(Note) Second part of the same article published yesterday, April 23
Link to part I: https://www.nicepremium.fr/actualite,42/politique,137/decrypter-le-terrorisme-djihadiste-entretien-avec-le-psychanalyste-jean-luc-vannier-i,23407.html?var_mode=calcul
Question: Why are young people the preferred targets of jihad recruiters?
JLV: In a conference held in Nice a few months before the massacre of July 14, 2016, a specialist from the DGSI broke down the Islamist radicalization process into three stages: “seduction, deconstruction, reconstruction.” Seduction, it should be recalled, is a key concept in psychoanalysis. The budding jihadist, especially if they are a teenager commonly seeking new glorious identifications at this age, finds themselves “seduced” by the recruiter. Perhaps they are waiting and even hoping to be seduced? And videos on the Internet cleverly assemble supposedly intangible, universal, omnipotent, even supernatural values: all elements that plunge the teen back into the childhood belief of their magical omnipotence.
Question: How do these propaganda films work?
JLV: They include all the required special effects: projecting identification onto the hero, guilt (others died for you), exploitation of the feminine (the maternal softness of the vaporous limbo of paradise), highlighting the masculine (virility galvanized by war chants), and finally the path of glory that awaits the martyr. The jihadist offer allows the person whose psychic structure is disintegrating—the drive chaos—to find in radical Islamist engagement, including the extreme kind leading to death, a means—illusory for us but meaningful for them—to stop, to bind their “self or hetero-aggressive tendency that aims to destroy all life, to disorganize every whole, either at the social level or at the level of the existence of the individual organism”: the death drive as defined by Professor Jean Laplanche. This is why, it seems to me, it is important to distinguish the act from the terrorist action.
Question: Are action and terrorist acts different?
JLV: “Im Anfang war die Tat”: in the beginning was the act. Quote from Freud borrowed from Goethe’s “Faust.” One decides on an action but encounters the act: to the action would belong the rational, meticulous, material, if not scientific, preparation of the project. To the act corresponds, however, the unconscious dimension sought by the subject: first, the potential capacity to introduce the unpredictable of the adventure into any situation, as the late socio-psychoanalyst Gérard Mendel reminds us. Second, the power to lead the subject beyond what their action entailed. Perhaps this is the direction that intelligence services should choose to prioritize in what they now call “the search for weak signals”: the significance of the act and no longer the barely hidden preparation of the terrorist project.
Question: What does the terrorist seek in this act?
JLV: Freud stated already in 1923: an increase in the unconscious sense of guilt can turn a human being into a criminal who finds a “relief to be able to connect that unconscious sense of guilt to something real and current.” In “current,” there is indeed “act”! What the jihadist terrorist accomplishes aims for a claim that something finally happens in reality: an act to allow the criminal to give substance to their unconscious sense of guilt and to let the inherent drive find its stop. A latent sense of guilt, as De Greeff reminds us, forces the subject to “overcompensate for their real state,” which amounts to a “growing destruction of the targeted personality.”
Question: Is there no solution?
JLV: There is currently much talk about deradicalization enterprises. I have personally expressed reservations from the outset about these attempts sketched out here and there: aside from the fact that they aim to calm a certain societal or even political guilt, they seem doomed to failure if they do not go beyond what has been “deconstructed.” In this sense, the so-called deradicalization work too often makes the mistake of proposing a sort of repair by trying to bring the individual back to the status quo ante, a state before radicalization.
Question: Can’t the jihadist terrorist be reasoned with?
JLV: It seems risky to claim to reach the “self” of the interested parties through mere volition and in their reality. And this, to convince them to disengage from jihad. How then to explain that the understanding and reason attributed to this same “self” to remove them were not precisely able to block the individual preventively in their deadly approach?
Question: Psychoanalysis has often been criticized for absolving criminals, now terrorists, from their responsibility. What do you think?
JLV: On this subject, one should reread Lacan in a 1951 report from the SPP (Paris Psychoanalytic Society) titled “Psychoanalysis and Criminology”: I retain two sentences, bold and yet visionary. About the responsibility of the criminal, Lacan emphasizes that “if there should be healing, it should be nothing other than an integration by the subject of their true responsibility.” To the point of suggesting that it might sometimes be more humane, with punishment, to let them find it. “Visionary” I said, since he similarly emphasizes that “the civilization of performance can no longer know anything of the expiatory significance of punishment.” One can easily imagine the scandalized media reactions if such statements were made today.
Question: The phenomenon of Islamist radicalization sometimes leads to questions about Islam itself. What do you think?
JLV: I will answer by sharing a reflection, rather a speculation, once again bold—but isn’t psychoanalysis bold by essence?—conducted by one of my young colleagues, an Iranian psychoanalyst, among those I meet each year in Tehran. In a strictly Freudian reading, he equates radical Islamism with the unconscious, the instinctual “id,” the primal one. And estimates that contemporary Islam, like the “ego,” originates from a part of the “id” that detached itself in recurring contact with external reality, in order to account for the situations imposed by this reality. A most interesting hypothesis. However, one must recall Freud’s very critical approach to the “ego,” constant throughout his work: in the “Five Child Psychoanalyses,” the “ego” is the “circus clown who thinks himself its director.” In “The Ego and the Id,” the ego becomes a “rider who, illusorily, claims to tame his mount”—that of the “id”—but ultimately only goes where the latter wants to take him. And in a later text, “The Disintegration of the Psychic Personality” from the New Lectures, the “ego,” “poor and weak,” is forced to “serve three harsh masters” (the id, the superego, and external reality). Thus, my Iranian colleague’s intellectual construction is illuminated: just as the “ego,” worked on, traversed, manipulated—even if this word today connotes many other meanings—by unconscious drives, can it not be, without immediate condemnation, possible to question the instinctual and archaic forces likely to act, without being recognized as such, within so-called contemporary and moderate Islam?
