, and they are enough to hold us together.

The disappearance of the others

Every species of the genus Homo is now extinct except our own. Archaeological discoveries and advances in dating techniques have shown that they began to disappear from the moment Homo sapiens arrived on their territory. The pattern is especially striking during the period of intense climatic cooling the Earth went through between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago, which allowed sapiens to cross stretches of water that had been impassable and to reach the American continent by way of Alaska.

Two explanations coexist. The first: with a bigger brain and the ability to cooperate well beyond a hundred and twenty individuals, sapiens would have been more efficient at hunting and gathering, simply leaving too few resources for the others. The second: on arriving in new territories, it would have carried out vast campaigns of extermination against local populations in order to seize what they had. Here again, everything rests on that capacity to cooperate — and to tell stories about the other. If you can bring yourself to believe that the other is abominable, that they must be wiped out, that they are not even a human being but an animal, then monstrous things become possible.

This reality has lasting consequences: whoever is strongest on a given day cannot be strongest forever. Human history is a succession of alliances, ruses, strategies and manipulations, in a permanent instability where death could arrive at any moment.

Regulating violence: the first written laws

To cooperate on an ever-larger scale, violence had to be regulated. In 1776 BCE, Babylon was the largest city in the world; the Babylonian Empire, probably the largest of its time, counted more than a million subjects and stretched over most of Mesopotamia — present-day Iraq — as well as parts of today’s Syria and Iran.

It is there that the oldest traces of written legal texts were found: the earliest known attempts to regulate phenomena of violence so that a society could function. Hammurabi, king of Babylon, had his laws carved into a block of basalt set up in a temple, and copies were distributed throughout the kingdom. That is how he created a shared culture and made millions of people cooperate who did not know one another and might live hundreds of kilometres apart.

We know this text as the law of retaliation: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. A mechanism appears here that will last for millennia: the appeal to a divine order, the only thing capable of giving the text its weight and legitimacy. If a man puts out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out; if he breaks a bone, his bone shall be broken.

But the principle of hierarchy is of supreme importance: members of each sex and each class do not have the same value, and this can be read in the very wording of the laws. The life of a woman of the intermediate class is worth thirty shekels of silver, that of a slave twenty, while the eye of a man of the intermediate class is worth sixty.

One point strikes us today as utterly inconceivable: children are not considered independent persons but the property of their parents. If a man kills another man’s child, it is not he who is put to death: it is his daughter, who asked nothing of anyone, because she is regarded as his property. It seems senseless to us; it was perfectly just in the eyes of Hammurabi and of all Babylonians.

The code therefore rests on a wager: if everyone accepts their place and the consequences that come with it, society will be able to cooperate on a very large scale, produce enough food for all, distribute it efficiently, protect itself from its enemies, extend its territory and build immense monuments.

Three thousand five hundred years later

Let us jump to 4 July 1776. The inhabitants of the thirteen British colonies feel they are being treated unjustly by the King of England; their representatives gather in Philadelphia and decide together that they are no longer subjects of the Crown. The Declaration of Independence lays down rules of functioning that likewise rest on a divine order — exactly as Hammurabi had done, a moment earlier on the scale of humanity. And it promises exactly the same thing: if individuals respect the laws laid down, they will be able to cooperate efficiently and build a great society together.

These principles have, in themselves, no objective validity. Our laws are in perpetual evolution, and our current definition of the order of things is closely bound to the great ideas of our time. It is at the end of an extremely complex process of mental construction, and after millennia, that we have arrived at a representation in which violence is abnormal, almost pathological, and therefore punishable. That subtlety is exquisite from a philosophical standpoint; if we look behind us, it is far from being the norm.

What this opens up for clinical work

So, is violence natural? I would tend to answer yes, in a way: it is part of the construction and evolution of the human species. We have arrived at a complex and recent representation in which it is punishable, and we have built a whole universe of thought that lets us cooperate more efficiently still — up to a form of cooperation on a global scale, with all the flaws and excesses that entails.

Now, if violence is natural, then containing it is anything but automatic: it is learned, it is taught, it belongs to a set of transmitted representations. From there, its manifestations can be read as a failure to internalise the law. The law rests on a few principles, and individuals can be situated according to how far they have integrated them: a valuable tool for understanding intrafamilial, marital or societal violence, and for intervening as well, particularly in a therapeutic setting.

That is what is taken further by the scale of aggressiveness and the different types of violence, and by the systemic reading of violence within the family.