Acting Out in Violent Ways

By Kevin Murphy MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychoanalyst,
Dublin, Ireland.


Another young man in Germany has attacked a school and caused bodily harm to his peers. Probably like so many of the cases we hear about, and Ireland has its own recent examples of young men being unexpectedly violent, we will discover that he was a quiet person who gave no sign of being capable of doing such a thing. Friends will probably recall that he was a doer of good deeds if a little shy, a bit withdrawn even. And yet he was probably friendly when people did talk to him.
His bewildered parents will probably remember him in their grief as a conscientious boy who had been a wonderful son. But in recent years he had become somewhat introverted. They first noticed this when he had a setback with school or friends or a girlfriend. He was not into drugs or drink. He was polite with most people. They cannot understand it.
I am not trying to read the future but rather draw on what we know from past experiences of this kind. In most of these cases that you read about, the individuals who are almost exclusively young or young-ish males have shown no sign of pathology. That is, they have not shown any obvious signs of being mentally ill. They have - up to the moment of their attack on friends, or school mates, or family –been living relatively normal lives that are subject to the same ups and downs that everyone experiences.
But what marks them out is that the act they committed involved, to a greater or lesser extent, some degree of planning, some degree of having been thought out beforehand. This makes what they chose to do rather different from blind rage.

French clinical psychiatry and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is also French in origin, has a phrase called ‘passage à l’acte’ or passage to the act. It designates impulsive acts, of a violent or criminal nature, which sometimes mark the onset of an acute psychotic episode.
These acts mark the point when the person moves, almost in the blinking of an eye, from a violent idea to the carrying out of the act. Because these acts are attributed to the action of madness, however temporary it might have been, French law says that the person does not have civil responsibility for them. One could call them crimes of passion.
It was French psychoanalyst Dr Jacques Lacan who spotted the difference and laid out the finer points of the distinction between this kind of action and what is more commonly known as ‘acting out’. For him, both sets of actions were last resort defences against extreme anxiety but there is a distinct difference.
The person who ‘acts out’ remains within the scene he or she is creating. That is to say they ‘remain’ in that they have a knowing sense of what it is they are doing, despite it being wrong or harmful. This same sense of knowing allows them prepare petrol bombs or buy weapons and plan out their attack.
By contrast, in a ‘passage to the act’, the person who commits the offence or the crime does not stay in the scene but effectively exits from the scene altogether at the moment it happens. This is best illustrated by someone who, pushed to an arbitrary and personal limit of endurance, strikes out at someone they love in such a way that causes catastrophic damage and they remember practically nothing about it afterwards.
The action feels as if it is over in an instant, almost before they know it. In this sense the person they normally are leaves the scene momentarily, even while carrying out the attack, only to return ‘to their senses’ and the consequences of what they have done.
For Lacan, ‘acting out’ is a symbolic message addressed to the bigger society in which we live. It is a message sent to the big ‘out there’, to no one in particular and yet to everyone. It is one that wants its meaning to be inscribed on the person’s own past as well on our communal present and our future. It seeks to insert itself into myth, history and even language itself. It says ‘I have suffered and the world must know’.
A ‘passage to the act’ is the opposite. It is a flight, albeit one that takes place at an automatic level, from language, experience, interpretation and the salvation of the human relationship into the raw, unmediated, beyond words, almost too-real dimension of physical destruction. In carrying out a ‘passage to the act’ therefore the person is exiting from the intricate network of symbols, signs and language that tie us all together in the social bond.
The person who ‘acts out’ is having the same destructive effect except they are very much present in the scene. And while the rage that drives the desire to harm is similar, it has risen to consciousness much earlier and embraced the idea to strike out over a longer period of time.
The symptoms of internalized rage are obviously difficult to see. Especially when you consider how many times the acts of violent young men are described as ‘out of character’ by those who knew them well. So if they are not obvious, then perhaps it is time we paid attention to the less obvious, less observable, almost invisible signs.
For over 150 years, psychoanalysis has posited that aggression and the potential for violence lurks within us all. It is part of our structural framework but for most of us the effects of parents, family, society, our personal constitution and personalities ensure that we remain able to contain and master it. But it lurks there in our unconscious nevertheless. Maybe an approach that took more account of this aspect of our mental life could make us more astute in seeing the signs.