Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book provides background on terrorism and explores what roles religion, gender issues, and political/societal processes such as globalization play in creating and fostering it. It also provides psychoanalytic perspectives on concepts such as victimization, dehumanization, and mental representations of history. The book examines what goes on in the minds of people who perform seemingly inhuman violence in the service of their large-group psychology. Soon after September 11, 2001, the International Psychoanalytical Association established a Working Group on Terror and Terrorism, the members of which—Sverre Varvin, Salman Akhtar, Abigail Golomb, Leopold Nosek, Vamik Volkan, and Genevieve Welsh—came from around the globe, from the Middle East to South America. The men who committed the violent acts of September 11, like those elsewhere in the world who are known in general as terrorists, are not inhuman.