In this groundbreaking book, James Gilligan examines the epidemic foremost in the minds of most Americans--violence. As he tells the stories of the men he treated at a hospital for the criminally insane, Dr. Gilligan traces the devastating links between violence and shame. He shows how that deadly e...

In this groundbreaking book, James Gilligan examines the epidemic foremost in the minds of most Americans--violence. As he tells the stories of the men he treated at a hospital for the criminally insane, Dr. Gilligan traces the devastating links between violence and shame. He shows how that deadly emotion drives people to destroy others and even themselves rather than suffer a loss of self-respect.

Drawing on firsthand experience as a prison psychiatrist, his own family history, and literature, Gilligan unveils the motives of men who commit horrifying crimes, men who will not only kill others but destroy themselves rather than suffer a loss of self-respect. With devastating clarity, Gilligan traces the role that shame plays in the etiology of murder and explains why our present penal system only exacerbates it. Brilliantly argued, harrowing in its portraits of the walking dead, Violence should be read by anyone concerned with this national epidemic and its widespread consequences.

"Extraordinary. Gilligan's recommendations concerning what does work to prevent violence...are extremely convincing...A wise and careful, enormously instructive book."--Owen Renik, M.D., editor, Psychoanalytic Quarterly