Editorial

Thinking about radicalisation, fundamentalism and terrorism immediately evokes powerful emotional responses and pushes us to the limits of our sympathy and understanding. Caught up in a maelstrom of public outrage, hate, fear, grief and helplessness is it possible to think psychotherapeutically, to access compassionate feelings and understanding for the perpetrators as well as the victims, to put into words what are often referred to as ‘unspeakable’ atrocities, and to imagine the mind of the terrorist, rather than adopting an overview and global analysis of the subject to distance oneself from any personal encounter?

A popular and plausible understanding of the nature and relationship between fundamentalism, radicalisation and terrorism is as follows. The first expresses a belief system of extreme views, usually pertaining to religion, in upholding a strict, literal or distorted interpretation of scripture, but also includes strict adherence to the basic principles of any subject or discipline. The second describes the process by which an individual, or group comes to adopt these (usually) extreme religious views which have now become attached to political or social ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or contemporary ideas often associated with Western values. This process is often thought to be the result of the active work of fundamentalists in causing someone, thought to be young and vulnerable in some way to being ‘converted’, to adopt radical positions on religious, political or social issues. Finally, in the most extreme cases, a minority of the radicalised will turn to terrorism in the unlawful use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, radicalisation, fundamentalism and terrorism all involve disturbed states of mind and it is tempting to understand the relationship between the three as a pathological regression of psychic processes from the psychic, to psychotic thinking, to