Can human violence be controlled?
A Montessori perspective
Silvana Q. Montanaro

As early as 1932, in a speech delivered in Geneva on the subject of peace, Maria Montessori wondered how society could acclaim at one and the same time both the scientist who discovers a microbe or a live-saving serum, and the scientist who discovers weapons capable of destroying the life of a whole population, perhaps of all humanity.

“Obviously,” she said, “this dangerous duality of the collective personality must be explained in an unedited chapter of human psychology as some untamed force that threatens humanity.”

The more we progress in self-awareness through the study of human sciences, such as psychoanalysis and psychology, the more we are terrified by our capacity for violence and by the effects of this perverse force. By analyzing our-selves, we have reached the understanding that violence is subtly hidden in many of our daily actions under various labels, it starts to act from the moment of birth, if not even before birth.

Violence can be defined as an excessive force exercised to the detriment of others.  Violence is action, and in this sense is different from aggressiveness, which can be considered as a tendency to exercise constriction and damage on another.

The problem of aggressiveness that evolves into violence has always been a subject of human interest. Human sciences have always tried to understand the reasons for behavior that is so damaging. Some believe the potential for violence is inherent in human nature itself. Others have always considered violence as a reaction to unsatisfactory, if not cruel, living conditions –often perpetrated by human beings against their neighbors. This concept, which divides the world into good and evil, leaves unsolved the problem of how so called “evil people” develop.

There are important genetic and hormonal factors in the formation of aggression. But the decisive factor in determining the future of aggressiveness is experience, which begins in the womb (Laing: the stone womb) and continues in the kind of care the child receives and in the possibility of early socializing.

The old psychoanalytic interpretation of aggression as negative, has given way to the assumption of “the existence of a primary and individual aggressive instinct, at the service of life –not death.” This instinctual activity provides the developing child with energies that can be translated into movement.

Though movement, the child comes into contact with the environment and gains control over his body. This autonomy is muscular, but it is also related to mental autonomy, which transforms the human being from a passive into an active person capable of taking initiatives.

The desire for movement must be recognized as neutral aggression in evolution, and as such should be respected by the adult, who must not only accept this movement but also –and here lies the fundamental role of education- channel it towards concrete and intelligent activity.

When the child structures a healthy aggression, he learns to manage on his own (“Help me do it by myself!”), to act autonomously and to have adequate relationships with people and with things, then the child learns to love.

Sometimes adults (especially mothers, who interact most with their children’s aggressions) consider this continual desire for mobility as being wrong and so they punish children with hostility. As a result, children come to feel that they have no right to move. Since they are incapable of distinguishing a part from the whole, they end up feeling that any initiative is bad and any action is a form of rebellion. “To do something” becomes synonymous with “to act against someone,” that is to hate. There arises (through negative identification with parent) a harmful principles: “When you want something from someone, you must use violence against them.” Thus aggressiveness is transformed into hostile aggression.

But where aggression can become constructive, it is transformed into activity and spirit of initiative, in harmony (rather than conflict) with self and surroundings. The two processes may be summarized as follows:

If we manage to have children learn to be aggressive in a productive way, they will become reasonable and free human beings, the sort of persons that every nation says it would like to have as citizens. But mostly, people, as they grow up, become incapable of channeling their aggressive energies productively. Even work in scientific, literary, artistic and sporting fields is often used for the purpose of dominating others.

Recent experiments have clearly shown that the more aggressiveness is hostile, the less it is productive: the best qualities of a person are wasted, to his own detriment. This force of aggression, so precious in life, may turn towards love or hate, towards production or towards hostility. In the latter case, it may become destructive aggressiveness leading to the most radical ferocity. In every age of human history, we find examples of such ferocity. Each group denies the evil (aggressiveness) in themselves and sees it only in others (schizoid alienation), and in these circumstances humanity becomes threatened with extermination.

Maria Montessori, in her book Education and Peace, clearly recognized the root of the degradation of the activity instinct (which we have called neutral aggression). She recognized in the child, the future adult, the need for self-fulfillment through freedom of movement for the achievement of specific purposes. The body must be an instrument at the service of the mind, it must serve to transform and adapt the environment in which one lives to meet one’s real needs. Children must be provided with the necessary means, with materials allowing them freedom of action –as they are, for example, in the Children’s Houses.

In such an environment, children achieve a harmonious social life at a very early age and manifest characteristics unknown to the adult. “What is delightful for a human being,” said Maria Montessori, “is not to possess things, but to be able to use the” –to use them as a means to improve oneself and one’s environment.

It is in the proper use of things that a love relationship develops between the child and his surrounding environment of people and things. All work leads necessarily to association, because no one could work long in isolation. The possibility of acting on things uplifts the child. If he is prevented from action, a morbid attachment develops toward people and things. Instead of mastering them, he becomes enslaved by them, interaction is replaced by fighting and possessiveness.

We have seen that there are two courses between which initial aggression can flow:

1. a) That of a positive evolution, which allows the child to act in a human way to improve himself and make himself united with the environment in a love relationship. This is a normal being, defined by Freud as capable of working and loving.
2. b) That of a negative evolution, in which the child is prevented from acting and becomes a hostile being, fomenting hatred and aggression towards others and regression in himself.

The analysis of the phenomenon of aggression that Maria Montessori made so many years ago is still valid. I continued to be amazed at how easy and possible it is, in the right environment, to direct the vital forces of the child towards his personal development, giving at the same time joy and satisfaction, building a social being capable of collaboration.