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Leon Wurmser 52/3

PSYCHOANALYTIC REFLECTIONS
ON 9/11, TERRORISM, AND
GENOCIDAL PREJUDICE:
ROOTS AND SEQUELS

T ERRORISM AND THE P SYCHOANALYTIC S PACE : I NTERNATIONAL

P ERSPECTIVES FROM G ROUND Z ERO . Edited by Joseph A.
Cancelmo, Isaac Tylim, Joan Hoffenberg, and Hattie Myers.
New York: Pace University Press, 2003, 182 pp., $30.00
S EPTEMBER 11: T RAUMA AND H UMAN B ONDS . Edited by Susan
W. Coates, Jane L. Rosenthal, and Daniel S. Schechter. Hillsdale,
NJ: The Analytic Press, 2003, 312 pp., $47.50.
T ERRORISM AND WAR : U NCONSCIOUS D YNAMICS OF P OLITICAL
V IOLENCE . Edited by Colin Covington, Paul Williams, Jean
Arundale, and Jean Knox. London: Karnac Books, 2002, 435 pp.,
$35.99.
T E R R O R I N T H E N A M E O F G O D : W H Y R E L I G I O U S M I L I TA N T S
K I L L . By Jessica Stern. New York: HarperCollins, 2003,
368 pp., $27.95.
D ER K AMPF D EMOKRATIE : DER EXTREMISMUS , DIE G EWALT
UM DIE
UND DER TERROR. By Arno Gruen. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002,
EUR 15.00 ($18.60).
FEINDBILD AMERIKA. ÜBER DIE BESTÄNDIGKEIT EINES RESSENTIMENTS.
By Dan Diner. Munich: Propyläen, 2002.
THE CRISIS OF I SLAM : HOLY WAR AND U NHOLY TERROR. By Bernard
Lewis. New York: The Modern Library, 2003, 184 pp., $19.95.
P HILOSOPHY IN A T IME OF T ERROR : D IALOGUES WITH J ÜRGEN
H ABERMAS AND J ACQUES D ERRIDA . By Giovanna Borradori.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, $25.00.
 L e o n Wu r m s e r

On September 11, 2001, an abyss opened up. “The violence of the

attacks against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon has revealed an abyss
of terror that is going to haunt our existence and thinking for years
and perhaps decades to come” (Borradori, p. 21). Imre Kertész, survivor
of the Holocaust and Nobel Laureate for literature, says at the celebra-
tion of the Day of German Unification in Magdeburg, October 3, 2003,
“For years one did not dare in Europe to acknowledge that on its
southeastern borders apocalytic abysses were opening up that now, ten
years later, threaten to devour the entire world” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
October 4, 2003). An abyss opened up for the individuals directly caught
up in the assault on America: “All acts of terrorism make the common-
place unsafe, unreliable. . . . When ordinary reality can no longer be
relied on to be only what it seems, it becomes uncanny. . . .The bound-
aries between real and unreal falter when the unthinkable happens”
(Coates, Schechter, and First, in Coates et al., pp. 25–26). It holds true
for the world community and certainly for the American nation: the
attacks are barely healed scars. They have opened a deep rift of under-
standing, separating the United States not only from much of the Islamic
912
world, but from much of Europe as well: large segments of the popu-
lation believe that the CIA or the Mossad engineered the attacks. This
profound gap in interpretation, this radically dif ferent perspective,
accompanied by widespread schadenfreude, calls for analysis.
The terrorist acts of 9/11 (and similar ones all over the globe) reveal
depths of hatred and hint at buried, but virulent anxiety in the per-
petrators that originate in personal, societal, cultural, and historical
humiliation and shame, and a loss of self-respect and dignity. The
aggression unleashed is ascribed to varied external motives, but at the
same time the resentment is an inner force of enormous destructivity, as
if to cry out, “Injustice has been done to us. We are the victims.
Everything is permissible to redress the balance of justice.”
Profound questions arise about the response—in regard both to
traumatized individuals, families, and communities, and to military
and political reactions and their psychodynamic meanings. These
questions cannot be avoided by psychoanalysts. How they affect the
“psychoanalytic space” becomes an urgent issue. Questions of war as
a response are raised. Should treatment of the terrorist acts be treated
mostly as the result of the West’s actions? Should we have peace at
almost any price? Or, to the contrary, is a so-called preemptive war
justified? How does one fight against terror and prevent new attacks
 9/11, TERRORISM, AND GENOCIDAL PREJUDICE

