This current argument, whose complexity is not lost on anyone despite the attempt by well-meaning individuals to simplify everything to give meaning to their theories, often comes back to haunt us in the light of events.
We publish an interview with Jean-Luc Vannier*, who deciphers it in an original way, and whose analysis is full of depth.
This text originates from the conference at IPAG in Nice by the same author on March 15.
Question: Why does psychoanalysis concern itself with jihadist terrorism?
JLV: The increase in “jihadist vocations” from French territory, regardless of cultural origin, religious environment, recruitment geography, social milieu, and educational background, has raised many questions and caused deep dismay in our society. To the point of sometimes giving the impression, following a tragedy of this type, of a sort of collective expiation where potential victims, or even the relatives of the victims, seem to assume, and strictly bear, part of the crimes of the massacre’s perpetrator: a mechanism far from paradoxical for those who know the mind’s capacities, especially when it comes to unconscious guilt, to subtly shift masks. Hence, the demand for a public and highly mediated trial to reveal the meaning of the terrorist act, in order “to mourn,” as is often said. A meaning that the perpetrator of the terrorist act is unaware of himself in most cases.
Question: What does psychoanalysis have to say about this?
JLV: In a recent article in Psychiatrie Française1, I cite two events that, in hindsight, that is, reactivated in my memory by the terrorist attacks in Paris, Nice, and Germany, invited me to reflect on the subject. The first dates back to 2003: sociologists that year observed a phenomenon of approximately five thousand Danish women converting to Islam. The women explained their religious choice as an attachment to rituals seen as “visible practice,” a feeling of living a more “physical” religion with “duties,” and the satisfaction of being integrated “into a community.”
Question: And the second?
JLV: The second comes from my professional activity when I was supervising in Lebanon: a consultation with a young Lebanese from the southern suburbs of Beirut, a direct witness to the death of his closest and same-aged friend, who was fatally struck by a car. Immersed in a fatal mourning, he
remained locked in his room. I later learned that he had been “taken in” by a Hezbollah combat unit and that his “commitment to martyrdom” would likely provide an “outlet” for his melancholic depression.
Question: What link is there between these Danish women converts, this young man from the southern suburbs of Beirut, and French would-be jihadists?
JLV: From the sole perspective that concerns me, the psychic mechanisms of the unconscious, there is indeed a link. Even while emphasizing the difference in degrees and not nature between these three examples. Future terrorists find in the path of radicalization and in perpetrating their crime, that is, the terrorist act – and I say act and not action – an unconscious means of supporting, containing, and suturing their instinctual chaos.
Question: What do you mean by instinctual chaos?
JLV: To understand, one only needs to return to the facts. Over the course of investigations and press leaks, we have always seen uncertainties and hesitations in qualifying acts of terrorism. And with good reason: one of the Bataclan terrorists frequently used psychoactive substances while another suffered from mental disorders. In Valence, the man who, with his car, wanted “to run over but not kill” soldiers posed many difficulties for the judicial authority: on the one hand, according to the prosecutor, “questions about his mental health” and “inexplicable motives,” on the other, “jihadist propaganda images but no specific network affiliation.” As for the attack on the police station in the Goutte-d’Or district, does not a source close to the investigation express the same aporia? “A fake explosive belt, these shouts, this allegiance in the pocket, these may be signs connecting him to a [terrorist] network, but at the same time they may be signs of imbalance.” The same contradictions apply to the tragedies in Dijon and Nantes where, in December 2014, drivers plow into crowds. More recently, it appears that the Nice terrorist engaged in prostitution, confirming in passing the Freudian approach to the psyche mixing desire and prohibition, then from 1920, death and sexuality. Terrorists drown their guilt through an instinctual release.
Question: And in Germany?
JLV: We can note the same inconsistencies there. The young German-Iranian shooter behind the Munich shooting in July 2016 suffered from psychiatric disorders. Yet he was preparing his murderous madness for a year. The one at the Christmas market in Berlin in December 2016 managed to evade German counterintelligence because he was both a drug user and dealer. German authorities explained that despite placing him under surveillance, his regular consumption of psychoactive substances appeared to them as a factor likely to rule him out as a potential terrorist.
Question: So, for psychoanalysis, do jihadist terrorism and mental disorder go hand in hand?
JLV: “Most terrorists are of sound mind,” a senior Parisian counter-terrorism official told me a few months ago in a private exchange. Such an assertion, at least peremptory, even surprising, raises two questions: who, among those responsible for our security, would take the risk of opposing the philosophy of their hierarchy and drawing attention to an individual until the crime is, unfortunately, committed? Of sound mind? How then to understand the dichotomy between the relatively dissolute life of these men – and women – immediately before their strict radicalization? A radicalization whose many elements – sudden extremism, the absolute destructiveness of the terrorist himself and his targets, the claim that provides necessary recognition in hindsight – bring to light the subterranean workings and archaic workings of the instinctual. I would add the assertion heard from a professional: “kamikaze action falls under psychiatry” according to Loïc Garnier, head of UCLAT.
Question: Why do you consider this assessment from the counter-terrorism official to be erroneous?
JLV: It is because it denies this psychic dimension, which is evident in these acts. Distinguishing terrorist acts from mental imbalance is, in my view, an attempt to ignore this conflict at the heart of the instinctual: “the essential element of the individual drama,” as Etienne de Greeff, illustrious professor of criminal psychopathology, reminds us. The same author points to our resistance to admit that “man himself harbors within him these strange powers, irreducible to our scheme of responsible being.” Admitting the psychic and unconscious dimension of terrorism also implies the need to abandon typologies and other categorizations developed by man to reassure himself by separating the good from the bad. “Crowds,” Freud reminds us, “have never thirsted for the truth but demand illusions they cannot do without.” The boundary between normal and pathological remains, I emphasize once again, a matter of degrees rather than nature.
Question: Where is the flaw located?
JLV: It is the excessive importance given to the exterior trappings, to the behavioral appearance of the criminal act. What disturbs because it is inexplicable is this coexistence, this coalescence in the same being of a fanaticism bordering on madness, and a calculating sagacity that leaves nothing to chance in the preparation and execution – at least at first – of the terrorist act. The terrorist act often combines rationality and irrationality, which helps mislead us.
