The science of revenge: a new book maintains that revenge is dependence – but does not convince

The science of revenge
James Kimmel Jr. (Books Harmony)

Few people can easily have until revenge – but it is undeniable that some of us do it.

The fixing of the American president Donald Trump on the scores to the “cancellation culture” of police services on social networks, and perhaps even to the slaughter of the emblematic tree Sycamore gaping in the United Kingdom-perhaps an attempt to recover because of one of the forces recognized at risk-revenge can be more plausible than love like the force that makes the world. Could we even go so far as to call him dependence?

James Kimmel Jr. supports with passion that we can – and we owe, if the world becomes a more compassionate place. His new book The science of revenge: understanding the deadliest dependence in the world – and how to overcome it Reflects his efforts, over a decade, to improve our understanding of neurology that stimulates revenge and recognizes his mortal toll.

You cannot deny Kimmel’s diplomas: he is a lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Yale, where he conducted studies on engine control and a lawyer. As a former civil litigant, resolving non -criminal disputes, he saw how the law could be abused to progress personal grievances and punish the enemies perceived, in particular by the rich and the powerful.

He also understood the impetus, he wrote. Having grown up in rural Pennsylvania in the early 1980s, he was the victim of intimidation and his family intimidated. Their dog was even shot. After their mailbox was exploded, the Kimmel teenager ended up shooting a weapon on his tormentors – but not the trigger.

However, writes Kimmel, his unrelated grievances ended up leading him to law – “professional revenge activity”. After a mental breakdown, he began to seek his theory of “dependence on revenge”, swiveling in psychiatry to progress it.

Today, Kimmel himself indicates as a “drug addict of revenge in convalescence”, as well as years of scientific investigation, to plead in favor of “compulsive research of revenge” to be understood as dependence and a brain disease.

He maintains that the desire for revenge records in the brain of certain individuals in the same way as narcotics, activating the desires, going beyond the impulse controls and “satisfying the same desire of the biological brain of pain relief and the hedonic reward”.

If he is confirmed, writes Kimmel, this idea could not only explain “the desire to hurt and kill”, but also to present a possible path to prevent violence. He suggests that by identifying people with a tendency to feel victims, nurses perceived the grievances and ruminate on reprisals, it may be possible to stop mass fire and other fatal explosions on their traces.

To assert his file, he refers to very credible research on reward, revenge and forgiveness. It is in advance on the limits of their application or their relevance for its concept of dependence on revenge, and includes voices of skeptical experts alongside those who agree that there can be something.

However, his eagerness to credit revenge as the cause of “all wars, murders and physical and psychological aggressions throughout human history” can extinguish readers as much as he persuades them.

Kimmel does not deny the relevance of “genetic factors, early trauma or psychosocial and environmental circumstances”, and says that dependence on revenge is not intended to excuse people who commit violent crimes. But it is often the impression that he creates, as when he compares to the experience of an episode of “desire for revenge” potentially deadly to a heart attack.

It is both confusing and clumsy. Kimmel is the most convincing when he tells the stories of people who have escaped lives shaped by hatred, like a former Ku Klux Klansman who now helps others. But its fixation on revenge as a root of all the evil risks pushing the nuances and other contributory factors (such as misogyny or sexual abuse of childhood) to the team.

His analyzes of the manifests of mass murderers and the psychologies of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong via the close (at best) objective of dependence on revenge are particularly uncomfortably. Revenge is perhaps underestimated as a motivation force through history, but Kimmel can be too close to its subject.

She Hunt is a writer based in Norwich, in the United Kingdom,

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