This paper describes the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the political response to them, from the point of view of their unconscious underpinnings, both personal and archetypal.

Lionel Corbett
Santa Barbara, California

Abstract

This paper describes the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the political response to them, from the point of view of their unconscious underpinnings, both personal and archetypal. The focus is particularly on the psychology of hatred, rage, envy, and mutual shadow projection. Also described are the effects of the cultural trauma and the defenses against it that ensued. The attacks are described as a manifestation of the dark side of the Self, with mythic—apocalyptic—implications. Suggestions are made from the point of view of various theoretical orientations that might be helpful.

Introduction

The traumatic events of September 11 are an example of Jung's (1959) idea that we experience the unconscious not only as dreams and fantasy but also as events in the world. A depth psychological approach to September 11, and to terrorism in general, requires an exploration of their unconscious underpinnings, especially the hatred and rage behind the politics. This approach also recognizes the mythological dimension of this cultural trauma, and acknowledges that we must take into account not only the human level of the event but also the contribution of the dark side of the Self.

In the short space of this paper, I cannot address the complex economic and political factors that underlie this event. Rather, at the risk of appearing reductionist, I can only suggest a psychological contribution. I recognize that there are objections to discussing terrorism and other social ills from a psychological perspective because of a fear that to do so excuses evil or does not acknowledge its full horror. In contrast, I believe that trying to understand the situation psychologically is a better way of dealing with it than responding unconsciously, as if we were medieval inquisitors dealing with heretics. The fact that we approach evil psychologically in no way justifies or condones evil, nor does it make it any less evil.

September 11 in Light of the Theory of The Theory of Complexes

Contemporary psychoanalytic theory is helpful in describing the personal levels of a complex, while Jungian theory clarifies its archetypal dimension. My assumption is that the social and cultural factors that produce terrorism correlate with complexes within the psyche of the terrorist. ⁽¹⁾ These complexes contain archetypal elements of the dark side of the Self, which I will address later. Addressing the personal level first, I would ask what possessed the men who perpetrated this act, and discuss some of the psychological factors that seems to be motivating our politicians' response to it. These factors are important because it is well established that the neuroses of politicians may become incorporated into public policy. Politicians have their own narcissistic difficulties, their own infantile anxieties and sadistic, punitive attitudes, which affect the response of the collective to a traumatic situation.

In this section I wish to focus on the origins of the terrorists' destructive emotions, such as hatred and rage, while acknowledging that these psychological factors are only part of the overall problem, since there are also historical, economic, political, religious and other factors at work. Neither are hatred and rage the entire explanation for terrorism, since, in their own minds, the terrorists were motivated by their version of honor, sacrifice, duty, idealism, and the struggle for social justice. The problem here is that terrorists do not write about their inner lives; their manifestoes and biographies are mostly ideological tracts that justify their behavior. Accordingly, we have to make inferences that must be tentative when we try to understand their psychology.

Hatred and Narcissistic injury: Our and Theirs

One of the psychological origins of terrorism is narcissistic rage and hatred. Hatred is one of our most destructive emotions, but we are only just beginning to understand its psychodynamics, especially the paradoxical fact that hatred is actually a perverse form of attachment to people. ⁽²⁾ Needless to say, there is no unified theory in this area. The psychoanalytic self-psychologists point out that rage and hatred seem to be a universal response to injury to our sense of self, to being hurt, to our narcissism, or to any attack on our self-esteem or vanity. We like to see ourselves as special and central. We have secret, grandiose fantasies about our importance that are shattered by an attack. Usually these fantasies are integrated into a sense of self-worth, but sometimes they are sequestered and not integrated. Then, when our sense of being special is attacked, rage is the result; the bubble of our fantasy of greatness is burst by such injury. The result is the release of rage and pain, rather the way energy is released by the splitting of an atom. ⁽³⁾ Simply put, pain is converted into rage and rage is converted into hatred. ⁽⁴⁾ Then we are determined to get even, and we try to make the attacker hurt as we have been hurt. Such unforgiving fantasies of vengeance can dominate the life of the rageful person, and presumably this was true for the terrorists of September 11. Often, such hostility also serves the unconscious purpose of signaling that we are hurt and searching for a re-connection.

In the case of September 11, the source of the terrorists' narcissistic rage has been well documented. They are drawing on a huge reservoir of bitterness and rage at American policies that have shamed and humiliated the people of the region, and their culture and sense of justice tells them that this can only be honorably alleviated by fighting. Their grievances are well known; whether or not we agree with them we will not understand their psychology unless we empathically grasp their point of view.

