cruelty

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n., pl. -ties.

1. The quality or condition of being cruel.
2. Something, such as a cruel act or remark, that causes pain or suffering.
3. Law. The infliction of physical or mental distress, especially when considered a determinant in granting a divorce.

noun

A cruel act or an instance of cruel behavior: barbarity, bestiality, brutality, inhumanity, savagery, truculence, truculency. See attitude/good attitude/bad attitude/neutral attitude, kind/cruel.

n

Definition: brutality, harshness
Antonyms: charity, compassion, consideration, feeling, gentility, kindness, mercy, niceness, thoughtfulness

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Cruelty is a multi-faceted concept in Freud's work. It can relate to actions and motivations but also to agencies, events, or destiny. When Dora (1905e [1901]) abruptly terminated her analysis, Freud mentioned the young girl's "cruel impulses and revengeful motives" (p. 120), which, through Freud in the transference, were directed at Herr K. and through him at her father. This text, written in 1901, contains an implicit question as to whether these impulses originate from the drives or the ego, but also as to the type of person associated with these impulses: in fleeing the transference, did Dora intend to be cruel towards Freud?

An "instinct of cruelty" appears in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). In this work, Freud relates it to male sexuality: the man has a tendency to subjugate in order to overcome "the resistance of the sexual object" (p. 158) and satisfy his sexual urges. Freud states: "There is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct" (p. 159). Along with scopophilia and exhibitionism, cruelty is classified as a partial or component drive. Whether active or passive, it also stems from the drive for mastery. Whereas this drive is exerted through the "apparatus for obtaining mastery" (p. 159), connected with the musculature, it is the skin, as the "erotogenic zone par excellence" (p. 169) that constitutes "one of the erotogenic roots of the passive instinct of cruelty" (p. 193). Freud also refers to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's memories of being beaten, which he goes on to discuss further in "A Child is Being Beaten" (1919e).

Like mastery, cruelty involves the use of the object simply as a means of satisfaction. In this sense, it differs from the "sadism proper" (1924c, p. 163) that results from the binding of the drive for cruelty with the sexual drive towards the object. Whereas the drive for cruelty, like the drive for mastery, is characterized by indifference on the part of the subject to the feelings experienced by the object of satisfaction, considered as a part-object, sadism involves a pleasure derived from the object's suffering.

Describing sadism in Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915c) as "the exercise of violence or power upon some other person as object" (p. 127), having also described the drive for cruelty in this way ten years earlier, Freud added: "the sadistic child takes no notice of whether or not it inflicts pain, nor is it part of its purpose to do so" (1915c, p. 128). Thus, strictly speaking, the small child is cruel but not sadistic. This becomes possible only after he has discovered the total object and his ambivalence towards it.

In the same year (1915b), Freud specifically related cruelty to egotism. Intrinsically neither good nor bad, the drives acquire these qualities with regard to the necessary process of civilization. But the child is able to renounce drive gratification because of his need to be loved by his libidinal object. However, the object still remains an unloved and sometimes hated stranger as a direct result of its otherness. Egoistic and cruel impulses resurface and are directed at the object, particularly if the object is generally designated as an enemy. Wounded by these attacks, the object becomes even more frightening.

After the introduction of the death drive in 1920, the drive for cruelty gave way to the "destructive drive," understood as an external deflection of the death drive (1923b) and described as aggressive when directed at objects. If it is taken up by the ego, the ego itself becomes cruel or sadistic. The ego then risks not only losing the object's love but also being subjected to the reprimands of the superego. This agency, which equates with moral conscience, can demonstrate an extreme cruelty, according to the need for aggression aroused by present and past frustrations. Rebellious by nature towards what is nevertheless the necessary process of civilization, the human being is always able to display a "cruel aggressiveness" (1930a, p. 111) if circumstances lend themselves to this.

