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Homo homini lupus: man is a wolf to man (Freud, 1930/1975, p. 111). Freud thus recognized the ever-present potential for evil. He was especially attuned to the way aggression and narcissism undermine moral imperatives. Although aligned with Hobbes in his pessimism about man's capacity for restraint in the absence of strong external controls, Freud regarded the real tragedy of human suffering caused by others to be that much of it is preventable. The unfortunate reality is that some individuals derive pleasure from causing others to suffer.
Freud emphasized the neurotic factors in the response to trauma. Rather than a normative response to danger accompanied by regression, compromised ego functioning, and “obligatory psychopathology” (Krystal, 1988, p. 145), trauma experience rested on pre-existing unconscious factors. Postwar psychoanalytic work on traumatic and post-traumatic stress disorders dramatically altered this perspective, as well as the therapist's approach to working with survivors.
In her excellent study Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure, Jody Lynee Madeira describes the plight of survivors and families of victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. It will be recalled that Timothy McVeigh and his accomplices, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, built and detonated a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, murdering 168 people and injuring more than 800. Madeira interviewed 36 individuals following McVeigh's 2001 execution, including 33 survivors or families of victims. Twenty-one of the original participants were interviewed again in 2009.
Killing McVeigh is only indirectly a book about the psychology of perpetration. Instead, it speaks to the life-altering impact of terrorism and especially to victims' efforts to cope and adapt in its aftermath. It documents survivors' struggle to find meaning in a senseless and horrific act of violence. What emerges is a picture of grieving and adaptation that accords