Here is an extremely brief summary of the politics underlying their rage. Their problem is much more complicated than newspaper explanations such as bin Laden's hatred of western values such as freedom, tolerance, religious pluralism, and universal suffrage, nor can it be reduced to "an attack on civilization." It is often said that bin Laden has religious objection to US troops on Saudi soil, which he regards as sacred land. But his political rather than his religious message is the one that resonates with many Muslims. They object to US support for Israel, and they object to UN sanctions against Iraq that have so far killed enormous numbers of people while strengthening Saddam Hussein. They object to US support for authoritarian regimes that they see as corrupt and brutal. The rulers of these countries siphon off wealth at the expense of their people, backed by western power, even as these rulers ignore western standards of free speech, democracy and self-determination. This policy forces the people of the region to choose between support for dictators or for religious extremists. People of the region object to the fact that the US uses a huge amount of the world's non-renewable energy resources, produces huge amounts of dangerous waste, and imposes what they see as unfair trade practices. Local people see the US as indifferent to their wishes, and feel that unless they become violent the world ignores them. Battered children produce adults who batter, and the same seems to be true for groups. Yesterday's oppressed become tomorrow's oppressors. (It's not an accident that the Jews have been among the world's most battered people, and now the Israelis are doing some battering of their own.)

Hatred emerges out of these grievances and out of the suffering and shame of oppressed people who feel helpless and powerless. They see the shadow side of the USA, whose affluence is bought at the expense of millions of people living in poverty and exploitation. They object to the history of western colonialism of Muslim countries by the British, Dutch, and French, who conquered or colonized India, N. Africa, Indonesia, and so on with brutal and painful results. When local leaders arose who were nationalistic and tried to take control of their country's own resources, they became targets of the British and Americans. ⁽⁵⁾ When we combine all this historical shame, pain, and rage with a mythology that values martyrdom, we produce a terrorist willing to kill himself. ⁽⁶⁾

We suffered our own narcissistic rage and pain because we were so wounded by the attack. Here the symbolic meaning of the towers becomes important. Joseph Campbell pointed out that, in all cultures, the highest buildings tend to be the most important ones; in traditional cultures the temples to the gods were always the highest. The phallic twin towers destroyed by the terrorists were the temples to our gods, the gods of commerce and money. Hermes was the god of commerce, and his name was given to herms, phallic piles of stones or pillars in ancient Greece used to demarcate property boundaries. (Lopez-Pedraza [1977] points out that these stone herms were scattered in the countryside in the same way that crucifixes would later be—they were archetypal god images.) Why pillars to denote ownership? Because possession and ownership are characteristic of the patriarchal worship of the phallos (Monick,1987), and the trade towers were all about possession. Perhaps this happens because if we own a lot we feel less castrated, or simply because possessions enhance our self-esteem. The rape of nature, the devaluing of the feminine, and skyscrapers are all aspects of solar phallic consciousness. ⁽⁷⁾ Some would say that this represents an attempt to escape from possession by the Great Mother. Others would point out that the towers also represented the patriarchy's attempt to get above the earth, away from the importance of the natural world, and show everyone our importance. Interestingly, the Taliban also had a male God-image; they retreated to their high mountains, and they too devalued and persecuted women and the feminine. They were just more overt and crude about the way they did so.

Here it might be worth briefly distinguishing rage from hatred. Hatred tends to arise when rage has failed to make things better. For Kernberg, ⁽⁸⁾ (1995) whereas rage is transient, hatred is chronic and stable and is more complex than rage, which is more primitive. Hatred is a kind of structured derivative of rage, an enduring process within the personality that wants to destroy a bad object, make it suffer and control it. Sometimes we can only protect ourselves by dominating what we fear, to avoid persecution from it. We then justify our hatred in terms of revenge. Paranoid fears of retaliation usually accompany such intense hatred (as we seen in the Israeli-Arab conflict). Hatred can arise out of the despair that arises when thwarted longings and needs have not been recognized, and so that we want to destroy whatever is frustrating or attacking the self. The frequently-aired video tape of bin Laden talking to a visiting sheik, in which both of them were laughing about the success of the attack, was an example of the sadistic pleasure and relief of tension that is provided by the acting out of hatred and envy.

Hatred is a very important mental mechanism, with several functions. Hatred allows us to avoid feelings of intolerable shame. Whereas anger is communicative, hatred serves to hold us together when we feel afraid and threatened. It is easier to feel hatred than it is to tolerate helplessness or anxiety or emptiness, and it is better to hate or be hated than to be ignored. Hatred defends against fear and guilt, and against dependency, grief, and separation anxiety, and is infinitely preferable to hopelessness. Hatred is a manic defense against an unbearable sense of smallness and helplessness; it's better than being nobody. ⁽⁹⁾ Of course, one may also disavow and project onto the other the hated aspects of oneself. In all these ways, whereas rage is not adaptive, hatred energizes the self and helps to hold it together.

