Commentary on Terrorism

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COMMENTARY

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND TERRORISMThe Need for a Global Talking Cure

Elaine Hoffman Baruch, PhDCity University of New York

Psychoanalysis has taken a lot of flak in recent years. However, September 11,

2001, has injected new life into the talking cure, both by serving therapeutic

needs and by illuminating the causes of terrorism. The traumatic separation of

the sexes in Islamic societies is a major cause of fundamentalism and the search

for violent political activity. Suicide bombing is one result of hating ones

sexual impulses. Of all disciplines, psychoanalysis is best able to deal with the

irrational components of terrorism. But although psychoanalysis now shapes the

way people in the West look at the world, not all of its principles are universal.

It should now give more attention to the Islamic world in the hopes of devel-

oping a global talking cure.

Psychoanalysis has taken a lot of flak in recent years. Blamed for both the false-memory

syndrome and its opposite, the neglect of real abuseboth unfair chargesthe discipline

that discovered the reasons for scapegoating had itself become a scapegoat. Furthermore,

forgetting that humans are speaking creatures, the pharmaceutical companies, to saynothing of the HMOs, were promoting pills as faster and cheaper than talk. But along with

everything else it has done, September 11, 2001, has injected new life into the talking

cure, the term given to psychoanalysis by its first patient, Anna O, in reality Bertha

Pappenheim, influential humanitarian and storyteller.

Since its inception, psychoanalysis has combined the two impulses of telling stories

and helping humanity. That may be part of its public-relations problem. Many detractors

associate stories with myth, the nonfactual. As for its humanitarian side, people often

dont want helpunless, of course, they are in crisis situations.

A major story that psychoanalysis tells is how the boy and, yes, the girl (feminism has

had a marked influence on it in recent years) grow up to become a man and a woman.

Psychoanalysis even has its own version of the expulsion from Edenthe separation from

the mother. When this separation doesnt go well, the kid is in trouble, and the rest of us

Elaine Hoffman Baruch, PhD, Department of English, City University of New York.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Elaine Hoffman Baruch, PhD,

310 East 46th Street, New York, New York 10017. E-mail: [email protected]

Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2003, Vol. 20, No. 4, 698700Copyright 2003 by the Educational Publishing Foundation, 0736-9735/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0736-9735.20.4.698

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as well. In societies that are antisexual and misogynistic, the separation of boys from

mothers, and from women in general when those boys grow up, is often forcible and

violent. Paradoxically, the Muslim veiling of women in an attempt to hide their sexuality

has the opposite result: One can never forget about their sex. At the same time an infantile

attachment to mothers remains, as in the case of Mohamed Atta and probably Osama BinLaden.

What does sexual repression have to do with terrorism? Plenty, as every dystopia has

revealed. At a conference held at Mount Sinai Medical Center recently, Dr. Maxine

Anderson (2002) suggested that separation from the mother when it is especially virulent

and violent, fosters extreme polarities which comprise what we might term the funda-

mentalist state of mind. According to psychologist Richard Koenigsberg (1989), trau-

matic separation may later lead to a search for union with a political body, which takes the

place of the mothers body, and a state of murderous rage when that body is perceived as

wounded. Does this explain in part the situation in the occupied territories as well as those

independent Muslim lands that feel deprived of former greatness? Pre-oedipal narcissistic

injury combined with adolescent humiliation and envy over the modernity of the United

Statesattacked as the great seducer or Satan, especially in the repetitive chanting of the

madrassas of Saudi Arabiahave led to what might have been predicted, not the form,

perhaps, but the terror.

What might psychoanalysis say about the form of that terror? Granted the economic

practicality and effectiveness of using ones own body as a weapon when one has limited

resources, hatred of ones sexual impulses is probably involved in suicide bombing as

well. But the repressed will return, one way or another, for what else is the body as bomb

if not the ultimate phallic symbol? Whether using their own bodies or the bodies of planes,

suicide bombers reveal a unique form of death wish. Although they demonstrate the theory

that suicide is murder turned against the self, real murder is involved here as wellof

anonymous strangers. And because the martyrs all look forward to a reward of 72

virgins in paradise (assuming we dont have a mistranslation here), their death wish also

involves the hope of delayed gratification in a sexually purified heaven. But what do the

female suicide bombers get out of their sacrifice? No studs in paradise for them. Genderliberation perhaps? If so, it has no life in the Islamic hereafter.

Jonathan Lear (2001) has said more than once that people do not want to consider the

irrationalone of the reasons for attacks on psychoanalysis, by the way. I suppose we

would rather attribute terrorism to economic deprivation, social repression, political frus-

tration, historical displacement, our own unfairnessanything, as long as it seems mo-

tivatedrather than to what Lear sees as the impulse to do harm, without reason. Im not

sure that Islamic envy is all causeless. But if so, of all the disciplines, psychoanalysis is

the best able to deal with the irrational.

Psychoanalysis isnt just for the privileged few who have the money and the leisure to

engage in it several times a week. It also informs the therapy that has proved absolutely

necessary since September 11 for survivors as well as many of the rest of us. Furthermore,

with its discoveries or at least codification of such concepts as the unconscious, regres-

sion, denial, and projection, psychoanalysis now shapes the way people in the West (andincreasingly elsewhere) look at the world, even those who refuse to admit it. It is a

discipline not just for analyzing individuals but also for understanding the products of

culture: stories, other art forms, and institutions. It should now give more attention to the

East, to the Islamic world. This should not be left to the historians and sociologists alone.

There has to be a psychoanalysis of the tribe as well as the family, the community

along with the individual, a recognition that individuation may not be the sine qua non for

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all people and that renunciation rather than achievement informs the value system of half

the people of the world. That is, psychoanalysis may have to modify its framework. It

cannot assume that all of its principles have universality.

It is of some comfort, however, to see that some of its concepts hold up more strongly

than ever: narcissism, for example. Of the two major types of unhealthy narcissism,overinflated and negative, Bin Laden and his like have revealed both at different times,

exhibiting both grandiosity and abasement. As I have already implied, a field of inquiry

can be narcissistic as well as an individual. And so can a nation. If it were willing to, the

United States could help the international situation simply by recognizing its own psy-

chological injuries to others. Boasting that were the greatest country in the world is bound

to wound the narcissism of others at the same time that it reveals an inflated narcissism

of our own.

However, just as the vocabulary of the individual talking cure has entered the general

vocabulary of culture, with little conscious pushing on the part of analysts but with the

help (sometimes unconscious) of those in other fields, maybe something similar will

happen with an international vocabulary of cure or, at least, care. Much of the world

does seem ready to recognize the importance of talkand its concomitant: listening. This

is in part testimony to the great influence, despite the bad press, that psychoanalysis has

already had. The most important contribution that psychoanalysis can make at this time is

to inform our international relations, to make the talking cure global.

References

Anderson, M. (2002, February). Narcissism revisited: Attempting to address and transform unbear-

able affect. Paper presented at the Mount Sinai Medical Center conference Narcissism Revis-

ited: Clinical and Theoretical Challenges, New York, New York.

Koenigsberg, R. (1989). Symbiosis and separation: Towards a psychology of culture. New York:

Library of Social Science.

Lear, J. (2001, December). Why do they hate us so much? University of Chicago Magazine, 94(2).

Retrieved September 3, 2003, from http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0112/features/remains.html

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