[Here are excerpts from Bob Pyles's address to the conference “At the End of the Battle,” held in Lima, Peru, in November 2001.]
The horrific attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., bear superficial similarities to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Both came without warning and with extreme violence, both resulted in massive loss of life, and both stunned the nation. But there the comparison stops.
The Japanese attack was intended to coincide with a formal declaration of war. The Japanese government felt some constraint to operate within the rules of warfare recognized by civilized nations. The assault was strictly aimed at military personnel and equipment. The goal was professionally political and strategic. Oddly, as shocking as it was, it didn't feel personal, nor did it feel motivated by hatred.
The terrorist attacks, by contrast, occurred with unmitigated and deliberate savagery against a completely civilian population. Women, children, unarmed men, people of many races and ethnic origins, more than 5,000 of them, were randomly murdered, just because they happened to be in those U.S. buildings at that particular time. … These attacks belong on the list with Bosnia, the Holocaust, and Cambodia. These are crimes of “ethnic cleansing.” The motivation is racial hatred. The goal is genocide — to eliminate a people.
In the aftermath of the attacks, as people recovered from the initial shock, [among] the most common bewildered questions [was] “Why do they hate us so much?” These are vital questions which political leaders, psychoanalysts, and others must work together to answer. …
What psychological forces must operate to create a mindset in which individuals or groups become capable of forsaking their basic humanity and perpetrating mass slaughter? … Much of the answer must lie in the understanding of group dynamics. In 1921, in his ground-breaking work “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” Sigmund Freud wrote about the necessary factors for the cohesiveness of a group. In his view, it required a central organizing idea or belief system, a charismatic leader, or both. Freud and many others have pointed out that membership in a group, particularly one that requires relatively unquestioning allegiance, requires a suspension of critical judgment on the part of the adherents. …
Thus membership in a group with a strong central belief system may require a certain setting aside of the ordinary ability of the ego to assess what might be thought of as rational reality. In psychoanalytic terms, this amounts to a regression to the more primitive ego mechanisms — splitting, projection, denial, and distortion. In this kind of group, which Bion would have called a “basic needs group,” paranoia and isolationism become paramount. The primary function of the group becomes the need to distinguish between “me and not-me”; that is, those who are like me (my group), and those who are not like me (everyone else). …
Fundamentalist religious groups, such as al-Qaeda, … invariably seek to return to a glorious past, and see the present as corrupt and obscene. … They have the sense that their cultural or national group has been betrayed and humiliated, and they seek to reclaim their honor by humiliating others. They feel economically and politically impotent. They glorify the male as dominant and seek to repress and control women. They abhor and fear sexuality.
The most central organizing feature of this kind of regressive group is the sense of impotence and humiliation. … An unchecked feeling of personal or group defectiveness, essentially a narcissistic regression, leads directly to the rationalized slaughter of the “other.”
These groups are marked by the most primitive of ego mechanisms. Hatred and suspicion of others, intolerance, exclusiveness, isolation, and blind adherence to their own belief system as the one true faith are their hallmarks. The gate of independent reasoning is closed. … There is a grandiose sense of fusion with God, and a certainty that they are carrying out the will of God. … This brings us to the most essential element that underlies massacre — the need to dehumanize the other. … In the case of the terrorists and many of the Muslim fundamentalists, much effort has gone into demonizing the United States as “The Great Satan” and Israel as “The Little Satan.” We are painted as a profound danger to Islam and Muslims across the world, and the call is for all Muslims to join the jihad, or “holy war.”
This is a classic example of the psychological mechanism of “splitting.” The world consists of holy warriors (the terrorists), carrying out the will of God, and everyone else (Christians and Jews). The call is for the apocalypse, to result in the annihilation of the infidel (those who are not like me). A diagnosis of a major aspect of the problem should also suggest an approach to a solution. Such a belief system as the terrorists advocate is based on splitting, the distinction between the grandiose self and the denigrated self. This can only flourish to the extent that the people of Islam are kept in isolation and ignorance. If this is true, then inclusion, dialogue, and mutual exchange must be the long-term goal. … What our self-professed enemies, the fundamentalist leadership, most fear is clearly the inclusion and influence of other cultures. This would mean the end to the isolation of their people, and the end of fundamentalism. As the Prophet predicted, Islam would be united into a world community. …
In the United States, people at all levels are experiencing a strange mixture of feelings. On the one hand, there is a steely resolve to do whatever is necessary to bring terrorism to heel and to punish those individuals and countries responsible for this modern version of a Biblical scourge. But on the other, there is widespread anxiety. The most ordinary things seem dangerous — taking a trip, opening the mail, etc. This raises the question, How can the roots of terrorism, the effect on the victim or victim group, be understood psychologically?
The goal of terrorism is to strike at one of the most basic elements of the human psyche, the sense of safety. Terrorism seeks to create the impression that there is no safe place, nowhere to hide. Disaster may strike from anywhere. People, places, or things [that] were once taken for granted can now become instruments of destruction. A letter can kill. The renter down the hall becomes a murderous hijacker. A commercial plane becomes a deadly missile. …
The media have greatly augmented the effect of terrorist activities, [which] are generally orchestrated to maximize media exposure. …
Our own freedoms have become the terrorists' most potent weapons.
The essence of fear [was] described by Freud in his 1919 paper “The Uncanny.” … As he puts it, “Uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Freud goes on to point out what is the most fear inducing, what truly inspires terror, is not what is totally alien and different, but that which seems familiar, but is strangely altered. …
From birth, we are faced with the never-ending task of trying to distinguish what is real from what is not, what we can count from what we can't. This is no academic exercise. We know, deep in our bones, that our very survival depends on getting it right. Our earliest survival manual: They look like parents; do they act like parents?
The power of terrorism rests in its ability to undermine our beliefs that we can determine what is safe and what is not. Terrorists seek to convince us that we can no longer rely on what we thought was real. … Terrorists in general, but these in particular, make it clear that although they seem human and look human, they are bound by no human convention. There are no laws or rules that they are not eager to violate. Even the most basic of human instincts, that of self-preservation, has no meaning. … The goal is to paralyze the enemy by a fear so profound and primitive that resistance will be impossible. …
What can we do to protect our personal psychological well-being? Just as our sense of reality can be used against us, it is also our main ally. … The terrorists are few in number. They are human and vulnerable. We have massive advantages in numbers and resources, and they know that. … It would be ironic and fitting if the ultimate effect of September 11 would be [a] greater understanding between Islam and the rest of the world. The achievement of this mutual understanding and openness would spell the death of terrorism and hatred and would mean the triumph of mankind.