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For all the media frenzy and its concomitant avalanche of research by governments, think tanks, and academic institutions worldwide, it has been an embarrassingly long time since a special issue or a compendium was dedicated to psychoanalytic approaches to terrorism and violent radicalization (a notable exception is Stavrakakis, 2020). The primary aim of the papers in this special issue of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies is therefore to remind us of the unique advantage of incorporating unconscious processes into models of sociopolitical grievances and the violent form in which they are sometimes realized.
By and large, the papers for this special issue were selected to showcase fresh ideas and voices in harnessing psychoanalytic theory to understand political violence. In addition, all authors have an intimate (and at times implicit) knowledge of the terrorism-inducing socio-historico-political context of their subject matter in the form of personal experience and/or extensive observations that give nuance and texture to the theoretical models that the authors use. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the psychoanalytic models that are proposed in this issue are integrative, making novel connections between “established” psychoanalytic theories to adequately fit the phenomenology of political violence. Another characteristic of this collection is its international and pan-ideological scope, which purports to inspire reflection on the larger social, historical, and political context of violent radicalization, beyond the myopic-yet-convenient focus on terrorism acts and the pathologization of their perpetrators.
The special issue starts with an overview of the major psychoanalytic frameworks and concepts that were put forth throughout the years for understanding sociopolitical violence. As an overview, it naturally does not mention each and every psychoanalytic model that was used in this context nor could it do justice to the nuance of the mod