**3.1 Subjectivity formation**

The mirror stage in the infant's development provides no coherent experience of the image in the mirror. Anamorphic as it is, it tends to convey rather fragmented than coherent aspects of the personality-to-be. That is why Lacan considered coherence an illusion, also owing to the fact that infantile dependence and helplessness are not conveyed in the mirror image. In referring to physiological prematurity, Lacan is close to Otto Rank's concept in which the whole self ("Total-Ich") precedes the partial self ("Partial-Ich"). Anything which is postnatal will only remain partial. Along birth, any wholeness will inevitably be lost: this is what humans will have to accept in life [82]. Here, we have a deceptive case of anthropology: there is not any totality possible. Infantile identification with the mirror image brings about alienation, or alteration, to the emerging subject, as well as dehiscence and discord seemingly biological yet a specifically human feature [83]. Basic vulnerability stems from this stage; it can shake the infant when it is confronted with outer objects. Any identification, e.g., with parents, siblings, or teachers bears refractions.

When the mother reflects the infant, the infant creates an imaginary space through projecting his own reflected bodily self [30]. It is eventually connected to the fantasy, or anticipation, of separation by a cut. This phenomenon is linked to the illusion of coherence, which provides stability; on the other hand, there is a subversion-proneness due to an inherent amount of fictitiousness and externality within the developmental process. In the course, the outer world is perceived more coherent, more indisputable than it really is. More often than not, those objects out there are experienced as identifiable egos having unity, permanence and, first of all, substance. But those objects generally comprise a fair share of ourselves, which we tend to have abdicated ambivalence and fragmentation: after all, we wonder why those objects are that fragile. So, imaginary coherence provides people with anxiety too. The earliest developmental stages, pre- and postnatal, are gateways to imaginary formations of ideals via identification and reproduction of social roles. Taking on societal relations that begin at this point, the subject remaining is prone to ideological indoctrination. Social environment might fill the subjects' fantasies at worst distracting the subject from recognizing reality,

eventually leading to escapism [84]. The infant's bewilderedness at that stage makes for irritation, and for readiness to fetch interpellation.

Violent behavior is to be called subjective violence, as it is clearly visible and shows in acts of crime. Yet, the location of subjective conflict is not necessarily identical with the location of expressed violence. Children often enact at-homeconflicts in school or kindergarten. Experiences of victimization and conflict may be brought back home, leading to aggressive behavior, e.g., in sibling or in parent interaction. At any rate, violent behavior may be used as a personal solution within a given structure, thus subjective acting manifests as violent acting. What is known is that in families with high psychic dysfunctionality parents are not capable of taking enough care of their children, either physically or psychically. Subjectively violent individuals often seem to have such a background [85], and they have often been victims of violence themselves [86]. Sometimes there has been a lack of attachment in mother-infant-relations existing from birth onwards, or there are disorders of early attachment that have developed in the infant's first year of age, or different sorts of subjective psychopathology in parents affect the infant's emotional development. Still, social status and the status of societal development may compromise psychic competencies, as can be concluded from very different research perspectives [33, 34, 87]. Dysfunctional and noncoherent educational practices in some families, which can puzzle and disturb children and direct their development toward dysfunctional modes of behavior may even be amplified by the loss of societal structure; at least it may disturb families in developing consistent educational modes [15, 46]. Some findings on subjective violence indicate an early lack of empathy in children, a lack of impulse control, and a lack of anger management in connection with early deprivation phenomena. Deviant behavior in the shape of criminal behavior can be viewed as developmental pathology, especially if lack of empathy or lack of emotional reactivity [88] can be diagnosed. Even when in offenders lack of reflective functioning [89] seems to be the key to their violent acting, and their experiences of abuse and violent behavior can be linked to their lack of individual mentalization [90], an important role in socialization must also be seen in educational institutions' repressive force, which mostly will not support empathy but competition. Competition may not be bad, still empathy needs to be supported as levels of empathy indicate the levels of pro-social behavior [91]. Moreover, any subjective behavior can be viewed as a solution-type compromise that is workable on a personal level and is due to the dialectics of acquiescence and resistance in the process of subjectivity formation. Even when such behavior may only be one among several psychic solutions of the individual, it cannot be surprising when some children react violently according to their personal biographic experiencing (cp. **Figure 2**)—which would be a long-term and somewhat functional mode of behavior [92].