without engendering new shame and injustice and thus contributing

to the vicious cycle of humiliation, resentment, violence, and new in-
justice? To remedy the causes is one thing, often incredibly difficult;
how to respond to imminent danger is quite another. We are reminded
of Freud’s dictum that in case of fire it is the first task of the firemen
not to look for the overturned lamp that has caused the conflagration
but to extinguish the flames.
These issues and many more are dealt with in these eight books.
They encompass the broad spectrum of psychodynamics and cultural-
historical dynamics underlying terrorism, intolerance, war, and genocide;
the philosophical background of these phenomena; the psychodynamics
and psychotherapy of the victims of severe trauma; and, above all,
terror, persecution, and torture, and their treatment. Unfortunately, it is
impossible in a brief essay to do justice to the richness, depth, and perti-
nence of the observations and the theoretical and practical conclusions
of the almost one hundred authors represented in these books. The essays
contained in them are unfailingly thoughtful and valuable, carried by a
spirit of understanding without condoning, almost all of them with a
913
deep psychoanalytic understanding of inner conflict and trauma.
I will begin with a cursory introduction to these books, in the se-
quence in which they are listed. The first (Cancelmo et al.) grew out
of a conference organized by the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training
and Research and reflects how a considerable number of clinicians
dealt with the suf fering of the terror victims and the great strains
put on psychoanalysts in their struggle to preserve the “psychoanalytic
space”: “Terror has the potential to induce, in both partners of the
analytic dyad, primitive affective states” (Isaac Tylim, p. 9), thereby
impinging on the “psychoanalytic space” that should serve both to
contain unsymbolized traumatic experience and to allow reflection.
The second book (Coates, Rosenthal, and Schechter) grew out of
a conference planned by the Columbia University Center for Psycho-
analytic Training and Research on the topic of transgenerational trans-
mission of trauma; needless to say, the project assumed much broader
significance with the disaster of 9/11. The book’s central idea is that
“one can begin to think of trauma and human relatedness as inversely
related terms. The greater the strength of the human bonds that connect
an individual to others, and the more those bonds are accessible in times
of danger, the less likely it is that an individual will be severely trauma-
tized and the more likely it is that he or she may recover afterward”;
 L e o n Wu r m s e r

the book stresses the “importance of human connection as a protection

against later trauma and as a means of healing afterward” (pp. 3–4).
The third work (Covington et al.) is a joint endeavor, by the edi-
tors of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Journal
of Analytical Psychology, and the British Journal of Psychotherapy,
“to bring together a historical collection of psychoanalytic papers
on war and terrorism” ( p. xi). Accordingly, the volume presents a
range of psychoanalytic writings on these topics antedating and going
beyond today’s terrorism and its origins and aftermath. Included are
contributions by Freud, Jung, Kurt Eissler, Donald Kaplan, Diana
Birkett, Robert Hinshelwood, and Hanna Segal.
The fourth volume discussed here is by one the foremost experts on
terrorism today, Jessica Stern of Harvard University. In it she presents
an extensive exploration of a broad range of terror groups: from mili-
tants of the “save the babies” movement in this country, to Islamic
terror groups in Pakistan, Indonesia, and Palestine, and on to Jewish
extremists—all on the basis of her own interviews and audacious visits,
conducted in very threatening quarters.
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Fif th is The S truggle about Democracy: Extremism, Violence,
and Terror, by the Swiss psychoanalyst Arno Gruen. The author has
written a number of widely read books on the psychoanalytic under-
standing of right-wing extremists, including Nazis and neo-Nazis;
on transgenerational psychopathology in the families of perpetrators;
and on the familial and cultural factors that promote their lack of
empathy and their suppression of their own feelings and true selves.
The sixth work, America, the Enemy: About the Durability of a
Resentment, by Dan Diner, professor of contemporary history at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem and director of the Institute for Jewish
history at the University of Leipzig, deals with the long history of
anti-Americanism in European literature and its current intensification.
The seventh work, by Bernard Lewis, elucidates the background of
the murderous resentment that at present fuels the most menacing forms
of terrorism: those emanating from the Muslim world, fundamentalist
religious and secular-nationalistic, both merging into a mighty river
that threatens to engulf more than just the Middle East.
Finally, Giovanna Borradori’s book presents two long interviews
conducted with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida almost immedi-
ately after 9/11, an encompassing study of the thinking of both, and an
interpretation of their philosophies of history.
 9/11, TERRORISM, AND GENOCIDAL PREJUDICE

After a few introductory remarks defining terrorism, I will begin

these considerations from the side of the victims and their therapists,
then proceed to psychoanalytically informed studies of perpetrators,
and end with some broader cultural and philosophical analyses of
9/11 and its background.

