ABSTRACT
This chapter describes five types—deficiency-based, defect-based, regression-based, identification-based, and strat-egy-based—of dehumanization and offers some guidelines for the remediation of dehumanization associated with terrorism. It considers states of dehumanization arising out of environmental input that is far too deficient for the purposes of psychic structuralization. Less dramatic manifestations of regressive dehumamzation include the sense that a particular body part is dead, alien, or machinelike and hence something that needs removal. In fact, defect, deficiency, regression, identification with malevolent caretakers, and strategy play a variably synergistic role in all forms of dehumanization. Children afflicted with early infantile autism and, to a lesser extent, its phenornenological cousin, Asperger's syndrome, also show an absence of "human" qualities. Delusions of lycanthropy and other forms of zoophilic metamorphosis associated with remote subcultures typify such bizarre states of "dehumanization". Features of sexual perversion, addiction, and psychotic-like thinking become gradually intermingled in the resulting syndrome of serial killing.
