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Hypothesis & Theory ARTICLE

This article is part of a Research Topic

The path to extreme violence: Nazism and serial killers

Geneva International Academic Network, Geneva, Switzerland

In people’s minds, extreme violence is an enigma. The tortures inflicted on defenceless victims seem to defy reason. Yet, the fact that these incidents keep recurring is proof that there are rules governing them. It is these rules that I have attempted to isolate. We shall see that they are clearly defined and that they are to be found in individual as well as collective violence. To categorise them is the first step towards implementing preventative measures which would help to protect the rational majority from a dangerous minority. Practice and theory are inextricably linked in the analysis of “organised insanity” that is extreme violence.

Keywords:

extreme violence, psychohistory, authoritarian personality, psychopathy, trigger event

Citation:

Cotter P (2010). The path to extreme violence: Nazism and serial killers. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 3:61. doi: 10.3389/neuro.08.061.2009

Received:

25 May 2009;

Paper pending published:

07 July 2009;

Accepted:

24 December 2009;

Published online:

18 January 2010.

Edited by:

Guillaume Poirier, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Reviewed by:

Albert Rizzo, Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
Mark Levine, Lancaster University, UK

© 2010 Cotter. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Philippe Cotter, Rue du Vieux-Billard 9, 1205 Genève, Switzerland. e-mail: pcotter@bluewin.ch