Violent Adolescents: Understanding the Destructive Impulse

124 Pages·2005·0.36 MB·English

by  Lynn Greenwood

VIOLENT ADOLESCENTS
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VIOLENT ADOLESCENTS
Understanding the Destructive Impulse
Edited by
Lynn Greenwood
Foreword by
Robin Anderson
Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series
Series Editor Honorary Consultant
Brett Kahr Estela Welldon
KARNAC
LONDON NEWYORK
First published in 2005 by
H. Karnac (Books) Ltd.
6 Pembroke Buildings, London NW10 6RE
Arrangement, Introduction © 2005 by Lynn Greenwood; Foreword copyright
© 2005 by Robin Anderson; chapter 1 copyright © 2005 by Andrea L. Scherzer;
chapter 2 copyright © 2005 by Lucia Berdondini & Andreas P. D. Liefooghe;
chapter 3 copyright © 2005 by Reinmar du Bois; chapter 4 copyright © 2005 by
Bruce Irvine; chapter 5 copyright © 2005 by Emily Cooney & Lynn Greenwood
The rights of the editors and contributors to be identified as the authors of this
work have been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright
Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
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permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 1-85575-915-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Edited, designed, and produced by Communication Crafts
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
In memory of Patrick Tomlin

CONTENTS
SERIES FOREWORD ix
EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS xiii
FOREWORD
Robin Anderson xvii
Introduction
Lynn Greenwood 1
CHAPTER ONE
Understanding self-destructive behaviour in adolescence
Andrea L. Scherzer 5
CHAPTER TWO
Beyond “bullies” and “victims”:
a systemic approach to tackling school bullying
Lucia Berdondini & Andreas P. D. Liefooghe 21
vii
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER THREE
Parent battering and its roots in infantile trauma
Reinmar du Bois 39
CHAPTER FOUR
Violence in care
Bruce Irvine 57
CHAPTER FIVE
Working with adolescents who want to kill themselves
Emily Cooney & Lynn Greenwood 73
REFERENCES 87
INDEX 95
SERIES FOREWORD
Brett Kahr
Centre for Child Mental Health, London
and
The Winnicott Clinic of Psychotherapy, London
T
hroughout most of human history, our ancestors have done
rather poorly when dealing with acts of violence. To cite but
one of many shocking examples, let us perhaps recall a case
from 1801, of an English boy aged only 13, who was executed by
hanging on the gallows at Tyburn. What was his crime? It seems that
he had been condemned to die for having stolen a spoon (Westwick,
1940).
In most cases, our predecessors have either ignored murderousness
and aggression, as in the case of Graeco–Roman infanticide, which
occurred so regularly in the ancient world that it acquired an almost
normative status (deMause, 1974; Kahr, 1994); or they have punished
murderousness and destruction with retaliatory sadism, a form of un-
conscious identification with the aggressor. Any history of criminology
will readily reveal the cruel punishments inflicted upon prisoners
throughout the ages, ranging from beatings and stockades, to more
severe forms of torture, culminating in eviscerations, beheadings, or
lynchings.
Only during the last one hundred years have we begun to develop
the capacity to respond more intelligently and more humanely to acts
of dangerousness and destruction. Since the advent of psychoanalysis
ix