At the collective level, chronic hatred of an enemy helps to establish a sense of continuity and identity among social groups. It becomes part of our history, part of the collective stories of the tribe, like the stories we constantly hear from Israelis and Palestinians that describe their struggle. These kinds of stories, and the stories that Muslims extremists tell about their struggle with the USA, are very powerful. They enable people to make sense of their difficult lives and give a sense of purpose. Hatred of a common enemy bonds people and increases patriotism. This kind of chronic hatred is strangely comforting; we talk of nursing our hatred, but actually it cares for us in difficult times, because it makes life worth living and allows the group to feel powerful rather than victimized. Important in the September 11 dynamic is that, when hatred is colored by religious and mythological themes, it gives a sense of spiritual transcendence. In these ways, hatred helps a group bear the unbearable.

But hatred eventually damages our own self-interest, because it does not matter if we are annihilated in the process of annihilating those we hate, and because it wounds the soul. The other problem is that, as we have seen throughout the history of human conflict, hatred eventually takes on a life of its own, so that in the end hatred traps us. Habitual hatred becomes addictive, because it becomes incorporated into the sense of self, so that whatever increases hatred is felt as strengthening the self, and any threat to the hatred is felt as a threat to the self. This is one reason the Israeli-Arab conflict is so intractable, and why attempts to solve the problem seem to make it worse. Hatred is corrosive and damaging. It prevents us dealing with the complexities and ambivalence of the real world by making everything too simple. Hatred prevents our affirming and embracing the world in spite of all its problems, and traps communities in a kind of bondage. When we hate, even as we want to get even with those who have wronged us, we attribute unrealistic power and importance to them. In all these ways, paradoxically, hatred actually binds us to the hated object, as anyone who has been through a nasty divorce can testify.

Some Other Aspects of the Psychology of the Politics

Naturally the politicians reacted with their own narcissistic rage at the September 11 attack, which may be a factor that explains the violence of their response. One could also see their retaliatory attack on Afghanistan as a form of phallic aggression. Classically, the term "phallic narcissism" referred to a type of personality that needs to be dominant, aggressive, and arrogant, with contempt for others that is often disguised as humor. Phallic narcissists try to defeat or degrade other men, afraid that otherwise their own power will be reduced. They are driven by these needs because they are afraid of being emasculated. When our phallic narcissism is attacked, we have to get them back, "dead or alive," to prove how strong we really are. We are then enacting our infantile fantasies of omnipotence and infantile rage. It does not matter how many innocents are hurt in the process, as long as we are avenged and we restore our wounded self-esteem.

Given all this, it is also important to acknowledge that empathic understanding, diplomacy, and psychological analysis would not have been much use against Hitler after he came to power. Sometimes force is unfortunately necessary. So, there are no straightforward answers to the question of whether war is sometimes justified. If Hitler had not been defeated, his next victims would have been the mass murder and subjugation of Slavic races. Getting rid of the Taliban can be justified on ethical grounds, but the problem is to decide when to use force against such people, instead of diplomacy, social pressures, or other means. The problem is that violence is both seductive and contagious, and leads to new cycles of violence in revenge, so when it is applied violence must be used the way a surgeon uses a scalpel, not in a fit of infantile rage or simply out of desire for vengeance. We may decide on a violent response, but this must be done with a differentiated consciousness, and with deep regret for the deaths that will occur, rather than with triumphalist rhetoric. Unfortunately, however, the personal pathology and fantasies of the policy-makers become involved in the decision making about going to war. In a crisis, they tend to regress and may act according to their own infantile anxieties, such as stranger anxiety, an intolerance of otherness, shadow projection, paranoid fantasies, or the need to find a scapegoat for social ills. It is easy then to dehumanize the enemy with long-range weapons and split off guilt about the deaths of innocent civilians.

Political leaders may disguise their own hatred and fear of others behind principles and causes (Schoenwolf, 1991). These ideologies gratify narcissistic needs and help to bond the population in a kind of twinship transference; at times of crisis we need to belong to a group of people who are the same as us, in order to feel safe. But group identification is often used to justify or permit aggression. People en masse regress are carried away by aggressive impulses that they would usually restrain if they were behaving as individuals. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Personal values are surrendered in favor of group approval. There is a kind of group narcissism or group ideology that drives our way of looking at things, and when this is threatened group narcissistic rage and violence may result, as we saw clearly in the aftermath of September 11. A mass movement allows people to avoid personal responsibility, because the group leader taps into his constituents' misery and tells them that they have been victimized. Their aggression is then mobilized and rationalized, which brings relief, because it allows action instead of passivity. Hatred of the enemy dissolves conscience, so that even the most egregious violence seems like self-defense. Our choice of leaders, or our support for them in war time, often caters to our need to feel that our suffering and conflict had nothing to do with our own behavior, and nothing to do with our values, but is only due to an external villain. This encourages the acting out of hatred.

