Psychoanalysis, Terror and the Theater of Cruelty

Abstract

This is an article about terrorism and about what clinical psychoanalysis might contribute to a discussion of its causes, its effects, and our efforts to combat it. The article views terrorism as constitutively theatrical, its acts of destruction calculated less for their potential to harm particular victims than to affect a mass audience that will witness its images on television and via the media. Because terrorism's aim is to strike psychologically at its enemies' sense of self-definition and cohesion, it is likened to Artaud's theater of cruelty. The article also argues that because psychoanalysis is constituted by the staging of the transference relation, it too might be likened to theater, even to a theater of cruelty inasmuch as it cures by forcing the analysand to remember what he prefers to forget. The clinical experience that is seen as providing the psychoanalyst with knowledge that might bear quintessentially on the question of terrorism is that gained by the treatment of traumatized patients ...