Childhood Aggression: A Psychoanalytic Reading

Article written in collaboration with @tracce.psicologiche

Aggression in young children is often experienced by parents as a problem to be corrected or eliminated. Psychoanalysis instead offers a more nuanced reading: aggression is not merely a behavior to be contained, but a complex phenomenon rooted in the very structure of drive and emotional life, one that takes on different meanings across the various stages of development.

Freud: Drive Dualism and the Emergence of Aggression as a Psychic Category

In Freud's earliest writings, aggression does not appear as an autonomous drive, but as a secondary reaction to the frustration imposed by the reality principle on the pleasure principle. It is only with Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud (1920) introduces a decisive theoretical shift, proposing the existence of a death drive (Thanatos) alongside the life drive (Eros): aggression would therefore not simply be reactive, but would have roots in an autonomous and original drive component present from birth. This drive dualism has an important clinical consequence: the young child is not aggressive merely because they "cannot tolerate" frustration, but because they must learn to integrate and regulate a destructive component that is a constitutive part of their psychic functioning, not an anomaly to be corrected.

Klein: The Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Positions

Melanie Klein offered one of the most systematic contributions to the study of childhood aggression, situating it within a development organized by "positions" rather than linear stages. In the paranoid-schizoid position (the first months of life), the child experiences the world in split terms: the good object and the bad object are not yet integrated into the same figure, and aggression is projected onto the "bad" object in order to protect the "good" one (Klein, 1946). Only with access to the depressive position does the child begin to recognize that the loved mother and the hated mother are the same person: from this recognition arise the capacity for guilt, reparation, and mature ambivalence (Klein, 1932, 1946).

This transition explains very concrete clinical phenomena. In the example of the birth of a younger sibling, the increase in oppositional behavior and regressions is not simply "jealousy": it may represent a temporary reactivation of more split modes of functioning, in which the child struggles to hold together love for the parent and anger over the perceived "loss" of their place (Klein, 1932). Provocation, in this sense, is also a way of testing whether the bond holds despite the anger.

Winnicott: Aggression, Vitality, and the Function of the Object That Survives

Winnicott departs somewhat from Klein, proposing that aggression, in its most primitive roots, is not linked to destructiveness but to motility and the child's vitality: the primary aggressive gesture is, above all, a way of "touching" external reality in order to verify its existence (Winnicott, 1984). What transforms this vital impulse into something psychically integrated is the repeated experience that the object (the parent) survives the aggressive gesture: it does not withdraw, does not collapse, does not retaliate. It is this "survival of the object" that allows the child to discover external reality as something distinct from the self, rather than a mere product of their own omnipotent fantasy (Winnicott, 1971/1974).

Winnicott also introduces a useful distinction between the spontaneous gesture, linked to the true Self, and compliant behavior, linked to the false Self: a child who has never been able to experience their own aggression without being punished or emotionally abandoned may learn to inhibit it, paying the price of excessive adaptation to external reality at the expense of their own spontaneity (Winnicott, 1965).

Bion and the Function of Containment

Bion formalized the process through which the child's raw emotions (the "unthought experiences," or beta elements) are gathered by the maternal mind, transformed into thought (alpha elements), and returned in a tolerable form (Bion, 1962). This function, known as containment, concerns not only physical calming but the very possibility that an emotion becomes thinkable. A child who screams, bites, or hits is communicating an emotional content that does not yet have a mental representation: the adult's task is not merely to stop the behavior, but to offer a mind capable of "digesting" what the child cannot yet digest on their own.

A Contemporary Perspective: Mentalization

Some more recent developments in psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Fonagy and colleagues on mentalization, have taken up and integrated these concepts, showing how the capacity to regulate aggression is closely tied to the capacity to understand one's own and others' mental states (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002). A child who grows up in an environment that reflects on and names their internal states more easily develops this capacity, progressively reducing the need to act out what they cannot yet think.

Clinical and Practical Implications

From these perspectives, however different, a common thread emerges: childhood aggression should neither be confined to a diagnosis nor treated as mere disobedience, but understood as a multidetermined phenomenon that intertwines drive, relationship, and the (still immature) capacity for mental elaboration. On a practical level, this translates into:

• Naming the emotion without judging it ("You're very angry")

• Stopping the action while keeping the relationship intact

• Remaining present even after the episode, without withdrawing affection (Winnicott, 1984)

• Offering words where the child has only acted, in a function of containment (Bion, 1962)

• Recognizing, behind the behavior, a possible fear of affective loss (Klein, 1932)

This is not a path that eliminates aggression, but one that accompanies it toward increasingly symbolic and elaborated forms of expression.

References

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.

Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press.

Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. (Original work published 1920)

Klein, M. (1932). The psycho-analysis of children. Hogarth Press.

Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27, 99–110.

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. Hogarth Press.

Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Playing and reality. Penguin. (Original work published 1971)

Winnicott, D. W. (1984). Deprivation and delinquency. Routledge.