Hatred can be authorized, justified, rationalized, even sanctified by a charismatic leader such as Hitler or bin Laden. The feeling of justification is very important when a group wants to release aggression. Individual moral judgments are swept aside and group standards are applied. Control then becomes external rather than internal; what is good or bad is decided by the group or the leader. We see this mechanism in all forms of political violence, witch-hunts, and the persecution of minorities and heretics. In a country such as the USA with powerful communications and media, there is a tendency for the cultural psyche to strongly affect individual attitudes. But we cannot surrender our individual moral position to the state or the collective. We have to be as fully conscious as possible. How paradoxical it is that the attempt to relieve human suffering is so important and necessary, and yet when governments attempt to do so on a large scale, they often have to use force, and serious evil results. Thousands of innocents are routinely killed and injured when we go to war to fight what we consider to be evil.

People who join terrorist movements are acting out of rage, hatred, and feelings of helplessness and paranoia, and these are exactly the feelings they induce in their victims, and in us if we remain unconscious and take a victim stance as if we had nothing to do with the attack. World history has shown that political leaders can exploit racism, ethnic tension, social unrest, and infantile rage for ostensibly moral purposes. Infantile rage surfaces as moral indignation and condemnation of others, but morality may be invoked in a way that serves the interest of the group that is in power. Another part of this vicious circle is that to constantly proclaim how morally superior we are, and how evil are the enemy, conveys contempt and condescension for them, which inevitably provokes further rage and violence from them, which confirms our belief that we are superior, and so on. To hide behind our ideology, to insist that only we have the real truth, is to avoid real contact. Instead we pay lip service to the idea that all people are equal, but our élitism makes us feel that really we are superior.

There are only a few psychological studies of terrorists themselves, but there is evidence that terrorists tend to be deeply traumatized people (summarized in Akhtar, 1999). As children they were usually chronically abused and humiliated, growing up mistrustful, hating passivity, and dreading any kind of boundary violation. In order not to feel like victims, they turn passive into active and victimize others. Devaluing others supports their self-esteem and justifies sociopathic behavior—the shock and horror of the victims fuels the narcissism of the terrorist. Their violence is triggered by deprivation or impotent, narcissistic rage at being hurt, and is given political rationalization. The terrorists are able to tolerate their current misery for the sake of future rewards, such as virgins in heaven, especially if their behavior has been given mythological status, and made into a religious process. But the paradox is that, because much terrorism is motivated by the need to externalize one's victimhood by making someone else feel it, terrorism cannot really afford to succeed (Akhtar, 1999, p. 352). If terrorism were to succeed it would no longer be needed, and the pain would have to be felt rather than externalized, so the group aims for the impossible and is inherently self-destructive, which also gratifies some of the guilt perpetrated against others. In fact, the terrorism expert David Rapaport (1992) has noted that the life expectancy of 90% of terrorist organizations is less than 1 year, and of the remainder most do not last 10 years. The exceptions are ethno-nationalist groups such as Al-Fatah, the PLO, the Basque ETA, and the IRA, because of the future promise of a homeland, which is a concrete goal.

Another important dynamic is the enormous envy of the terrorists for the affluence and power of the West. To address Rodney King's ⁽¹¹⁾ immortal question of why we cannot all get along, part of the reason is that envy attacks different perspectives. Boris (1994) notes that envy is the enemy of points of view, making people fanatical. Here we must take into account different views of the origin of envy, both of which seem relevant. According to Melanie Klein, envy is a form of hatred for what is good, because it is good, but when the goodness is perceived as beyond our capacity to possess. Whereas Kleinian thought sees envy as an expression of innate aggression and hostility, psychoanalytic self-psychologists think of envy in a relational context. For these theorists, envy arises as the result of the feelings of shame and a defective sense of self that result from defeat in the pursuit of ambition and grandiosity. Such shame is followed by comparison of one's self with successful rivals, leading to envy because envy wipes out the terrible reality of failure (Kohut, 1971). Intersubjectivist theory adds to this formulation the suggestion that envy is likely to arise in childhood when caretakers respond to the child's failure with condemnation or scorn, which compounds the damage done by shame. Then, on every occasion when someone else possesses something good, the individual feels more worthlessness, and a fundamental conviction develops that one is doomed to failure (Orange, 1995). The terrorists of September 11 might be surprised to hear me think of them as envious. In fact, it is often said that fundamentalist Moslems decry the materialism of the West. But, at least in some cases, such hatred and devaluation of the West may defend against envy of its prosperity.

The situation is made worse by the fact that the perpetrators of the September 11 attack are foreign to us, which activates stranger anxiety. We tend to project our own destructive impulses into the stranger, who then tends to be perceived as threatening. Strangers are viewed as potential predators, activating our fear of annihilation. Hatred of the stranger helps to master this anxiety by transforming prey into predator. One way we cope with the anxiety of being prey is the manic defense of triumph, contempt and control in an attempt to master this anxiety (Grotstein, 2000).