Melanie Klein substantially developed this concept of cruelty on the part of the superego. In the context of the controversy that pitted her against Anna Freud, she drew attention to the extreme severity of the infantile (or early) superego, even where the parents are conciliatory (1927). The harshness of the agency is proportional to the aggression felt by the child as a result of the frustrations experienced during weaning and toilet training. Thus a cruel superego, "something which bites, devours and cuts" (1928, p. 187) is the outcome of the oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic drives. Taking up Freud's hypothesis concerning the necessary external projection of the death drive, to which the effects of pre-oedipal frustrations are added, Melanie Klein described an extremely cruel child who "attacks its mother's breast" (1933, p. 253), "thinks of sucking out and eating up the inside of its mother's body" (p. 254) and attacks its object with excrements that are "regarded as burning and corroding substances" (p. 253). This intense hostility both from the object and toward it is the product of the deflection of the death drive and past frustrations but also of fears of reprisal for the hostility towards the hated object, ultimately of the influence of the early superego. Thus, "the small child becomes dominated by the fear of suffering unimaginable cruel attacks, both from its real objects and from its super-ego" (p. 251). Although the oedipal phase is influenced by the earlier stages, these destructive rages are tempered with pity and some reparative impulses emerge.

Donald Winnicott (1955/1975) has clearly demonstrated the process of transition from a "pre-ruth era" in which the little child can inadvertently or unintentionally display aggression, since "if destruction be part of the aim in the id impulse, then destruction is only incidental to id satisfaction" (p. 210), to a subsequent stage when the child is concerned about his object. He then has worries about it and is able to feel compassion or potentially creative reparative wishes, which prevents him from remaining cruel toward his object.

Of course, these drives are primitive and potentially cruel toward the object. Throughout his life, the subject will have to find compromises between the claims of the narcissistic pole of his drives and the intensity of his love for the object. However, the object's tolerance of the subject's drive-based egoism varies. In fact, some parents and spouses are better able than others to tolerate narcissistic egocentrism in their child or partner and are accordingly less vulnerable to their "cruelty".

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.

——. (1905e). Fragment of an analysis of a case of Hysteria. SE, 7: 1-122.

——. (1915b). Thoughts for the times on war and death. SE, 14: 273-300.

——. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14: 109-140.

——. (1919e). "A child is being beaten": a contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions. SE, 17: 175-204.

——. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1-66.

——. (1924c). The economic problem of masochism. SE, 19: 155-170.

——. (1930a). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21: 57-145.

Klein, Melanie. (1927). Criminal tendencies in normal children. In Love, guilt and reparation and other works 1921-1945. The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 1, pp. 170-185). London: Hogarth,.

——. (1928). Early stages of the Oedipus conflict. Love, guilt and reparation and other works 1921-1945. The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 1, pp. 186-198). London: Hogarth.

——. (1933). The early development of conscience in the child. In Love, guilt and reparation and other works 1921-1945. The writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. 1, pp. 248-267). London: Hogarth,.

Winnicott, Donald W. (1975). Aggression in relation to emotional development. In through paediatrics to psychoanalysis (pp. 204-218). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1955)

—ANNETTE FRÉJAVILLE

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

The deliberate and malicious infliction of mental or physical pain upon persons or animals.

As applied to people, cruelty encompasses abusive, outrageous, and inhumane treatment that results in the wanton and unnecessary infliction of suffering upon the body or mind.

Legal cruelty involves conduct that warrants the granting of a divorce to the injured spouse. Phrases such as "cruel and inhuman treatment," "cruel and abusive treatment," or "cruel and barbarous treatment" are commonly employed in matrimonial law. The term comprehends mental and physical harm, but a single act of cruelty is usually insufficient for divorce; a pattern of cruel conduct must occur over a period of time. This ground of divorce is of diminished significance due to the enactment of no-fault legislation by most jurisdictions.

Cruelty to children, also known as child abuse, encompasses mental and physical battering and abuse, as defined by statutes in a majority of jurisdictions.

Cruelty to animals involves the infliction of physical pain or death upon an animal, when unnecessary for disciplinary, instructional, or humanitarian purposes, such as the release of the animal from incurable illness.

A person commits a misdemeanor if he or she intentionally or recklessly neglects any animal in his or her custody, mistreats any animal, or kills or injures any animal without legal privilege or the consent of its owner.

See: animal rights.

