‘The Science of Revenge’ Review: Vengeance Isn’t Benign

When people hurt us, we want to get back at them, it’s only natural. But do thoughts of retribution harm us? Are there alternatives?

Excerpt: '“Revenge,” said Francis Bacon, “is a kind of wild justice.” Both justice and revenge, Bacon recognized, involve our punishing those whom we believe have wronged us. But there is one big difference. Justice requires that the wrongdoer know that he is being punished and understand why; it isn’t strictly necessary for the victims, who might be gone anyway, to know anything about it. With revenge, it’s more the other way around. What matters is that the victims feel that they have been avenged; the wrongdoer himself—think of a terrorist hunted down and killed in an instant—needn’t always be aware.

In “The Science of Revenge,” James Kimmel Jr. examines the minds of victims, real and self-perceived, in the throes of pursuing revenge. Mr. Kimmel, a professor of psychiatry at Yale, was once a practicing lawyer. Over the years he began to notice something. Although the state is responsible through the criminal law for punishing wrongdoers, and individuals themselves are responsible through the civil law for pursuing compensation from those who have harmed them, Mr. Kimmel’s high-paying clients were getting their compensation in the form of punishment. They were, he came to see, seeking nothing more than “the pleasure of dragging their adversaries through the traumatizing litigation process.” It dawned on Mr. Kimmel that he was engaged in the practice of “legalized revenge.”'