Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Fundamentalism, Radicalisation and Terrorism

"I know John really well and his chapters in this book give an excellent perspective on the psychology behind terrorism . When you look into it, it’s much broader than just terror. John started off as a psychologist before getting into politics, and he was instrumental in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. That’s how he became a member of the UK’s House of Lords—because of those negotiations. In this work, like the others cited above, he also points to the importance of systems. He uses the analogy of an ant colony. If you want to understand the emergent properties of the ants, you don’t learn by studying each individual ant and what it’s doing. You’ve got to look at the whole. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Coming back to terrorism —this is built out of his experience in the peace processes in Northern Ireland—you’ve got to look at the whole. And what you find is that most ‘terrorists’ are not psychologically dysfunctional. Quite often, they’re very sane. They may have radical ideas or ideas that we think verge on unbalanced, but when you look at them, there is a deep history of emotional trauma within the group that has never been rectified, so they’ve got these feelings of disgust, anger, hurt—sometimes going back hundreds of years. The bigger thing for me is that this can also explain a lot of other dysfunctional behavior. Think of mass shootings in the US; think of the cyber attacks by people who just want to do harm because they don’t like governments or they don’t like corporations. There’s a mixture, and this work shows the background psychology that gives rise to this kind of phenomenon. Another thing he argues, and he’s quite right, is that when we think of terrorism, we quite often think of jihadists . But historically, it’s a fairly new phenomenon. Northern Ireland was full of what we termed terrorists, but one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. So there is the latent potential within the US and within Europe for these kinds of movements to spring up. Terrorism and a whole range of other dysfunctional behaviour. We started with peace, which gets different results than starting with war, and worked out what created peaceful societies. But once we had worked out that structure (what we call ‘positive peace’ ), we found it was also associated with many other social characteristics that are considered desirable. Societies that are more adaptable—which means that, as things change, as times change, they change and adapt with them—are also much better at picking up new ideas and technology. They have a much better performance on GDP, for example. Countries which are improving in Positive Peace have 2% per annum higher GDP growth rates than countries which are deteriorating over long periods of time. These societies are more resilient; they have fewer civil resistance movements that last for shorter amounts of time. They’re also more moderate in their aims and far more likely to achieve them. In addition to the absence of violence and better economic outcomes, positive peace is also associated with better measures of wellbeing, higher levels of inclusiveness and more sustainable environmental performance. So, what we can see then is that when you combine positive peace with systems thinking, it gives you a new and unique way to envisage how you go about societal development. In other words, this concept of positive peace creates an optimal environment for human potential to flourish. Understanding what creates sustainable peace cannot be found in the study of violence alone."