From the Latin crudelem, morally rough, cruelty is the deliberate — and often joyous — infliction of physical or psychological pain on other living creatures. Cruelty is today, and has throughout human history been, an overwhelming presence in the world; its uses are for punishment, amusement, and social control, and its medium is pain. But despite a vast literature (for example, Edgerton 1985, Scarry 1985, Puppi 1991) on deliberately inflicted pain, there has been scant study of two matters that are fundamental to an an understanding of cruelty's weight in the world: the evidently considerable gratifications of perpetrators and audiences, and the origins of the cruelty impulse in the human psyche.

1. The uses and gratifications of cruelty
2. The origins of cruelty
3. Cultural elaborations of cruelty
4. The problem of prevention

1. The uses and gratifications of cruelty

Punishment. Thoughtlessly or maliciously, the strong punish the weak by the infliction of pain: thus masters with slaves, adults with children, and men with women. When Sarai complained to Abram of Hagar's contempt, he replied, ' "Your slave-girl is in your power, do with her as you please." Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her' (Genesis 16: 6). Corporal punishment of children and pupils was part of medieval and early modern life. From the 15th century, the birching of school pupils became increasingly common and brutal 'for all offences and all ages' (Aries 1962: 259). Heroard, the physician of King Henri IV of France, kept a diary of the childhood of the king's son who was to become Louis XIII. From 1608, when he was 7, his education was more serious, but, though he had stopped playing with his dolls, 'he was still given a whipping from time to time' (Aries 1962: 66).

Spectacles of pain and death were a fixed part of medieval life, and there is a rich tradition of popular woodcuts of execution scenes (Edgerton 1985, Puppi 1991). The route taken by the procession to the gallows or the wheel was planned so as to draw the whole of the urban fabric into these public demonstrations of the sovereign's power. Great crowds followed the wagon and gathered at the place of execution.Amusement. Punishment shades over into the most shameful of cruelty's uses, for private pleasure and amusement. The oscillation between the judicial and the personal is detectable in cruelties inflicted by agents of the state when they believe that they will not be held accountable. Thus with the torture and killing of Muslims in Visegrad, eastern Bosnia, reported in the New York Times on 25 May 1996. A survivor tells that she crept out of hiding on 19 July 1992, and watched as her mother and sister were made to sit astride the bridge parapet and shot in the stomach by Serb paramilitaries: 'When they fell in the water, the men leaned over and laughed.' Similar scenes of clandestinely videotaped South African police brutality have been widely broadcast — setting dogs on prisoners as a 'training exercise', burning a semi-conscious hijack suspect with a cigarette lighter: the police laugh uproariously at the victims' pain. One of the two British 10-year-olds who abducted, tortured, and killed James Bulger, a baby of 2, said of the other at the trial, 'He probably did it for fun, he was laughing his head off'.

Caligula (ad 12–41) tortured Roman senators, men he knew well, not to extract information, but for amusement. The Historia Augusta (c.ad 500) relates that Commodus (ad177–92) was destructive even in his humorous moments: 'For example, he put a starling on the head of one man who, as he noticed, had a few white hairs, resembling worms, among the black, and caused his head to fester through the continual pecking of the bird's beak.' Ovid (Art of Love, 3. 235–8) writes:

Social control. Judicial punishment in order to enforce laws and preserve discipline ranges from verbal reprimand, shaming, and ostracism to execution. Babylonian, Mosaic, and Roman law are founded on the principle of talion, retaliation: 'it shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot' (Deuteronomy 19: 19–21). The barbarity of the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables (450 bc) — a parricide was cast into the sea in a sack with a cock, a viper, a dog, and a monkey — led Gibbon to remark that it is 'written in characters of blood'. The worst cruelties were inflicted on slaves and 'inferior races'. Spartan youths killed Helots for sport (Plutarch, c.ad 100, Lycurgus, 28); in his Amazon diaries, Roger Casement compiled a report on the fearful atrocities against Indians by rubber traders on the Putamayo River, a tributary of the Amazon.Cruelty as entertainment, and thus indirectly as an instrument of social control (Coleman 1990), reached its apogee in the late Roman Republic and early Empire. The gladiatorial show was 'the most prominent and most popular spectacle of all', writes Tertullian (Apologeticum, ad 197, 12. 1). The sheer extravagance of the arena spectacles attests to their social purpose as an extension of the emperor's power and authority, and a visible manifestation of his benevolence (Coleman 1990). Suetonius (ad 100, Life of Julius Caesar, 39.3) records that Caesar, for his triumph in 46 bc, held five days of animal hunts in the arena, and the first naumachiae (mock naval battles) in a specially excavated basin near the Tiber with 'biremes, triremes and quadriremes of the Tyrian and Egyptian fleets, manned by a large number of combatants' (loc. cit.). These were mock battles in the sense that they were theatrical — but the deaths were real.

