What’s Going on Around Here? Psychodynamic Thinking on Guns, Violence, and Youth in America: Aggression, Depression, and Destruction

ABSTRACT In May 2022, a gunman entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX and shot and killed 21 people, including 19 children. Section II (child and adolescence) of the American Psychological Association, Division 39 (the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology) responded by organizing a two-part conversation series, titled, “What’s going on around here? Psychodynamic Thinking on Guns, Violence, and Youth in America,” a heading we hoped would capture the intention to think together about these issues, which themselves are difficult to define and label. This paper is a manuscript of the first of these conversations, with discussants Shana Grover, PhD, Ali Khadivi, PhD, and Larry Rosenberg, PhD, who were invited based on their clinical and professional experience working with young people who are considered at-risk for perpetrating violence, as well as those who have themselves been victims of violence. The conversation centered on the ways that psychodynamic thinking can inform how mental health professionals conceptualize what underlies an individual’s threats or acts of violence, approach risk assessment and intervention, and formulate an understanding of these horrific events at an individual, and cultural and societal level, to guide our responses both inside and outside of the therapy room.