The Problem of Projection

In a war, each party sees itself as right and good and the other as all bad. Unbearable, disavowed, and split-off shadow components of the self are typically projected into the other side. For example, bin Laden says that violence is justified, and Mr. Bush says that violence is justified. We call them terrorists, but they believe that the USA is a terrorist nation. Many observers have pointed out that the world court condemned the USA for its attack on Nicaragua in the 1980's, and the USA rejected a security council resolution calling on all states to observe international law. The story persists that, in 1985, the Reagan administration set off a truck bomb outside a mosque in Beirut, timed to kill people as they left. The bomb killed 80 people and wounded 250, mostly women and children; they were aiming at a Moslem cleric who was not hit. The US supported the brutal Turkish crushing of its own Kurdish population—ethnic cleansing—using arms supplied by the Clinton administration in the 1990's. We call the terrorists fundamentalists, but popular religious culture in the USA is one of the most fundamentalist in the world. American Christian fundamentalists are as terrified of modern thinking and alternative life styles as are the fundamentalist Moslems. The Rev. Jerry Falwell famously said that September 11 was God's retribution for feminism and homosexuality. Both groups of fundamentalists have a terrible fear of individuality and personal moral choices. Bin Laden feels he is doing God's work by attacking the God-less West, while the same attitude of death to the unbelievers is found in the book of Revelations. We call the terrorists criminal, but some say that the American response, ignoring the need for UN Security Council authorization, ignored international law. The USA accuses other countries of harboring terrorists, while itself harboring Toto Constant, ⁽¹²⁾ a Haitian whom many people consider to be a terrorist. Islamic terrorists stereotype the USA as godless and materialistic, while many in the USA stereotype Islam as violent and fanatical. In these ways, both sides create enemies by a primitive process of splitting and disavowal of the shadow that is projected onto the other group. This makes the enemy dangerous and devalued—the same mechanism used in all wars, and the kind of psychology that led to the Nazi dehumanization of the Jews or the incarceration of Japanese Americans in WW II. To recognize our own capacity for evil would be a step towards controlling it.

The mechanism of projection is important in other ways. For years there has been a great deal of rage within the American population about world trade, globalization, and our economic system, and many protests about these issues had occurred before September 11, such as that in Seattle. One therefore has to ask whether bin Laden was acting out an unconscious fantasy or wish among some Americans. By projecting our guilt for such fantasies onto bin Laden, we decrease our own shame at the wish. An assault by outsiders on one's own group solves the problem of one's own ambivalence towards some of our own cultural values and beliefs. We can then disavow our negative feelings by projecting them onto the perpetrators, who now embody all of our own rage at the culture in which we live. Our conscious innocence and protest drown out our unconscious feelings of relief that someone acted out our own rage.

Ferenzci (1933) pointed out that hatred reduces our own suffering by allowing us to inflict pain on someone else. Today we think of this phenomenon in terms of projective identification. Bin Laden said in one of his tapes that "what America is now tasting is insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years." This suggests that he is trying to induce in us the way he feels. Given the way we now feel, I'm sure he felt very threatened. (Aggression in general is largely concerned with survival; the aim of much aggression is to protect oneself against a perceived threat.)

Finally we have to remember that the word "terrorist" is applied selectively to groups we disapprove of, which is why we must define the word carefully, for example as any use of violence or fear to coerce or induce political or social change. Unfortunately, as long as a friendly government is doing the terrorism, it has been acceptable. (Samosa, Batista, Pinochet, and others are examples; terror in Nicaragua, Chile or El Salvador is fine if we approve of it. In 1985, Ronald Reagan welcomed a group of Mujahideen in Washington as "freedom fighters.")

The Social Response to Trauma

As a rule, massive cultural trauma such as September 11 allows us to see what is behind our usual cultural defenses and mythology. All such terrible losses re-open earlier losses and rages, and make us feel vulnerable. They also intensify our current suffering, because the public trauma re-awakens private traumas and intensifies feelings of insecurity. For an individual who is living in a state of terror as a result of a painful complex or a persecutory internal object, any problem that acts as a time-bomb in the inner world, an event like September 11 will activate this material and terrify the person even more. Hence much of the talk of the "war on terror"; the constant repetition of this phrase by politicians is also about trying to deal with internal terror. On television immediately after the attack, Mr. Bush looked extremely fearful. One can only imagine the dread of imminent attack that it must have evoked.

