Violence is doubtlessly one of the scourges of humankind, yet, though we have many clues about it, it is hard to conceptualize and therefore eliminate.
The goal of this symposium is to further a meta-view of violence, from which its different dimensions, manifestations and perversities can be orientated, specified categorized and as it were diagnosed, and eventually, hopefully, find directions to be treated.
In order to do this, two new concepts derived from a view of traumatology will be introduced. They are (1) survival strategies and (2) their three dimensional (or triaxial ramifications. To preempt the thrust of this talk, I will suggest that while all survival strategies have their forms of violence, the maladaptive aspects of the survival strategies fight, flight, assertiveness and competition, have been and are especially virulent in human history, and are worth examining.
Survival strategies and their triaxial framework, are more fully described in my book, From Survival to Fulfillment; A Framework for the Life-Trauma Dialectic,
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