Human aggression – a mysterious and puzzling force

"We have decided to execute you straight away", he says to me as he briskly enters the room where I have been sitting since dawn, picking up an R4 rifle and pointing it at my chest. There is little emotion in his voice.

This member of the notorious Security Branch of the South African Police tells me this is their decision. His colleague has been guarding me all day since my detention before dawn that winter Monday morning. I am being held under the State of Emergency Security Laws which allow for indefinite and incommunicado detention. I find myself on the infamous 10th floor of John Vorster Square Police Headquarters, the notorious blue and white building in downtown Johannesburg. 

It is 1986, still four years before the African National Congress is unbanned. Nelson Mandela is still in prison. I am quietly mulling my surroundings and the awareness that I am in the same office in which Dr Neil Aggett, a medical doctor and activist, had been tortured to death four years previously. I had attended his funeral, alongside tens of thousands of others. The authorities said he committed suicide in his cell. It was to be many years before his death and the many deaths in this blue and white building would be reframed as murder.

Indefinite detention and solitary confinement are not easy. Stripped of all vestiges of control and human contact, the psyche quickly becomes vulnerable and distressed. Compound this with hostile and often violent torture and interrogation, an uncertain future, and the constant challenges to normal defences and self-protection, the sense of dread and victimhood becomes a detainees' constant companion [i]. How you breathe, pee, and eat, what you say, do, or see is controlled by others. It is not a game, it is deadly serious and for those that ended up dead through 'committing suicide', 'slipping on the soap', or 'falling out the window' [ii] this experience of victimhood was hyperreal [iii]. This was the height of Apartheid South Africa's civil war reaching its crescendo and spasms of violence and struggle.

Alone in the office on the tenth floor, the situation is intimate as the Security policemen and I contemplate my impending execution. In those nanoseconds that the mind can process moments of crisis, I am not convinced such a noisy and messy method would be their choice. My guard has been telling me all day that what I represent is dangerous. I am struck by his perception that I am the threat in this equation. How could I possibly be the threat? Alone, vulnerable, and without any vestiges of control. I was, my interrogators would keep telling me, a perpetrator threatening their fabric of stability and civilisation, furthering the aims of powers arraigned like a total onslaught against the State and its people. It was indeed political, but it was also personal. Their lives, lifestyles, and security, and their families and futures were under attack. Who did I think I was, the one interrogator had repeatedly shouted at me in salty language, in my naive gullibility and martyred idealism to threaten them and contribute to this untenable situation? Did I really want to get slaughtered in my bed if the barricades came down and they were defeated?

There was a point at which the inversions of who was the victim and who was the perpetrator got weird and confusing. Alone and cold in my cell later that evening, I began to consider this inversion, and it gradually became clearer to me: first, it was a function of perspective and subjectivity; second, it was a function of who was preserving what interest and identity; and third, the greater the perception of threat, the greater the resort to the use of various forms of aggression. These inversions appeared in many places when I began to explore them, and as the science and psychology wrestled with these questions through my career, it became muddier and more vexing, riddled with paradox and counter-intuitive tensions that required answers.

The scourge of human aggression against other humans has plagued humanity since time immemorial, and as it turns out, probably originated before humanity even existed. In fact, the science has shown us that this aggressive drive probably had its roots as early as when molecular life stirred from its beginnings in the inorganic deep in the earth and oceans and became animate. Did electron gradients in hydrothermal vents billions of years ago have a link to the development of later human aggression?

In ways unique amongst the species, humans have the capacity to destroy each other at scale in endlessly macabre and inventive forms and to transgress against their own species in ways that seem to make little evolutionary sense. Often, individual squabbles, conflicts, and violence in the domestic space find parallels in group conflicts, geo-political tensions, and wars. Too often, the drivers of destruction have underlying them only feelings of victimhood and threat. It is as if underneath so many acts of destructive aggression lies this perception of victimhood. This perception of being the victim facing threat often motivates an aggressive defence which can be rationalized as just cause, given the human minds' capacity to channel rage into ideological narratives. Such ideological justifications can hence suffer the mutilations of what is regarded as rational in the service of some deeper unresolved emotional perception.