WHAT IS TERRORISM?

Jessica Stern presents the political scientist’s definition: “only two

characteristics of terrorism are critical for distinguishing it from other
forms of violence. First, terrorism is aimed at noncombatants. This
characteristic of terrorism distinguishes it from some war-fighting.
Second, terrorists use violence for dramatic purpose: instilling fear in
the target audience is often more important than the physical result”
(p. xx). She defines terrorism “as an act or threat of violence against
noncombatants with the objective of exacting revenge, intimidating,
or otherwise inf luencing an audience” (p. xx). The psychoanalyst
Salman Akhtar states that “the term terrorism refers to the violent
915
expression of a political agenda by an organized group of individuals
who operate in a clandestine manner and who are bound to each other
by hatred of a common enemy and love of a common political, ethnic,
or ideological goal” (Covington et al., p. 89). Lord Alderdice differen-
tiates between “terrorism, whose purpose is to bring about radical
change in a polity, and the tactics of terror used by some dictatorial
states to hold on to power and maintain the status quo” (Covington
et al., p. 13). In fact, the lines become blurred when dictatorships
f inance and support external terror groups against democracies, thus
exploiting local grievances, as happens now almost typically.

HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND AND TREAT THE

EFFECTS OF TERROR ON ITS VICTIMS?

The starting point for many papers in these books is the concept of
trauma. It is not only central for the victims of terrorism; it also forms a
bridge to the underlying dynamics of the perpetrators, as we will notice
later on: “disruptive violence attacks the virtual and symbolic place
where individuals engage with one another. . . . The un-symbolized, non-
representational terror stemming from violence may be regarded as a
central theoretical and ethical dilemma in psychoanalytical practice”
 L e o n Wu r m s e r

(Viñar, in Cancelmo et al., pp. 29–30). An answer to the dilemma is

given by Myrna Gannagé, a resident of Beirut, from her work with
child survivors of the massacre of Kana: “It was within the therapy
that the narrative would reintroduce the time factor in the representa-
tion, transforming the traces into thought, the reviviscence into rememo-
ration. . . . The treatment of these children has restored the symbolizing
potential through games and drawing” (Cancelmo et al., pp. 42–43).
Mourning rituals, like memorialization—establishment of memorials,
the inscription of the names of lost communities—can be helpful in the
healing process (Garwood, in Cancelmo et al., p. 369).
Mordechai Benyakar, who has worked with victims of terror in
Israel, as well as in Argentina, warns of “the dangerous tendency to
focus on causality of the events” instead of just dealing with “the
obstruction of the psychic capacity of processing” (Cancelmo et al.,
p. 96). I wonder, though, whether the attempt to understand the meaning
of the external events themselves and their concatenation may indeed
form a relevant part of the working through. This becomes evident
from other contributions: Dvora Miller-Florsheim speaks of the phobic
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avoidance of “social and political countertransference” and describes
her own very painful struggles with it (Covington et al., pp. 75, 81).
The complementarity of inside focus and attention to the traumatizing
outside is here decisive, not an either/or.
Looking at the problem from the viewpoint of attachment theory,
Susan Coates poses the question, “Could the simple loss of human con-
nectedness constitute for a child a trauma equal to the trauma of war?”
(Coates, Rosenthal, and Schecter, p. 6). A corollary of this connectedness
is the predictive importance of the mother’s attitude for the child’s response
to severe external trauma: “Mothers who tried to avoid reminders of
the trauma and who were in a numb emotional state that restricted their
capacity for closeness were unable to help their children process the
experience of trauma.” It confirms the importance of reflective function-
ing in the parent as a protective factor (Coates, Schechter, and First,
in Coates et al., pp. 32, 39, 41). This last point is focused on by
Fonagy and Target: (Coates et al., p. 1034): “Ref lective function pro-
tects” (p. 105). “Caregivers with unresolved experiences of mourning
and trauma appear to cause disorganization in their infants’ attachment
relationships,” not the fact of trauma per se, but its lack of resolution
(Covington et al., p. 333). “The dissociative core permits the direct trans-
mission of unconscious traumatic fantasy from mother or father to child”
 9/11, TERRORISM, AND GENOCIDAL PREJUDICE

