Psychological Undercurrents of History, Volume Terror and Apocalypse explores the psychology of terrorism, apocalyptic violence, and trauma. What impels people to murder civilians with righteous impunity? How can people murder without remorse? What comprise the apocalyptic imagination and fantasies of cataclysmic destruction? The authors of this volume examine these questions in light of recent events, both to understand the phenomenon called terrorism, and the violence and madness pervading the nightmare of history.
Judaism and Psychological Undercurrents of History Volume IV returns to the Holocaust and the analysis of anti-Semitism in a time when racial hatred, ethnic cleansing, and apocalyptic fantasy are resurgent. Why do people seek to exterminate other cultures and peoples? How can people inflict violent atrocity without feeling horror or compassion? The authors of this volume address these questions to understand the psychodynamics of hatred, mass violence, and the genocidal impulse, phenomena which thrive even today.
This book argues that conventional interpretations of Freudian psychology have not accounted for the existence and complexity of death anxiety and its intrinsic relation to the creation of illusions and delusions. This book contends that there is sufficient evidence to support the view that death anxiety is not only a symptom of certain modes of psychopathology, but is a very normal and central emotional threat human beings deal with only by impeding awareness of the threat from entering consciousness. The immanence of the fear of death requires vigilant defensive and coping techniques, especially the distortion of reality through these defenses and fantasies, so that over-whelming terror does not psychologically cripple the organism. The fear of death is so horrific that human beings must insulate themselves in religious, social, and private illusions, rituals, obsessive pursuits, self-glorification, and myriad desperate attempts to lie about the quintessential nature of reality. Death is that terror that induces psychopathology. This book demonstrates that a careful reading of Freud reveals a copious amount of material supporting these propositions.
Die überwiegend aus New York stammenden Autoren von Terrorism, Jihad, and Sacred Vengeance befassen sich in dieser englischsprachigen Publikation eingehend mit der Psychologie des Terros und religiöser Gewalt. Wie sehen die Ideen, Antriebe und Fantasien von Terroristen und Selbstmord-Attentätern aus? Wie wirkt sich Opfererfahrung und die Konfrontation mit dem Tod auf die Psyche aus? Terrorism, Jihad, and Sacred Vengeance erkundet den Wahnsinn und die Verzweiflung, die mit den jüngsten Ereignissen einhergehen, in ihrer Bandbreite von faschistischen und paranoiden Reaktionen auf den 11. September 2001 über Wunschvorstellungen vom Eintritt ins Paradies und einer glückseeligen Vereinigung mit Gott durch selbstzerstörerische Taten bis hin zur Bedeutung des Bösen und der Opfersymbolik.