Any organism must either resist impingement to maintain itself and its homeostasis or adapt to changing conditions in order to enable survival. In this sense, 'survival of the fittest' is about how any organism can adapt to new challenges and become 'compliant' to these demands in order to master challenges. Sometimes, as Freud noted in a letter to Einstein in 1933 addressing the question Einstein put to him about war [iv], that the "organism preserves its own life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one". The drive of preservation turns to destructiveness but only, it seems, in an effort to better protect itself.

But is this true? So much human-on-human aggression ends up to be both self-defeating and often self-destructive, both to the individual and to the species. On the face of it, this does not seem to square with theories of evolution of adaptation. Whilst human aggression and destructiveness is all around us all of the time and seems ubiquitous to everyday existence throughout the ages of humanity, it also remains a mysterious and puzzling force the moment we probe deeper into it. Why on earth would humans be so destructive to other humans? It makes little sense in the context of science, evolution, and survival, let alone the psychology of well-being and actualisation. How can the human species thrive whilst simultaneously having the capacity to destroy itself and often seems intent on so doing? Closer to home, why do the majority of intimate relationships flame-out in a tailspin of hurt and conflict, often leading to terrible costs to the children, mental health, and the purses of everyone involved? How do we explain road rage that leads to jail terms, violence against women that attacks the fabric of family and community, or sexual violence that tears apart societal cohesion. Or serial killers who relentlessly pursue their grim compulsion and invariably trigger their own eventual demise. Or suicide bombers that fly into  buildings in pursuit of their cause in the full knowledge of ensuring their own premature entropy, hardly a natural course to end life as the theories would suggest? The list goes on, and none of these examples make much evolutionary or adaptive sense. Unlike other species, we kill ourselves and others with what to an outside species might appear to be with relentless and unfathomable gusto.

My book is not about philosophical speculation or ideological judgement about matters of aggression and destructiveness. I use ideological and theological references not as a religious or ideological plug but because human narratives are captured through history and this gives us useful data. Human history also has memory captured in the rich complexity of theological memory and its reflections on human nature, and I draw on some of these to provide deep and rich data on the universality and timelessness of the themes we explore in the science. There is no necessary contradiction between these narratives - even when they use different language to describe the same phenomena.

My book is about the science of aggression - delving deeper into the mysteries of this side of human nature. It is a psychological investigation that strives to draw upon and unify the good works of science and neuroscience with the less tangible or quantifiable qualities of feelings and consciousness. This may sound like an overly ambitious project requiring me to 'stay in my lane' of psychological expertise. However, even the great pioneer of the mind, the neurologist Sigmund Freud, who provided us with some groundbreaking, profound and timeless insights into the mechanisms of the aggressive drive that we draw upon here, also lamented the limitations of his research works into aggression in his time. Struggling with the inadequacies of science and biology in his day over one hundred years ago, he nonetheless drew on the natural sciences to assist him in completing what he saw as his theoretical speculations around the mind and its aggressive drive. In fact, Freud made the point reflectively that "uncertainty of our speculation has been greatly increased by the necessity for borrowing from the science of biology", and that since biology is a land of unlimited possibilities, "we may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess which answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it". [v] Freud's theory of aggression was incomplete as was his consideration of the implications of what he discovered. He noted how his theoretical observations raised a host of other questions "to which we can at present find no answer" - we must, he wrote, "be patient and await fresh methods and occasions of research". [vi] This book aims to follow Freud's advice and take a small step forward, to complete our understanding of aggression, its origins in nature and its mechanisms in human life. To do this, we will draw on the current knowledge of science and biology towards building a more unified theory of the psychology of human aggression and conflict.

So much of the psychological and biological evidence brings us to some strange and paradoxical conclusions: that inevitably, from a subjective point of view, aggressive enactments seem to derive from perceptions of injury and threat. Perpetrators invariably see themselves as the victims in their narratives. It is an uncomfortable correlation which raises issues of culpability to those who become victims or perpetrate enactments. The science of describing these mechanisms in no way serves to justify violence or destructive enactments at the personal or political level. Rather, science must be invoked to make sense of the often-unfathomable realities of complex life and the demands of living. Perhaps, by understanding why individuals or leaders of countries aggress in often vile and unfathomable ways we might better intervene to reduce such effects of what in essence, as we shall discover, aims to be a benign drive in the nature of living things.