(p. 345). Compatible with this view, many articles in these books refer
to the destruction of symbolic thinking, and with that to the attack on
metaphor and imagination.
The extent of traumatization by 9/11 goes far beyond those most
directly affected: “we remain in the midst of one of the most extensive
mental health crises in memory, with enormous public health issues
created by these events” (Robert Alan Glick, in Coates et al., p. vii):
“approximately 200,000 (27%) of NYC public school children met cri-
teria for one or more of the probable psychiatric disorders” (Hoven,
Mandell, and Duarte, in Coates et al., pp. 66–67).

WHAT ARE THE AIMS OF TERROR AND

THE MOTIVATIONS OF TERRORISTS?

Again we may listen to what Jessica Stern writes from her vast experi-
ence; although she deals with religiously motivated terrorists, her
insights can be extrapolated to those who act out of ideological or
nationalistic reasons. “My interviews suggest that people join religious
917
terrorist groups partly to transform themselves and to simplify life. They
start out feeling humiliated, enraged that they are viewed by some Other
as second class. They take on new identities as martyrs on behalf of
a purported spiritual cause. . . . What seems to happen is that they enter
a kind of trance, where the world is divided neatly between good
and evil, victim and oppressor. . . . a sense of transcendence is one of
many attractions of religious violence for terrorists, beyond the appeal
of achieving their goals” (Stern, pp. 281–282). The ecstasy is very much
of a sexual character: “call out in joy . . . a wedding to ‘the black-eyed’
awaits your son in paradise,” proclaims the last will of a Hamas suicide
bomber to his mother (Stern, p. 54). For Stern, the central motive is
clearly the axis of shame and resentment. Against the Marxist credo of the
precedence of socioeconomic factors she states that not only is “poverty,
in and of itself . . . unlikely to be the cause of violence,” but “wealth and
education are positively correlated with terrorism” (pp. 79 f.).
Lord Alderdice, speaker of the Parliament of Northern Ireland
and a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, explains that terrorists “see them-
selves as righting some terrible wrong, some humiliation, some deep
disrespect that has been done them, their community or their nation and
they in their weakness are, with great courage and risks to themselves,
embarked on the heroic task of righting that wrong” (Cancelmo et al.,
 L e o n Wu r m s e r

p. 14). They aim, in their weakness, “to provoke organizationally strong

authorities into a substantial overreaction that will damage their stand-
ing and moral authority, both domestically and internationally”
(Covington et al., p. 12) This is the devilish dilemma in dealing with
genocidal terror: every countermove by force threatens to create even
more grievance and universal enmity, but to abstain from counterforce
is devastating to the victim of terrorism, a proof that the victim is
horribly weak and humiliated, and thus encourages even more terror.

WHAT ARE THE SHAME AND GUILT DYNAMICS

AND THE ROLE OF THE SUPEREGO IN TERRORISM?

Conflicts about values and authority, about guilt and shame, about the
sense of justice and injustice—superego issues—go through the studies
on terrorism like a red thread. As in Greek tragedy, a single value is
pursued to the exclusion of everything else, especially empathy, thereby
eliminating all moral ambiguities and dehumanizing the adversary—all
in the service of an ideal: “the appeal of purifying the world through
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murder” (Stern, p. xxix).
Like Stern, but adding something important, Arno Gruen (2002)
claims that “behind all terrorism and violence stands an inner empti-
ness because no identity could be formed which would have been rooted
in compassion and the sensibility for his own pain and the pain of the
other. Instead of such a fundament, an identity structure arises that is
based solely on identifications with authorities and obedience” (pp. 137–
138). The loveless and cruel attitude of caregivers is being taken over
by the child. What is his own is being split off as something foreign.
Instead, revenge is taken on the supposed weakness of the other (their
pain, their tenderness, their femininity, their affects altogether), which
basically is one’s own weakness. Violence becomes a source of feel-
ing alive. Albert Speer described the greedy, even delirious joy with
which Hitler watched movies of the burning London, of the firestorm
over Warsaw, and of exploding convoys and grew ecstatic imagin-
ing the cataclysm of New York: “how skyscrapers turned into huge,
flaming torches and collapsed into each other and how the flaming
city was reflected against the dark night sky” (Gruen, p. 132). Hitler’s
twilight fantasy became the reality of the terrorists of 9/11. A very
important aspect is the hatred of women and a disdain for sexuality,
rooted in a profound fear of the omnipotently devouring mother. The
 9/11, TERRORISM, AND GENOCIDAL PREJUDICE