The events of September 11^th destroyed the fantasy that the US is blessedly isolated from attacks on its own soil. This kind of trauma causes an intolerable break in our sense of the way we feel that the world should be (Stein, 1997). Simplistic, sound-bite explanations by politicians, such as "this is an attack on freedom," help people make sense of the trauma, and help people try to reconstitute the world in the same way as it was before. At the same time, they radically oversimplify the situation, perpetuate social unconsciousness of the origins of the attack, and ignore the changes that are called for.

Much of the tough talk from politicians is a way of trying to gain some semblance of control, and reassure the population, in a situation in which we have totally lost control, both in terms of our intelligence failure and our ability to be sure we can prevent these attacks. Some people go into politics because they need to have power or omnipotent control over other people in order to sustain their sense of self and feel safe. For these politicians, loss of control is particularly terrifying. Presumably, this kind of anxiety drives some of the star-wars talk; at least we can control some IBM's, and master some of our paranoid fears. This is a dangerous dynamic when it is combined with the projection of the politicians' own hate and rage, and their own murderous persecutory and destructive wishes, onto the enemy, which leads to the image of an enemy who is implacably evil, made worse by fears of retaliation.

After an event such as September 11, not only the trauma itself but also the defenses we use to adapt to the situation are important. For example, the insistence on how strong we are, and how we are winning the war against terrorism, are like magical attempts to reverse the terror and humiliation of the event. So too much of the flag waving and defiance, which are useful in that they express solidarity, but which may act to repress grief and rage. One way of understanding the bombing of Afghanistan is to see it as an attempt to turn passive into active, to undo or reverse the humiliation and vulnerability that we felt. In this way we repair our psychological defenses, re-integrate our collective sense of who we are, and try to master the trauma. Another way we try to gain mastery is to find someone to personify and focus our hatred, in this case obviously bin Laden. Yet another attempt to master the trauma is to focus on the tremendous heroism and selflessness of the rescuers, and find someone strong to idealize, in this case New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. All these mechanisms will provide some bulwark against grief, fear of vulnerability, and shame. However, if we "get back to normal" too quickly we are distancing ourselves from an in-depth analysis of the situation.

The Mythological Dimension

The mythology of the age, which is usually unconscious, and the psychopathology of the individual and the group, inform each other. Perhaps we can empathically understand the narcissistic rage and despair of the people from Gaza who grew up in terrible conditions of poverty, exploited by their political leaders, which enables people to turn themselves into human bombs. ⁽¹³⁾ But the men who destroyed the twin towers were different. Their hatred was not only political but also religiously motivated, using the mythology of Islam as a justification—they felt that they carried a religious message, the attack against the unbelievers. They believed in the superiority of their own mythos. The enormity of their destruction in turn evoked an archetypal response from the USA, with the result that both sides are now gripped by an archetypal image, the fight of good against evil. This is a dangerously apocalyptic scenario, which has added to the volume of apocalyptic imagery and fear that was already prevalent in our society. Apocalyptic imagery such as the book of Revelations is about death on a large scale, judgment, punishment, and a new order of things—it is a manifestation of the dark side of the Self. As Edinger (1999) pointed out, this imagery is particularly common today, ⁽¹⁴⁾ which is why we see constant warnings about environmental catastrophes, global warming, pollution, nuclear wars, chemical and biological warfare on a devastating scale, and the fundamentalist anxiety about the end of time. Recent movies have been about invasions by aliens, pandemic outbreaks of plagues, the earth hit by a huge meteor or asteroid, and so on. For the USA in general, and for many individuals, September 11 was such an unthinkable event. These situations stimulate powerful archetypal forces that exist as potentials within the cultural psyche. Like all archetypes, this one is ambivalent. An apocalyptic atmosphere is not only dangerously destructive; it also provides an opportunity, because it reflects a wish to purify and begin again. But, instead of this aspect of the archetype, both sides in this dispute talk about its dark side, about retribution and justice, and seem to be possessed by destructive apocalyptic fantasies. Hence their passionate intensity. The terrorists express themselves in religious terms and see themselves as agents of God in a holy war. They are therefore possessed by an archetypal inflation, which gives them the ability to kill others, since they are engaged in a sacred task. Our politicians do not talk about bringing bin Laden to justice according to established international law, because the event was so apocalyptic that their response follows suit; hence all the talk of retribution and punishment of the evil doers. We also project a mythological status onto bin Laden, as the personification of evil; he then carries the projections of the dark side of the Self as well as of our own shadow.

The Dark Side of the Self

The Self acts as a blueprint for ego development, since the ego is formed by the incarnation of the Self. Thus, the human shadow, which is the source of our evil behavior, must also have a transpersonal core, because the human shadow contains a fragment of the darkness of the Self. In this model, evil always consists of a mixture of personal and transpersonal elements; it is never purely human.