Contemporary accounts attest to the high and delighted arousal of the arena audiences. One cannot attend these shows, writes Tertullian, 'without his mind being aroused and his soul being stirred by some unspoken agitation ... for even if a man enjoys spectacles modestly and soberly, as befits his rank, age, and natural disposition, he cannot go to them ... if the passion ceases' (Apologeticum, 12.1; 15. 2–6). A platform in the middle of the arena catered to the spectators' fascination with the minutiae of violent death: wounded victims were placed there so that the spectators could more closely observe their death struggle. In his Confessions, St Augustine tells of his young friend Alypius, a Christian who had come to Rome to study law. Augustine's account captures the delirious contagion that swept over the Arena audience: 'some man fell; there was a great roar from the whole mass of spectators ... [Alypius] saw the blood and he gulped savagery ... he was drunk with the lust of blood' (6. 8).

2. The origins of cruelty

Primatologists, palaeontologists, and evolutionary psychologists have long speculated (see, for example, Dart 1953) about possible continuities between primate, early hominid, and human behaviour. A growing body of field observations (Stanford 1999) suggests that the roots of human cruelty and the gratifications it mediates are to be found in the predatory adaptation.

The first effective predators emerged with the middle Cambrian explosion of animal life, c.540 million years ago, with sense organs to locate prey, and the ability to pursue and overpower it (Brain 2001). But predation (nutritional killing of living creatures by animals) is very hard work: the kill success rate for the wolves on Isle Royale in Lake Superior is under 5 per cent, and the meat yield is 4 kg of meat per wolf per day; for the Gombe chimpanzees, hunting is nutritionally uneconomic: a 1 kg baby monkey is the typical yield for a hunting party of up to 20, so that the effort expended 'is enormously costly relative to the quantity of meat that is usually available' (Stanford 1999: 97).

The costs of hunting (nutritional killing by hominids) in hunter–gatherer societies is equally high: among the Dobe !Kung, 10 hunter-hours yield 1,000 calories of meat, as against 4 hours for 1,000 calories of vegetable foods (Lee 1968: 40); successes for the individual hunter are sparse and unpredictable, with the daily failure rate for individual Hadza hunters at 97 per cent. Hunting thus 'involves a great deal of effort and prestige' (Lee 1968: 40), and a hunter may go days or weeks without a kill; the !Kung hunting yield is 1 hunter-hour/100 calories.

Given these high costs, the predatory and hunting adaptations could not have emerged without massive conditioned reinforcers that derive from the prey's terror and struggles to escape as it is brought down, the shedding of its blood, and its vocalizations as it is wounded and eaten, often while it is still alive (Stanford 1999). In surviving forager societies, killing and butchering game is accompanied by a similar panoply of auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, and visceral stimuli (Lee 1968). A working hypothesis is that it is this stimulus array, tied back to the prey's blood and death, that reinforces and sustains human cruelty and accounts for its high reward value.

3. Cultural elaborations of cruelty

War is the most significant social product of the predatory adaptation. In mythology, ethnography, and contemporary culture, there are explicit links between hunting, war, and manhood (Nell 2002). Because of the male gendering of hunting (Lee 1968, Stanford 1999), it becomes an affirmation of manhood: Croesus of Lydia dreamed that his son Atys would die by the blow of an iron weapon, and accordingly forbade him to hunt a huge boar that troubled the people of Mysia. 'What face meanwhile must I wear as I walk to the agora or return from it?' lamented Atys. 'What must ... my young bride think of me? What sort of man will she suppose her husband to be? ... I pray you, therefore, let me go with them' (Herodotus, 440 bc, 1. 34–9). Reciprocally, the warrior hero is a great predator: Achilles is 'a soaring eagle | launching down from the dark clouds to earth | to snatch some helpless lamb or trembling hare' (Homer, 800 bc, 22. 364–8).

