ABSTRACT
Fundamentalists of all religious traditions believe that theirs is the only true religion or the only path to salvation. Psychotherapy with religious fundamentalists can be difficult for several reasons. Terrorism is typically understood to mean the use of violence against civilians to achieve political, ideological, or religious purposes and goals. Casoni and Brunet suggest that there is a parallel between the intrapsychic phenomena experienced by witnesses of terrorism and the psychodynamics of the perpetrators of terrorism. The victim of a terrorist attack suffers in several ways apart from physical injury. Revenge has the value of allowing the subject to feel active rather than like a passive victim, but the possibility of reconciliation is impaired by the repetition of the attack-revenge cycle, which is repeated over and over again until its futility is finally seen. Young men are commonly found in terrorist groups.
