Mass Murder and the Individual: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Perpetrators and Their Victims

Abstract

During the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, we have been witnessing a steady increase in violence caused by global terrorism and an increasing number of genocides. Descriptions of these major historical events that have cost millions in human lives are offered by historians, political scientists, and writers of literary non-fiction as well as by psychologists and psychoanalysts. While the historical and political circumstances under which wars, terrorist acts, and genocide may emerge can readily be identified, describing the psychological profiles of individual participants in mass murder has been an elusive task. The examination of unconscious motivations that may move large groups to act destructively is complicated by the fact that historical events, especially if these have been traumatic, find their way across generations through myths and traditions into the fabric of social, cultural, and political lives of people.