Terrorism and war: Unconscious dynamics of political violence Edited by Coline Covington, Paul Williams, Jean Arundale and Jean Knox. London:  Karnac. 2002.  435 pp.

This book is well timed; that is its great strength but perhaps also its minor failing. It is well timed because, with the ‘War on Terrorism’ being the replacement for the Cold War, it is topical both when viewed against the Twin Towers, Afghanistan and Iraq and also when considered in relation to what is to follow over the next decade or decades of the twenty-first century. The minor failing is, in my view, the inclusion of personal accounts and photographs of the Twin Towers attack. The risk of including such specific material is of making the book American-centric, pivoted on that specific incident and presenting a direct reaction to it. It therefore also runs the risk of causing the book to become prematurely dated when it, in fact, addresses issues that will be of major relevance for a long time. For this reason this book should be in print to the widest possible audience for a long time to come. It would also be a great pity and a disservice to society if it were to become or remain a script confined only to the small psychoanalytically and psychotherapeutically informed subset of society. At least some key chapters should be read by opinion formers and politicians worldwide, though to say that is perhaps to go a bit too far, since, as stated in this book, there is no evidence that every politician's having a psychoanalysis would alter political behaviour. Sadly, and notably, it thus follows, too, that reading a clear exposition of the dynamics of terrorism is unlikely to alter the political-cum-governmental situation much. Yet surely, and in spite of this realisation, we must persist at working at understanding the dynamics of political violence, terrorism and war, and this book goes a long way towards doing that.

The book is divided into four sections: ‘Terrorism’, ‘Hatred, enmity and revenge’, ‘Why war’ and ‘The aftermath of war’. Each section has an Introduction by one of the four joint co-editors of the book.