idealization of a Führer figure “rescues them from the unconsciously

feared omnipotent mother” (p. 153). America, equated with female
soldiers and emasculation of men, is perceived as a land ruled by women.
Clinically we know how abused children, based on the “omnip-
otence of responsibility,” blame themselves for the horrors they have
suffered, leading to a constant sense of guilt. Turning things around,
in the form of fierce aggression, is an important defense against guilt.
The true self is hated and persecuted in the stranger. Identification
with a totalitarian authority—merger of the ego in an archaic, resentment-
laden superego figure dictating the necessity of a false self—replaces
genuine identity. This is a superego that measures only the scale of
strength and weakness, “honor” and shame, not love and guilt for hurt-
ing the other. Such a resolutely shame-based superego commands sub-
mission to an equally absolutist external superego figure, a total denial
of all feelings of closeness and compassion and an exclusive stress on
values of steely ruthlessness signifying “strength.” This is, as Gruen
persuasively argues, much more part of a culture stressing blind submis-
sion to some form of authority than a matter of individual pathology.
919

HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND THE

CULTURAL BACKGROUND?

Dan Diner’s book deals with the motivating power of anti-American-

ism and its long and persistent history, particularly in Germany,
but now having become a dominant force throughout Europe and the
Muslim world. While the psychodynamics in these two cultural areas
are certainly far from identical, there is some generalizability to what
the author specifically identifies in German writings over the past two
and a half centuries. “America is a counterworld to Europe” and thus
serves as a projection screen for all those images and metaphors that are
the opposites of the European self-image, specifically for “the dark
sides of modernity” ( p. 16). It is this “antimodernistic reaction for-
mation” that is now gripping large parts of traditional societies caught up
in globalization. Already at the time of the Enlightenment, there
were “fantasy formations of decay coming from America” (p. 18).
There were therefore, apart from sincere expressions of horror,
compassion, and solidarity, worldwide reactions of joy to the catastro-
phe of 9/11: “America is guilty, America has been punished—for its
crimes, for its riches, for its ‘way of life’ ” (Diner, p. 164). Prominent
 L e o n Wu r m s e r

representatives of culture expressed their “amazing joy in view of

the destruction of the superpower, or more exactly: in view of its self-
destruction, of its suicide as work of art. . . . ” So wrote Jean Baudrillard
in Der Spiegel. After describing the catastrophe in “poetic” words,
Sibylle Tönnies adds that “this image evokes a majestic feeling,” while
the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen celebrates it as the “greatest work
of art” ever. With that there appeared in short order various conspiracy
theories about the CIA, the FBI, and Mossad. Diner concludes his
magisterial exposé by returning to a worldwide anti-American resent-
ment, now deeply entrenched: “[It] is directed against a country
which, as imperial republic, is more than a national state and less than
the universality of mankind. This resentment indulges in a mostly
antimaterialistic pose, and in the revulsion against the ethic of utili-
tarianism and of regulated self-interest predominant in an America
that is alleged to be interested only in business and profit. Opposed to
this great corrupter of mankind is an ‘idealism’ of supposedly higher
morality and purity that is called on to stop this American pursuit
of happiness. Such pursuit is treated as a disenchantment that world-
920
wide leads into emptiness” (p. 199). In this imagery, the affirmation of
materialism, seen by traditional societies as shameless, is compounded
by an unrestrained consumerism.
This European anti-Americanism is now joined with its Islamic
twin, which directly brought about 9/11. This Islamic version is very
helpfully analyzed by the leading expert on Islam and the Middle East,
Bernard Lewis. He describes how the current glowing resentment in the
Muslim world against the West in general, and against Israel and Jews
in particular, is due to the decline of the “House of Islam” and the
ascendancy of the “House of Unbelief.” This decline began in the thir-
teenth century, first in Spain, then in the Balkans and in Russia, later in
South Asia, and assumed ever more dramatic speed. The successful per-
severance of the Jewish state is in fact the fifth and latest of the great humili-
ations. In the fury of anti-Western and anti-Jewish resentment we witness
today, shame about such historic humiliation plays the cardinal role.