For over three decades I have worked as a clinical psychologist specialising in individual and couple therapy. This work with couples in treatment has consistently demonstrated a correlation between perceptions of hurt and the activation of an aggressive response. The greater the perception of victimhood, the greater the aggressive mobilisation. What often appears to an outsider as a perpetrator, feels from the inside to be victimhood. It seems that those who aggress the most invariably feel the most hurt and aggrieved. The greater the aggressor response, the more likely they feel the victim. Whilst correlation is not causation, the deeper I have excavated this mechanism the closer I have come to finding that perhaps, in fact, there is a causal link. My book aims to put that causal link into place and make sense of how a benign drive in nature with benign aims can become so malignant with such destructive effects. When one thinks about it, this ubiquitous aspect of humankind stops making sense the more one tries to understand its purpose in life. Marital conflict, group tensions, ethnic wars, violence on the street, and shootings in supermarkets or schools do not square with aggression serving any adaptive purpose.

A psychic drive, whether sexual or aggressive, can, it seems, become perverted and can develop a life of its own in split-off and separated ways. Unlike sexuality which impacts individuals, perversion of the aggressive drive can be scaled and this makes it so dangerous to both the individual human and humanity as a collective. Separated from its unconscious origins in memory, its immense power derives from the internal representation, often disproportionality perceived through old lenses in development. Accordingly, the tendency of a reactivation of old injuries will invariably be disproportionate to the trigger and only makes sense with the perspective of subjectivity in mind. Put in neuroscientific terms, aggression seems to serve the function of protecting a self-organising system from entropy. Or a little more strictly, aggression protects the self-organising system from their perception of threats to their subjective equilibrium. A guardian of equilibrium is essential to the mental apparatus' ability to safeguard and regulate both mind and body, but especially the mind's function in the service of the mind-body system.

Hence, under the strain of perversion when this mechanism develops a life of its own, separated from its original activations in life, this guardian of the peace becomes a weapon of war, the guardian of stasis becomes a tool of retaliation, trading outer destructiveness for inner peace of mind. As a former security policeman reflected on it after Apartheid ended: 

"Fighting a revolutionary war is much more difficult than fighting ordinary criminals. You must remember that you are fighting the crème de la crème; the best brains available in this onslaught are your opponents. You must be one step ahead of these people". [vii]

Aggression in the service of defence? This is a narrative you will see over and over as we explore the subject.

At least in theory, this would be its purpose but there is invariably a cost to the perversion of the aggressive drive - sometimes internal guilt and evacuation, like a bee that stings and in the process eviscerates itself. At other times it contributes to the genesis of symptoms like anxiety, depression, or psychosomatic illnesses. Or on a grander scale, the loss of life that invariably leads to the aggressors' own geo-political demise - a kind of geo-political suicide by grand homicide. Such is nature's tendency to balance the books in the bigger picture of living life - but this may be little comfort to those who suffer at the hands of aggression whether in the domestic or social space. Understanding the aim of aggression, however, in both the clinical and social space, may edge us closer to entering the unconscious motivators of those who aggress and decode and decipher the underlying unconscious triggers. As we will see, amidst the myriad of individual complexity and subjectivity, these links are not so mysterious after-all, and we may be able to enable healthy aggression in the service of being the guardian of the mind's peace rather than its acceleration into scaled destruction, perverse in its effects, and unwanted at the end of the day, by everyone. This exquisite complexity of the mental apparatus is humbling but like many phenomena in science and nature, paradoxes are often evident and counter-intuitive, like the concept of time being relative and space can curve. How strange to think of aggression and destructiveness as originating as the guardian of the peace?

What begins as a protective mechanism to maintain psychic homeostasis ends up in a perverse loop, aggression at others that is perceived through projection to be the source of risk to one's own subjectivity, the internal self-identity that creates a sense of cohesion in the world. The guardian of the self now becomes a perverted guardian, and in its wake all manner of symptoms, psychopathology and interpersonal strife can manifest. The costs to this drive unchecked can be high indeed.

This book aims to weave a tapestry of theory and science to form a picture of the nature of aggression, in both the most literal and abstract senses of the term nature. The journey takes us through various facets of evolution, biology, and neuroscience to build upon Freud's and psychoanalysis' deep insights into the processes of psychological functioning and the relationship of the human psyche to the energetics of biology and evolution. To accomplish this goal, we need to understand various aspects of the human psyche, its subjectivity, perceptions, and use of memory. We also need to make sense of the biological and evolutionary drivers of life and the mechanisms life uses to both survive and thrive whilst preserving itself against the constant threats of entropy. We need to investigate the pesky problems of consciousness and feelings, and the role these play in maintaining our inordinately complex functioning in a constantly changing and threatening world.

