Publisher's Synopsis
Originally published in 1972, "Human Destructiveness" provides a study of humanity's capacity for evil. Its author, one of Britain's foremost psychiatrists, has rewritten this 2nd edition to take into account the most recent findings and his own accumulated experience as a psychotherapist. The text presents the relevant findings from psychology and psychiatry concerning our capacity for aggression, hatred and cruelty. In seeking to shed light on such brutal phenomena as genocide, racial conflict and other large-scale manifestations of violence, the author cautions against easy extrapolations from individual behaviour to the behaviour of groups or nations, although he offers discussions of aggressive personality disorders, sadomasochism and paranoid delusion. Most provocatively, he locates the propensity for mass outbreaks of violence in the human imagination.