Traditional theologians argue that evil behavior, such as the killing of innocents, is always the result of human evil and cannot be attributed to the divine, because divine power is always used for the good, always healing and creative. Some traditionalists will say that evil is the result of demonic, not divine, powers. But for the depth psychologist there is no powerful psychological manifestation that is purely human, because the archetypal Self is the deep structure underlying the empirical personality. What we call the "human" psyche is permeated with transpersonal or archetypal elements, some of which form the center of complexes that make us treat others and ourselves badly. What mythology calls the devil corresponds, within the individual, to a complex within the personality that creates havoc when it breaks loose. The right combination of circumstances evokes the shadow sector of the personality.

If there is an opportunity to be found within these events, let us hope that, at the transpersonal level, September 11 was a manifestation of the dark side of the Self personified as Kali, an aspect of the divine feminine who re-creates life by first destroying it. Kali is Shiva's wife, or an aspect of Shiva in a horrific form. She assumes this terrible role to annihilate evil, but in her rage she devours existence. She symbolizes the power of the divine feminine (Shakti) for action and change; she is uncompromising and direct, and she demands total surrender of the ego and detachment from materialism. She cannot tolerate complacency and arrogance, and she requires honesty. But she is also the divine Mother, the nurturer and provider.

Does depth psychology have a therapeutic response to terrorism?

It is surely a given that punishment of the murderers who planned the September 11 attack is essential. But that will not solve the problem of the polarization of the USA and much of the Moslem world, which will perpetuate the danger of terrorism. To bridge this gap, I would like to suggest responses to the situation derived from psychoanalytic self-psychology, from Kleinian thought, and from a Jungian perspective.

From a self-psychological stance, we might be able to develop a degree of reconciliation with those opposed to us if we try to empathically grasp their hatred and rage, their grief and sadness about their losses, and their terror of the stranger. Both sides of the conflict are being driven by the same affects, although for different reasons. Each side must understand this pain, and the reasons for it, from the perspective of the other side. Instead, if we just meet their hatred with our hatred, only destruction will result. The West must understand the resentment within many Muslim countries at being ignored, discounted, and controlled by western interests. We must understand Muslim countries' envy and shame at being treated by the West as inferior and deficient. These feelings could be ameliorated, and we could help to strengthen their national sense of self-worth, with appropriate assistance and a respectful attitude. It would help if the West would acknowledge its cultural and historical debt to Muslim scholars in fields such as astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and mathematics. In their turn, Moslem countries must understand that in the long run terrorism worsens their case. They must appreciate the horror and resentment that terrorism inspires in the West, which will always evoke an intensification of nationalism and calls for military responses. They must also grasp our fear of militant, extremist Islamic fundamentalists, our unfamiliarity with Islam, our disapproval of its attitude to women, our dislike of theocratic government, and the anxious paranoia produced by our dependence on their oil. Much more could be added to these lists.

In Kleinian terms, what is needed is a move from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. In the paranoid-schizoid position, which seems to be the one that is prominent now, the world is seen in black and white terms, in which we are only good and they are only bad, in which we are victims and they are oppressors. The predominant affects are mistrust, rage, fear and ruthlessness. If we could attain the depressive position, we would acknowledge that we are not all good and they are not all bad. Empathy is then possible, along with gratitude for what we have, guilt and sadness for having hurt others, and the need to repair the damage. Reality testing would then improve, and the capacity for a truly reciprocal relationship might develop.

For all this to occur, we need frequent, non-hostile interaction so that the combatants see each other more clearly, see the damage they have done to the other, and see that they have both been cruel. This may allow some empathy. Remorse and mourning are important, with reparation both emotionally and materially. Revision and discussion of the memories of the conflict, seeing the whole conflict in a new light from the other's point of view, also helps. Eventually forgiveness is possible, as we see exemplified by the South African Truth and Reconciliation process, and in the case of old enemies such as Japan, Germany, and the USA.

A classical Jungian contribution might add the need for a sensibility that understands and values the mythology and folklore of both sides, and the clash of Self-images depicted by their religions and mythologies. We would see September 11 as both a wake-up call and an initiation into an archetypal, death-rebirth process provoked by the Self—in its dark aspect—in order to bring consciousness and balance to a hopelessly one-sided set of cultural attitudes on both sides of the divide. This would allow the hope for re-birth that is a part of an initiation process. We would try to contain the tension of opposites without acting out, as we develop a differentiated ego position in relation to the promptings of the Self. Rather than act out the archetype of the apocalypse literally, we can try to understand the symbolic meaning of September 11 in terms of the need for a radical change of our social structures and the development of a new consciousness that recognizes the inter-connection of all beings on this planet.

The Christian emphasis on God as love, ignoring the dark side of the Self, is the result of infantile, magical thinking, a kind of childish wish for endless love from a parent with no ambivalence. There is a love that moves the stars, but we don't always experience it down here. A new image of the Self is emerging that has both a light and a dark side. It is our responsibility to recognize this and do our human part to incarnate the light side and become as conscious as possible of the dark. By struggling with suffering and evil, with the dark side of the Self, we are actually involved in a realistic relationship with the Self rather than a fantasy relationship.

