In a notable analysis of shame, guilt and violence forensic psychiatrist James Gilligan (2003) recounts what he had learned, after working with thousands of violent offenders in prisons and mental health institutions over nearly four decades, about the causes and prevention of violence, about what it is that drives certain people, in certain circumstances, to commit acts of extreme violence. Gilligan found that when he asked perpetrators about their crimes, they repeatedly offered the same explanation. They had used violence either because they had felt ‘dissed’ or disrespected by their victims or because they wanted to gain respect in the eyes of others. Violence had served as a mechanism for countering feelings of belittlement or for achieving personal esteem (see also Hicks, 2011). Over time Gilligan began to realise that it is the detrimental impact of shame, and the visceral need to ward off or eliminate shame, that is the psychological pathogen from which violence springs, and not just in interpersonal relationships but also in large-scale conflicts.

Unsurprisingly Gilligan found that the most persistent offenders had almost always suffered overwhelming abuse or neglect in childhood. Many said they felt ‘dead’ inside: empty, numb, frozen, without human emotions, such as love or fear or regret, and even unable to feel physical sensations. It was as if their personalities had died long before they started killing others, Gilligan surmises. This feeling of emotional or spiritual deadness was so intolerable they were prepared to do anything, even commit horrific atrocities, including terrible self-mutilations, just in order to feel alive again. Their violence was a desperate attempt ‘to resurrect their dead self and bring it back to life – to become “born again”, so to speak, through an act of apocalyptic violence’ (Gilligan, 2003: 1153).

At first, Gilligan thought he had discovered something original about the psychological genesis of violence, something previously unknown. But then he happened to reread the biblical story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:3–16), putatively the first recorded murder in history, and realised ‘the Bible had arrived at the same psychological insight I had, but a long time earlier’ (Gilligan, 2003: 1156).