These observations, and many others like them, convinced me that the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation, a feeling that is painful and can even be intolerable and overwhelming, and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride.

I used to think that there are many causes of violences, just as there are many kinds of violence. But I now am convinced that human violence is the result of shame, or a human's aversion to it.

(Pardon the .pdf file and its somewhat whacky punctuation.)

jadedog:

This entire article is about violence in males. It only glances over females for about a sentence or two. In those couple sentences, it basically says that females are culturally trained to behave differently in the face of shame and guilt.

If the desired end result is the reduction of violence, can males be trained in the same way?

posted 2877 days ago