Yale Sociology Workshop in Urban Ethnography presents Dr. James Gilligan, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University:
“Political and Economic Determinants of Violent Death Rates: The Social Psychology of Shame and Guilt.”
Dr. Gilligan is a psychiatrist who has specialized in investigating the causes and prevention of violent crimes and war crimes. He directed the Institute of Law and Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, whose faculty he was on for more than thirty years, and has also taught at the Institute of Criminology of Cambridge University, in the U.K., and at the University of Pennsylvania. He has used prisons and jails as the social-psychological setting for much of his research.
He is currently a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University, where he also teaches in the Law School. His publications include Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, Preventing Violence, and Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others.
This workshop will focus on showing how psychology and sociology are both needed in order to explain the causes and prevention of violence in individuals and groups, by treating this as a problem in clinical psychiatry and psychology, and also in public health and preventive medicine (i.e., social psychiatry). We will review the psychological conditions that cause violent behavior in individuals, and the social conditions that cause those psychological conditions to reach epidemic proportions in whole populations.