WHAT DOES PHILOSOPHY CONTRIBUTE

TO REFLECTIONS ABOUT 9/11?

“Mine is the story of a philosopher in a time of terror.” So Giovanna

Borradori describes her extensive interviews with Jürgen Habermas and
 9/11, TERRORISM, AND GENOCIDAL PREJUDICE

Jacques Derrida. But she makes a distinction: “While for Habermas

terrorism is the effect of the trauma of modernization, which has spread
around the world at a pathological speed, Derrida sees terrorism as a
symptom of a traumatic element intrinsic to modern experience, whose
focus is always on the future, somewhat pathologically understood
as promise, hope, and self-affirmation” (p. 22).
Habermas accuses the West, in particular America. While conced-
ing that Islamic fundamentalism is a “defensive reaction against
the fear of a violent uprooting of traditional ways of life” and that “the
West in its entirety serves as a scapegoat for the Arab world’s own, very
real experiences of loss, suffered by populations torn out of their
cultural traditions during processes of accelerated modernization,” he
raises the counterpoint: “A materialist West encounters other cultures—
which owe their profile to the imprint of one of the great world reli-
gions—only through the provocative and trivializing irresistibility of a
leveling consumerist culture” (pp. 32–33). He looks at the causes of
the problem above all in economic terms. Zeroing in on the West’s
contribution to this spiral of violence, he suggests that “without the
921
political taming of an unbounded capitalism, the devastating stratifica-
tion of world society will remain intractable” (p. 36). The phrase “clash
of civilizations,” he says, often masks the vital material interests of the
West. The answer lies, according to Habermas, in a transition to “what
Kant had anticipated as a state of world citizenry” (p. 38). While this
concept is taking shape in the UN, its weakness is also clear to him;
he speaks of a conflict “between the legitimate but weak authority of the
international community and the actual strength of nation-states capable
of military action but pursuing their own interests” (p. 39)—a conf lict,
in fact, between justice and power. Even admitting the scandalous and
recurrent failure of international institutions in the face of genocidal
massacres and terror, he insists that the central achievement of the
order after World War II must be preserved: the prohibition of “attack
wars,” including preemptive strikes regardless of the imminence or
severity of a threat. A resolute ostracism of states ignoring that pro-
hibition is the decisive step toward a cosmopolitan state of law, and
America’s flouting of the injunction, says Habermas, has destroyed its
“normative authority” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 17, 2003).
On a deeper philosophical level, he comments further: “It seems
that in the anxiety of a technologically highly armed superpower about
terror the Cartesian dread of a subject is concentrated that tries to
 L e o n Wu r m s e r

objectify itself and the world surrounding it, in order to bring every-
thing under control” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 17, 2003).
This endeavor stands in radical conflict with the professed civilizing
mission of this superpower to improve the world according to liberal
concepts. He views the risk of overreaction by the U.S. and others
as leading paradoxically and tragically to the result that “global terrorism
succeeds in the supremely political goal of deligitimizing the authority
of the state” (p. 56). Thus, Habermas considers the root causes to be
economic and ideological, in contrast to other views, like Samuel
Huntington’s, that see in culture “the driving and mobilizing force in
today’s conflicts” (p. 65). But for Habermas “the cause of the com-
municative ailment brought about by globalization is not cultural but
economic” (p. 65).
This indeed appears to be the point of schism in much of today’s
geopolitical discourse and the antithesis of left and right, liberal and
conservative: the primacy of economic and societal values versus
the primacy of cultural and religious values. What has the psycho-
analyst to add to this controversy? The dispute is one that has riven
922
our field as well: outside versus inside forces, trauma versus drives,
experience versus innate disposition. Freud addressed these polari-
ties using the central explanatory concept of the complementary
series, even before the concept of complementarity assumed episte-
mological dignity in physics. Applied to the philosophical dispute at
hand, the complementarity and equal dignity of the two views would
seem to of fer a way out. And yet, when we look at it as analysts,
this duality of motivation appears insuf f icient. I will come back to
a more specif ically psychoanalytic enlargement of this dialogue:
tertium datur.
Derrida starts out from the self-destructive force, “the implacable
law . . . [regulating] the autoimmunitary process” inherent in the Cold
War, the end of the Cold War, and the war on terrorism (p. 95). In
regard to the first, he speaks of the U.S. representing itself as “the
ultimate presumed unity of force and law.” But this is inherently self-
destructive, as “the Cold War in the head”—the “aggression of which
it is the object . . . comes . . . from the inside”—has itself given the
weapons of its destruction to the terrorists. Thus, “the wound [of 9/11]
remains open by our terror before the future and not only the past”
(p. 96). All our “defenses” and all forms of the war on terrorism “work
to regenerate . . . the causes of the evil they claim to eradicate” and lead
 9/11, TERRORISM, AND GENOCIDAL PREJUDICE

