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Killing, Societal Fascination With
The fascination with killing cannot be directly traced back to an alleged instinct of aggression. The fascinating fantasies about killing are culturally guided quests for an answer to certain ubiquitous intersubjective and intrasubjective conflicts revolving around the ambivalence between love and hate. It is based in an affective attractedness, to which one (initially) does not completely surrender oneself. Only in fantasies, the subject secretly but lustfully lurks around the object of desire—until a war provides an opportunity to realize these fantasies. In social sciences, the genesis of the fascination with killing has been explored in the most differentiated way by psychoanalytical social psychology.
The Death Wish and the Dialectics of Recognition
The psychoanalytic perspective deepens the common psychological approaches to explain the affective layer of military and ...
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