© Lionel Corbett 2003.

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References

Akhtar, (1999). The Psychodynamic Aspects of Terrorism, in Psychiatric Annals, 29, 6, p.350).

Boris, H. (1994). Envy, Northvale, NJ., p. ix.

Edinger, E. F. (1999). Archetype of the Apocalypse. Chicago: Open Court.

Ferenczi, S. (1933). Confusion of tongues between the adult and the child. In: Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalyis, pp. 156-167. London, Hogarth Press, 1955.

Grotstein, J. (2000). Some Considerations of "Hate" and a Reconsideration of the Death Instinct. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 20, 462-480.

Jung, C. G. (1959/1978). Aion. CW 9, ii, para. 126.

Kernberg, O. (1995). Hatred as a Core Affect of Aggression. In: The Birth of Hatred, Developmental , Clinical and Technical Aspects of Intense Aggresssion. Ed. S. Akhtar, S. Kramer, and H. Parens. p. 64. Northvale, N.J. Jason Aronson.

Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press.

Lopez-Pedraza, R. (1977). Hermes and His children. Dallas: Spring Publications.

Monick, E. Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine. Toronto, Inner City Books.

Orange, D. M. (1995). Emotional Understanding. NY. Guilford Press, 1995.

Rapaport, D. 1992. Terrorism. In: Hawkesworth et al, eds, Routledge Encyclopedia of Government and Politics, vol. 2, p. 1067).

Stein, H. F. (1997). Trauma Revisited: Culture, Mourning, and the Unconscious in the Oklahoma City Bombing. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 1997, vol 2, no. 1, p. 18).

Suttie, I. (1935) Origins of Love and Hate. Free Associations Press, London, 1988.

Schoenewolf, G. (1991). The Art of Hating Jason Aronson, NY.

Footnotes

¹ One cannot say which came first; the individual and the collective reflect each other.

² Suttie (1935) for instance saw hatred as beginning in a plea for love that is ignored. For him, to hate someone is to express one's great need for that person. As I understand bin Laden in that context, what Suttie means is that bin Laden would be pleading for a real, feeling response to his grievances.

³ Kohut's (1971) own metaphor.

⁴ Self psychology—like Suttie, Fairbairn, and Guntrip—allows for innate assertiveness that can become destructive if frustrated.

⁵ Eg, Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, who was removed in 1953 by the CIA, and replaced by the brutal Shah Pahlavi whom everyone hated. In Egypt, Nasser wanted to nationalize the Suez Canal because it was Egyptian, but the British refused. Sukarno, a nationalist Indonesian president, was targeted by the CIA and replaced by Suharto because the US wanted to control Indonesian natural resources; a million Indonesians died as a result. When such dictators are deposed, the vacuum is filled by religious fundamentalists.

⁶ If grievance is added to a characterological problem such as sociopathy, the world is felt to be populated by hateful, sadistic persecutors, so that the sociopath has to become a hateful persecutor himself, which is what we see in our home grown terrorists who bomb abortion clinics and blow up buildings.

⁷ The inflation of the phallic patriarchy actually suggests Priapus, the Roman god whose erection would not go down. Monick points out that these men construct nuclear phalli with which to challenge each other. They are concerned with whose is bigger or whose will shoot the furthest. (The solar phallos is about light and freedom from the feminine and the Mother, about narcissism, one's standing in the world, institutional authority, and leadership; its shadow is patronizing, demeaning, and humiliates others. It is always right, excessively rational, and interested in conquest. The cthonic phallos is about sexuality, the Great Mother, and desire; the body is then dominated by the Mother archetype.)

⁸ Kernberg belongs to the school of thought—like Melanie Klein, Freud, and Rosenfeld—that believes in instinctual aggression as a reflection of the death instinct. Other theorists reject the death instinct but believe in instinctual aggression, and so on.

⁹ Manic defenses are used when the depressive position cannot be consolidated; they are fantasies of control of the object, triumph and contempt that protect against the dependency of the depressive position.

¹⁰ Hence the danger of propaganda and mass media influencing public opinion.

¹¹ The victim of a racist beating in Los Angeles.

¹² Constant is said to have been the leader of death squads that murdered thousands of Haitians. His extradition was requested by the Haitian government and refused by the US because he had worked for the CIA.

¹³ We have yet to explain why most others, similarly deprived, do not become terrorists. My guess is that those who act out violently have more violent psychodynamics, but this possibility could only be confirmed by a clinical study.

¹⁴ Edinger felt that this archetype, depicted in the imagery of the book of Revelations that was written at the beginning of the Christian era, is now active again at the beginning of a new era.

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