#### **3.2 Social objectivity**

While zestful aggression makes for what can be called anthropology of the political [76] that does not deny subjective libidinous aggression aspects, violence must be viewed from a perspective of multifactorial subjective and objective connection. Objective violence is to be differentiated from the subjective kind [93, 94]. Contrary to subjective violence, which is committed by individuals and groups, objective violence emerges through objective reality itself; it is systemic, anonymous violence that is seemingly without reason but conceptual, more uncanny than direct precapitalist socioideological violence, which could be imputed to individuals' intentions [94]. Objective violence stems from the generated frame in which people exist and act. It is the societal background in which ideology evolves in the

*Challenges for Behavioral Neuroscience: Prenatal, Postnatal, and Social Factors DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85368*

#### **Figure 2.**

*Subjective and objective factors model of violent behavior.*

subject. Individuals expressing subjective violence in this context have to be viewed being subjectively and objectively motivated. From an objective perspective, violent acts might be an attempt at realizing representation [32]; from a subjective perspective that would be the wish for reality—which turns out to be second reality [32, 34]. That would be a matter of substructure hitting upon superstructure, as is brain hitting upon societal commodification demands [95]. The contours of society are not only shaped by continuous interpellation through societal systems of economics and politics but the seemingly smooth functioning of society is at the same time obliged to generate outbursts of individual, i.e., subjective violence. What may be conceptualized as personal shortcomings in individuals can also be traced back to objective violent structure characterized by societal depravation. What may appear as solely internal conflicts the subject has to solve seems co-determined by the ideological structure that dominates their surroundings.

As there are cultural differences in societies, which are said to be quite similar a mundane example is that Americans show higher scores of body image dissatisfaction than Italians [96]—it is that what may look like internal processes only should also be viewed as the result of internalized societal relations of which an individually processed relation of the subject to their surroundings is formed. This relation may either, more or less, remain on a fantasmatic level tending to repress reality, or develop toward a rather realistic level. More than enough, human readiness for projective processing [97], i.e., for fantasmatic modes of creating personal reality, is an anthropological constant, which seems due to physiological prematurity in humans in the course of evolution. Adding severely to it, subject-object-differentiation nowadays is increasingly blurred owing to the loss of representation in virtualized surroundings [32]. That is why it is not possible to retrieve authenticity, if ever there was one. As people tend to hang on to the concept of authenticity especially in highly virtualized surroundings, "one always wishes to see the other act naturally, but this eludes him and thus becomes an object of fetish and intrigue" [55].

Fundamental issues of identification and representation still go unresolved [53]. Societal motion may seem detached from individual action at first but is not. It has strong effects on everyday dealings. Objective societal structure, at least in Western Europe, is currently dominated by high degrees of personal freedom and its concurrent, restraint, at the same time. The shibboleth of absolving societal structure

from its responsibility of taking effect on human living conditions [98] promotes such a motion. Instead, bio-psychosocial environment viewed as a result of early interaction combined with societal interpellation hitting upon organic substructure provides a reasonable framework to work with. Certainly, given the inevitable entanglement of the individual in the socialization process confronting multiple determinants [71], the question must be raised whether or not a subject can be a subject undamaged at all [99]. Peter Zima ascertains the subject to be inherently pending between rejection and indispensability, between subjugation and freedom [100]. Still, as Resch and Parzer point out, it is not subjective realities and interpretations that will prevail but phenomena like death, pain, and poverty. Such phenomena cannot be misread, cannot be reframed [101]. They belong to objectivity. Only some of deprivation phenomena are man-made, while others are not.
