1st Edition

Terrorism and War Unconscious Dynamics of Political Violence

    454 Pages
    by Routledge

    435 Pages
    by Routledge

    Following the attacks of September 11th 2001, one of the resounding questions asked was "What would make anyone do such a thing?" The psychological mentality of the suicidal terrorist left a gaping hole in people's understanding. This essential volume represents a much-needed effort to collate and examine some of the material already at our disposal as an encouragement to serious thought on this question and other related questions.'If terrorism is not new, what is it about the recent attacks that gives us a sense that something has changed? Is it the scale of the destruction, or the anxiety that we are facing some altogether new uncertainty? Are we in some sense facing a new enemy? ...In reflecting on these and other related questions we may be facing a similar watershed of understanding to that faced by Freud at the end of the Great War...In the absence of progress in our thinking today, political leaders and public opinion will likely turn to previous political and religious ideas, investing in them with a fundamentalist certainty that spells disaster.

    Foreword -- Introduction -- Terrorism -- Introduction -- Thoughts and photographs, World Trade Centre: 11th September 2001 -- The eleventh of September massacre -- Thoughts on September 11th, 2001 -- Beyond bombs and sanctions -- From containment to leakage, from the collective to the unique: therapist and patient in shared national trauma -- The psychodynamic dimension of terrorism -- Reflections on the making of a terrorist -- Hatred, Enmity and Revenge -- Introduction -- On hatred: with comments on the revolutionary, the saint, and the terrorist -- The role of hatred in the ego -- Fundamentalism and idolatry -- The benign and malignant other -- Why War? -- Introduction -- Freud/Einstein correspondence -- Jung correspondence: Letter to Dorothy Thompson -- Thoughts for the times on war and death: a psychoanalytic address on an interdisciplinary problem -- Psychoanalysis and war -- Psychoanalysis and war—response to Diana Birkett -- Psychological defence and nuclear war -- Silence is the real crime -- The Aftermath of War -- Introduction -- Destructiveness, atrocities and healing: epistemological and clinical reflections -- Omagh: the beginning of the reparative impulse? -- The transgenerational transmission of holocaust trauma: lessons learned from the analysis of an adolescent with obsessive compulsive disorder -- The holocaust and the power of powerlessness: survivor guilt an unhealed wound -- Exile and bereavement -- Forget -- Glossary*

    Biography

    Arundale, Jean