I have leant on great thinkers and scientists in this work, some of them are accomplished Nobel Prize winning experts in their fields that enable cross-links to be forged to weave the tapestry of a unifying theory of aggression. I hope these cross-overs will begin to make sense as we link the threads from various disciplines of biology, evolution, neuroscience, psychology and psychoanalysis and place the real world and its examples under the feet of these theoretical giants. Some of these lateral and innovative thinkers are contemporary, like Kandel, Panksepp, and Solms. Others are the giants of our scientific foundations like Darwin and Freud, the conquistadors of new terrain, breaking new ground at a level that is permanently knowledge changing. These thinkers complement each other, because they describe different aspects of the same phenomenon from the vantage points of their respective disciplines. This complementarity allows progress and methods to complete aspects of theory and knowledge previously incomplete, for reasons of the limitations of technology and science in its day or because fresh methods emerge over time. This work is inspired by Freud's gigantic leaps and insights, some of which remain, by his own reckoning and acknowledgement, incomplete, awaiting fresh insights. To paraphrase Freud, what we don't achieve flying we can at least achieve limping. But sometimes, through the incisive thinking and dedicated footwork of others, we do take little quantum jumps forward.

In psychological work, there is nothing more sacrosanct than confidentiality, nothing more ethically compelling than complete respect for each and every patient's boundaries. As such, this book does not present clinical material from my consulting room. It does not need to - since there are ample case material and data in the public domain, geo-political conflicts, historical figures, and public cases of violent offenders. In this work I use that material because it captures so well the psychological processes that we explore, sometimes in its extreme forms, but often so much clearer as a result. The sacred space of the consulting room must remain inviolate and I trust the reader will grasp the essence of the theory using the biological and psychological data at hand.

I hope by the end of it, you will make better sense of this strange human tendency to aggress and how it drives us in our relationships, cultures, countries and wars. But also, as mental health issues foreground in the modern era, understanding the aggressive drive assists in making sense of individual symptoms, anxiety, depression, and maladies of the mind and body. It is this drive that holds the key to unlocking individual symptoms and why they occur the way they do. We may not be able to save the world, but we can reduce the struggles of living and the pain of life through insights such as these.

Dr. Adrian Perkel (M.A. Clin. Psych.; D.Phil.) is a registered practising clinical psychologist based in Cape Town. Since 1989, he has been lecturing, writing, supervising other professionals, and practising psychotherapy. His work is deeply informed by psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

• Unlocking the Nature of Human Aggression: A Psychoanalytic and Neuroscientific Approach, by Adrian Perkel, is published by Routledge. This preface is reproduced with their kind permission. 
• The book is reviewed here.

Notes

[i] See John Schlapobersky (2021). When They Came for Me: The Hidden Diary of an Apartheid Prisoner for a powerful first-hand insight into the psychological effects on a detainee. As a practicing psychologist, his memoir provides unique insights into the experience.

[ii] In practice, argues Thomas Grant in his book on the trials and inquests during the Apartheid era, detention was not just used as a pretext for torture but also increasingly for state-orchestrated assassination. "At inquest after inquest police officers would straight-facedly explain that detainees had slipped on bars of soap, fallen downstairs, hanged themselves or engaged in acts of self-defenestration from high windows" he writes. In Thomas Grant, (2022). The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid, pp. 243-244. John Murray: London.

[iii] See the poem 'In detention', written by Chris van Wyk, a writer and poet during the Apartheid era.

[iv] Freud, S. (1933). Why War?, p.211.

[v] Freud, S., (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 334.

[vi] Freud, S., (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 338.

[vii] "'Fighting a revolutionary war is much more difficult than fighting ordinary criminals. You must remember that you are fighting sometimes against the crème de la crème; the best brains available in this onslaught are your opponents. You have to be one step ahead of these people.

In retrospect it's unfortunate that these things happened. If my opponents look back it's also unfortunate that certain policemen were killed in bomb explosions and in attacks on their houses. But both sides have to prove a point and you have to be result driven…We were there for the preservation of the internal security of the Republic. So sometimes it was very, very difficult.'"

Hennie Heymans, former security policeman