to “the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the pur-

poses of religious fanaticism” (p. 113).
In contrast to the process in Europe inaugurated by the Enlighten-
ment—“still uneven, unfulfilled, relative, and complex”—of lifting
“the authority of religious doctrine over the political,” it is precisely
religious doctrine that rules both American democracy and the Muslim
world: it “in fact governs not the principle but the predominant reality
of American political culture” (p. 117). Thus the “war on terrorism”
pits “two groups with a strong religious identification” against each
other: “There would thus be a confrontation between two political the-
ologies, both, strangely enough, issuing out of the same stock or com-
mon soil of what I would call an ‘Abrahamic’ revelation” (p. 117). The
real front in the current struggle, says Derrida, is therefore be-tween the
United States and Europe, between a political theology and “the only
secular actor on the world stage” (p. 170).
Derrida’s central assertion—the fundamental antagonism between
American political theology and European secularism—stands almost
directly opposed to Diner’s conclusions (and my own observations).
923
The French Revolution did not engender only the pathos of liberté,
fraternité, egalité and was not simply heir to the humanitarian impulses
of the Enlightenment. It also inspired the utopian, messianic totalitari-
anisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Largely absent from
the American scene, these ideologies conquered vast lands in Europe
and Asia and now are explicitly carried forward by the Islamicist
and secular nationalist revolutions in the Arab world, including a viru-
lent anti-Semitism.

PSYCHOANALYTIC CONCLUSIONS

I will try now to summarize in psychoanalytic terms some of the major

ideas presented in these eight very valuable books. Above all, I would
like to express my conviction that one of the greatest contributions
psychoanalysis can make in any debate is the idea of trying to under-
stand the intraindividual, familial, and sociocultural processes in terms
of both conflict and complementarity—contending forces that clash,
but also determine each other in circular ways and thus complement
each other.
A leading element in the ef fect that terrorism has on its victims
is a cognitive regression due to severe trauma: the replacement of
 L e o n Wu r m s e r

“representation” by direct “presentation”—the process of desymboli-

zation. The ability to put ideas and feelings into words, to symbolize, is
impaired, and a major part of the psychotherapist’s or psychoanalyst’s
task is to find the metaphors and narratives to restore that capacity.
Terror is a public health problem of the greatest magnitude, and
it affects deeply the analyst’s own work. To protect the analytic space
as much as possible and so facilitate a return to the inquiry of inner
life is a prime task, but the acknowledgment and exploration of external
events and their causal concatenation cannot be neglected in the psycho-
analytic work.
Severe historical trauma lives on in the cultural memory of a
people, is transmitted from generation to generation, mostly in the form
of survivor guilt and shame that must be expiated. This leads directly
to the background of terrorism: A culture that abuses its children and
inculcates blind obedience to authority creates suicide bombers. It con-
tinually re-creates new trauma, but is itself rooted in historical trauma.
It deflects the rage created by incessant shaming (and reinforced by
historical grievances) onto an outward enemy who symbolizes values
924
antithetical to all that the culture claims to honor; there is a deep sense
of humiliating deficiency. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the
pathology of an archaic, shame-oriented superego, rooted in severe
physical or emotional traumatization, is as important as historical injus-
tices, economic deprivations, religious fanaticism, or the threat posed
by modernity. On the one side, the shamed part of the self is projected
onto the victim; it needs to be tortured and destroyed as a symbol of
one’s own image of weakness and victimhood. On the other side, a
harsh superego—a punishing and absolving, absolute authority—
is projected onto leaders, terrorist groups, and above all onto “God.”
Terrorism can thus be understood as an externalization of inner con-
flict with an archaic superego. This conflict is guided by pervasive
resentment—“inner” here meaning within the individual, as well as
within family, group, and large community. Terrorism’s history is a
tale of shame and resentment and their exploitation for power
and prof it.
In this context, cognitive dissonance, moral ambiguity, and inner
conflicts are anathema. Fanaticism is a battle against inner conf lict,
an attempt to abolish it altogether. Conflict is “resolved” by splitting
in Freud’s sense: the side-by-side coexistence of denial and acknowl-
edgment.
 9/11, TERRORISM, AND GENOCIDAL PREJUDICE

