Male Violence towards Women (book review)

Review of Donald G. Dutton, The Abusive Personality: Violence and Control in Intimate Relationships. New York: The Guilford Press, 1998. ISBN 1572303700, viii + 214 pp., $26.95.

Advances in understanding male violence towards women will be welcomed by psychohistorians. Male wishes to control and punish women, for reasons generally unknown to themselves, need elucidating before larger questions about marital and social disorder can be accurately

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posed. While perhaps only three to four percent of males do enough violence to their wives and partners to come before the legal system, the problem is on such a broad scale that study of any segment of it is important. Donald Dutton’s study is of abusers he calls “cyclical,” that is, they batter repeatedly after intervals of contrition and making up. They are not men usually associated with violence, and indeed their assaults seem out of character.

Dutton, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, offers a “life span perspective,” showing that the abusive personality begins in childhood, even infancy. Anything less is partial and misleading. He reviews theories of causality: behavioral and neurochemical, together with ideological theories of sociobiologists and feminists. Each is shown to be too general to reveal the psychodynamics of cyclical abusers, who invariably have high dependency needs, chronic fear, jealousy, and repeated build-ups of rage. Dutton’s advance is in giving centrality to attachment theory in the controversy over the origin of spousal abuse. Will he be believed? I think so, because of astute clinical observation combined with skillful use of attachment theory originated by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth and honed to fine research instruments by others.

Several types of abusive attachment in adult males are distinguished. The psychopathic is least discussed, while “overcontrolling batterers” are said to be avoidant, dependent, passive-aggressive, and have a pre-occupied attachment style. “Instrumental” (undercontrolled) batterers are actively violent, lacking in empathy, and have an attachment classification of “dismissing.” “Impulsive” (undercontrolled or cyclical) batterers are actively violent and are notably depressed, anxious, and ambivalent, typically with borderline personality. Their attachment classification is “fearful angry,” a variant on Mary Main’s Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) described by Kim Bartholomew. Thus, Dutton does not strictly follow the AAI protocol for assessing the current meaning of developmental attachment experiences. One may question reliance on such tests as the EMBU, a less exacting means of measuring memories of upbringing.

Critical readers will raise such methodological fine points; behavioral researchers will discover Dutton making speculative leaps, and, of course, psychoanalysts will miss discussion of long-established theory. But Dutton is an adventuring researcher; unafraid to traverse this highly charged area of human relationships and to forcefully state findings. Abusers’ anxiously attached relations with their mothers are certainly studied, but perhaps most revealing is the following research finding:

The results were so strong that, if I had to pick one single action by the parent that generated abusiveness in men, I would pick being shamed by the father.… A lethal combination of shaming and physical abuse was required to generate the kind of abusiveness we have described above (pp. 152-153).

It is a great pleasure to follow Dutton on his quest for experientially grounded explanation of cyclical wife abuse. This disconcerting topic is brilliantly addressed and made foundational for social theory. The book closes with a chapter on “The Treatment of Assaultiveness,” showing that male assertions of power and control over women can indeed be modified, though the general availability of such therapy seems utopian at present.

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