Brill Violence: ‘Mercurial Gestalt’: 47 (At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, 47)

"One afternoon, a patient who had been in three times weekly ... psychotherapy ... left my office after her session, drove down to the train tracks half a mile from my office, and sat down facing an oncoming train." This tragic event opens the essay by psychoanalyst Susanne Chassay who explores the relationship between private and political terrorism. Her viewpoint complements analyses of violence - that 'mercurial gestalt' - by other contributors to this collection derived from a 2003 Cultures of Violence conference held at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, organized by the Inter-disciplinary Net. From fields as diverse as philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, political science, literary criticism, and forensics, authors consider, for instance, hostility to European minorities; military training and torture; the 'endemic violence' aesthetically recorded by Haitian novelists; child abuse in film; female genital mutilation in fiction; or the massacre of Koreans during the 1923 Japanese earthquake. Violence in contact zones in Northern Ireland or in the memory of South African museum directors trying to comply with Truth and Reconciliation Commission mandates is also an object of scrutiny here. Finally, that vexed, primordial issue of violence - nature or nurture? - is probed. About the Author Tobe Levin, Ph. D., is collegiate professor, University of Maryland University College in Europe and adjunct, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. She specializes in African American and Jewish women’s writing, edits a journal, Feminist Europa. Review of Books, and is currently a non-resident ‘Fellow’ at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute, Harvard University. Chair of FORWARD - Germany and founding member of the European Network (EuroNet) FGM, she has been active against female genital mutilation since 1977. Fluent in German, French and Spanish, she translated the well-received autobiography by Fadumo Korn and Sabine Eichhorst. Born in the Big Rains. A Memoir of Somalia and Survival. Trans. and Afterword Tobe Levin. NY: The Feminist Press, 2006.