Religion promises union with a transcendent authority and re-

demption from guilt brought on by inner aggression, omnipotence
of responsibility, and shame over one’s actual or perceived weakness.
These dynamics are strongly rooted in cultural tradition, as well as in
historically based resentment, but are funneled through the individual’s
childhood and family history to emerge as inner victimhood. Indivi-
dual identity is thus replaced by a subjugating, implacable superego,
with an absolutist ego ideal. The victimhood so much played up is
primarily that inherent in moral masochism: relentless attack by a
traumatogenic, archaic superego, operating much more by shame than
by guilt. External humiliations awaken its inner brutality and unleash
its vehement aggression against whoever or whatever is perceived
as the cause of this shame. The terrorist act, especially if it involves
suicide, is an act of conciliation with a superego authority, embodied
by God, and thus is an act of redemption.
A necessary ingredient in this dynamic is a defensive dehumaniza-
tion of the other, above all in the form of categorization: a category
to which the human being belongs, be it class, nation, religion, race,
925
or gender, is considered that person’s essence and so deprives the
individual of his or her unique value. The categories of friend and foe,
of belonging to one’s own identity or the alien’s, are forced on people,
and one becomes blind to their intrinsic value, their being ends in
themselves. In this condition of soul-blindness, a general atmosphere
of dehumanization pervades all relations, of sexuality in particular.
If resentment, the corrosive feeling of injustice suffered, is added
to this concretization of persons, we find the ideological mass catastro-
phes. The cause of such resentment is commonly displaced from the
one who has inflicted the injury onto categories of symbolization that
may reflect very different dimensions and stem from within.
Typically, sexualization is a crucial part of the reaction to traumati-
zation, just as there is an intense, but strongly suppressed accumu-
lation of aggression. In fact, there is a deep equivalence of aggression,
sexual excitement, and traumatogenic af fects. In particular, power
and violence are erotized. In the perpetrations of massacres and
suicide bombings, the intense, erotically ecstatic element cannot be
overestimated, particularly within the context of societally and reli-
giously massive devaluation of genital sexuality and of everything
feminine—the fear of the overwhelming Great Mother. Religion and
ideology thus become repositories not only of shame and guilt, the
 L e o n Wu r m s e r

repression of sexuality, and the radical devaluation of women, but

also of redemption from all these conditions—in a grandiose compro-
mise formation.
The other, the alien, the stranger who has been branded by cate-
gorical thinking becomes the carrier of all that is suppressed as evil,
dirty, or otherwise threatening in the self. He—or she—becomes the
devil. The essence of evil is this traumatic power of resentment, with
its inherent concretization, objectification, and dehumanization of the
other, and with that the license to hold him in contempt and wreak
humiliation upon him. This evil found its extreme realization in the
Holocaust and other totalitarianism enormities, and we encounter it
today in global terrorism. The stranger becomes the blood sacrif ice
to assuage the inner judge by placating the judging divinity.
In R ódinka: A Russian Recollection, a novel dedicated to Anna
Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote about the Russia she left behind;
like her, we feel today “as if another world were covered, covered over,
denied . . . and yet a ghostlike reality, not yet here, and yet already
felt behind us.”
926

Leon Wurmser
904 Crestwick Road
Towson, MD 21286
Fax: 410–828–6602
E-mail: leonwurmser@copper.net