Dr David Kaposi

Mid-Career Fellow 2021-22

Milgram and Beyond: Towards a Psychosocial Theory of Violence

An examination of hundreds of sessions conducted by Stanley Milgram for his “obedience to authority” experiments. What was it that kept people in a violent situation they wanted to escape? And what capacity was required to actually get out of it? The answer may be found not in the explicit clarity of the order, persuasion, or manifest forms of pressure; but in processes that are implicit and barely visible on the surface of conscious accounting. With the help of his hardly believable data, Kaposi ultimately hopes to formulate a psycho-social theory of violence.

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Biography

David Kaposi is a Senior Lecturer at The Open University. As a social psychologist and a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist, in his research he seeks to understand violent phenomena with a therapeutic sensitivity to inter- and intra-subjective processes, and joint making and unmaking of meaning. 

For his PhD thesis, Kaposi looked at a fabled and acrimonious exchange between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. He found that explanation for the ultimate cutting of the chord between these two intellectuals and friends may not be found in diametrically opposed ideologies or identities; it is rather in a shared but barely articulated sense that who we are cannot be escaped, that it is in our blood. Subsequently, looking at British broadsheets’ portrayal of the conflict in Palestine-Israel, he found that to account for warring representations we may not look at human facts or politics; it is rather in the shared sense of a present battle between the non-human pure and impure.

Biographical details correct as of 03.12.24

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