If war is predation's most significant social product, its principle cultural product is the emotional weight of blood in mythology, religion, literature, and the graphic arts. A fixed feature of early religions is the gods' thirst for animal and human blood: 'for the life of the flesh is in the blood: ... for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul' (Leviticus 17: 11). It is the wasting life of the sacrificial victim that gives the words their power: the neo-Platonist Sallustius writes, 'Prayers divorced from sacrifice are only words, prayers with sacrifices are animated words, the word giving power to the life and the life to the word' (361/1926).

The warrior's death is in blood and demands blood. At Patroclus' funeral pyre, Achilles, 'with wild zeal | flung the bodies of four massive stallions onto the pyre ... and then a dozen brave sons | of the proud Trojans he hacked to pieces' (Iliad, 23, 22–6, 35–6, 200–3).

In today's world, Roman and medieval carnivals of death are perpetuated in movies and the electronic media, and in gladiatorial contests — boxing and kickboxing, American football, car and motorcycle racing — that are unwillingly stopped short of frank killing. Violently inflicted cruelty is the coinage of smash-hit novels, films, and TV series. The torture of animals for entertainment, a popular public spectacle until the establishment of humane societies in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century, continues clandestinely. The willingness of military establishments to develop technologies of cruelty as instruments of war flourishes globally, while the coercive forces of the state (and its opponents) use confessional and disciplinary cruelty for political ends.

4. The problem of prevention

For individuals, today as in the past, cruelty continues to serve as a gateway to power and a route to prestige, leadership, and social mastery that entrains survival and reproductive benefits. Thus, despite the human capacity for compassion, atrocities continue. An essential first step towards more effective prevention of interpersonal, internecine, and international atrocities is to account for the psychological gratifications that perpetrators and audiences derive from inflicting or observing cruelty, which in turn requires an understanding of the deep evolutionary origins of cruelty.

(Published 2004)

— Victor Nell

Bibliography
• Aries, P. (1962). Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life.
• Brain, C. K. (2001). Do We Owe our Intelligence to a Predatory Past?
• Coleman, K. M. (1990). 'Fatal charades: Roman executions staged as mythological enactments'. Journal of Roman Studies, 80.
• Dart, R. A. (1953). 'The predatory transition from ape to man'. International Anthropological and Linguistic Review, 1.
• Edgerton, S. Y. (1985). Pictures and Punishment: Art and the Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance.
• Lee, R. B. (1968). 'What hunters do for a living, or how to make out on scarce resources'. In Lee, R. B., and DeVore, I. (eds.) Man the Hunter.
• Nell, V. (2002). 'Why young men drive dangerously: implications for injury prevention'. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11.
• Puppi, L. (1991). Torment in Art.
• Scarry, E. (1985). The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
• Stanford, C. B. (1999). The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behaviour.

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The infliction of pain or distress unnecessarily.

• c. to animals — an offence under the Protection of Animals Act or similar legislation. The definition of unnecessary varies between countries and from time to time in the one country. Under the impetus of a great body of community compassion the threhold has been greatly lowered in recent times. Determination of the prevailing standard of cruelty can only be decided by the courts.
— It is now taken to include, besides physical assault and surgery without anesthesia, deprival of food, water and shelter. The worst kinds of cruelty are susceptible to the heaviest penalty, under the classification of aggravated cruelty.

IN BRIEF: The state of being ready to hurt others.

Cruelty can not stop the earth's heart from beating. — E. Coleman.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - grusomhed

Nederlands (Dutch)
wreedheid, onbarmhartigheid

Français (French)
n. - cruauté envers, cruauté (acte)

Deutsch (German)
n. - Grausamkeit, Unbarmherzigkeit

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - σκληρότητα, αναλγησία

Italiano (Italian)
crudeltà

Português (Portuguese)
n. - crueldade (f)

Русский (Russian)
жестокость

Español (Spanish)
n. - crueldad

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - grymhet, misshandel

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
残酷, 残酷的行为, 野蛮

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 殘酷, 殘酷的行為, 野蠻

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 잔인함, 잔인한 행위, 학대

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 残酷, 残酷な行為

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) قسوة‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮התאכזרות, אכזריות‬

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