| Jungian Reflections on September 11 |
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| Articles - Psychology, Culture, Politics |
| Written by Donald Williams |
| Tuesday, 28 July 2009 01:03 |
A Global NightmareEdited by Luigi Zoja and Donald Williams
Imagine a young adolescent at one of Pakistan's 7,000 "madrasahs," the religious schools that produced the Taliban and still prepare young men for military Jihad.(1) He wakes up with other children at 3 a.m. for study and prayer, breaks for play at 4:30 a.m., has breakfast at 7:30, studies the Qur'an till 11, sleeps for 2 hours, then prays, studies, eats, prays, studies, prays, eats dinner, then goes to the mosque to sleep. In the course of several years he will memorize the Qur'an in Arabic, a language he most likely does not understand. Mohammed Ajmal Qadri, the director of one of these schools, a man who frequently preaches in U.S. mosques, explained that 13,000 "jihad fighters" had passed through his school. "Eventually," he said, "all people must become Muslim, including the Christians and Jews of the United States. It's our divine right to lead humanity."(2)One of Qadri's students, l4-year-old Obeidulla Anwer, speaking in Urdu, explained that he will "fight for Islam and [end p. 203] for the pride of Islam. ...I will hurt those who are enemies of Islam. And I know that I could be hurt or killed." Obeidulla was asked how he would recognize the enemies of Islam. "If I greet them with 'Salam Aleikum' and they won't say it back," he answered.(3) It is frightening to think of tens of thousands of young Islamic militants who know only one story and will measure all others by that story. The terrorists of September 11 lived by the same story, could hear only this story. I know, of course, that I have only to walk a few blocks to a nearby church to find worshipers also with one fervent religious story. Many fundamentalist Christians fully anticipate the End Time and the Rapture that will lift up all true believers and spare them from the Tribulation while all nonbelievers suffer. Fundamentalist Christians, however, rarely have intentions of killing non-believers on their way to the Rapture. They also know, like it or not, that other people live by other stories. The more we know of the world, the more we see a multitude of stories. Each story, religious or scientific, economic or political, is an attempt to make sense of the world. But Qadri and Obeidulla, for all practical purposes, live in the Middle Ages (madrasah education dates back to 1200 A.D.). The "official story" for Obeidulla weaves the Our'an together along with his needs for an identity, self-esteem, and hope and with the realities of poverty, illiteracy, and cultural isolation. Especially as psychoanalysts, we may be able to appreciate the value and meaning of the Islamist story; it is natural for us to articulate meaningful stories about the stories people tell. An Islamist, however, is unlikely to enter an analyst's office because his story, held with such conviction, does not permit any alternate story. Psychotherapy of every shade is about telling new stories about old stories and about nurturing [end p. 204] original, first time stories. The Islamist's story is as hostile to ours as our stories about stories are inevitably hostile to his. Jungian psychology, despite modernist lapses, is at heart a postmodern story because Jung asserted our role in the ongoing creation of the world and because he embraced a multitude of stories -- beginning with his theory of psychological types created to shed light on our natural preferences and differences and to appreciate the subjective roots of all our theories. Consider the hallmarks of Jungian analysis: "holding the tension" of opposing stories and asserting in every session the irreducible value of individual experience [analysts and their theories bend to their patients]. Every session of analysis affirms that each person has a unique story, their story is worth listening to and reflecting upon, and their story makes sense. Psychoanalysis of all persuasions is a story about stories. [revised paragraph] It must be frightening to Obeidulla and to his companions and instructors in the madrasah to think that there is a global community of people who now move between stories as they might move between currencies and countries. Walter Truett Anderson has argued that the greatest threat to peace in the world is not the competition between religions or ideologies (stories) but rather the "competition between different stories about stories" -- between absolutist and relativist convictions about the nature of human truth.(4) Writing presciently in 1990, Anderson said, "As we move into the twenty-first century, look for large numbers of people to be doing everything possible to turn back, as far back as the imagination will carry them."(5) The idea of the ongoing creation (or "social construction") of reality is, Anderson argued, "one of the most psychologically and politically threatening events in all of human history."(6) [end p. 205] Obeidulla, the young Pakistani student, showed more psychological maturity during his interview than did the terrorists who led the attacks on September 11 -- despite the fact that the terrorists were well-educated and exposed to different cultures. The boy was asked: "Since most Americans do not know Arabic and cannot know how to respond to the traditional Muslim greeting, are they enemies of Islam?" The boy looked confused. "I don't know," he said, looking expectantly at his hovering teachers, who also appeared confused by the question.(7)When Obeidulla was confused by the question, he experienced a moment of self-doubt, the kind of doubt that the other' terrorists must have habitually quelled during their years in the West. The young student elevated himself by answering, "No," when asked "whether all non-Muslims were anti-Muslim." I do not have any trouble thinking about Obeidulla studying the Qur'an at four in the morning in the madrasah or preparing to serve in a jihad. It is easy to imagine him going to fight in Kashmir -for him it may be the only choice he has with his only friends. I find myself very interested, however, in how boys and young men survive a fundamentalist madrasah, in how they bear up under one unrelenting story, in the marks left by poverty, and I wonder how it is possible for them to imagine a desirable, credible future, if indeed it is. What Can We Learn? Unlike Obeidulla, Mohamed Atta, who flew the first plane into the World Trade Center, came from a well-educated [end p. 206] family in Cairo. His father was an attorney and he had two sisters, one a medical doctor and the other a professor of zoology. Atta studied architecture at the University of Cairo, graduated, went to work in Germany, enrolled in a technical university outside of Hamburg, and later graduated with a masters thesis on urban planning in an ancient Islamic city -- he earned the highest grade possible.(8) This "gentle person," described by his father as "very shy, unassuming, and highly sensitive," chose to become a ringleader of the September 11 terrorists though he had many other identities or stories to choose from.(9) Atta began attending the Al Quds mosque in Hamburg in 1996, immersed himself in a fundamentalist Islamic faith, and became a member of a terrorist cell. He visited the Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan between summer 1997 and the fall of 1998. During that time bin Laden declared Americans as legitimate targets in a "holy war" and the U.S. Embassies in East Africa were bombed.(10) Unlike the madrasah students in Pakistan, who perhaps have had no choice but jihad, Mohamed Atta chose as an adult to wrap himself exclusively in a secret religious brotherhood of terrorists; he chose one story, one charismatic leader. We can hear Mohamed Atta's wish for violent transcendence in the self-hypnotic incantations he prescribed for the other terrorists on their last night. Paraphrasing Atta's instructions: Make an oath ...His instructions (found among his and other terrorists' possessions) prescribe the means the terrorists would use to dissociate themselves from the horror of their actions. Which one God were the terrorists always to be remembering? certainly not the God of compassion we find in the Qur'an. From scholars we will eventually learn more about Atta and the other September 11 terrorists, about the climates of family, religion, and politics that influenced values, beliefs, and private psychological needs. In the meantime we can reassess and extend our knowledge of fundamentalism in all its variant strains. Psychoanalysts created a rich vocabulary that helps us to understand terror, murderous rage, charismatic leaders, and submissive followers. We can rely on a century's worth of analytic thought and on such concepts as complexes, internal objects, persecuting objects, idealized others, false selves, projective identification, the paranoid position, regression, the persona, dissociation, denial, masochism, sadism, etc. We also have decades of research on authoritarian personalities, religious cults, charismatic leaders, small and large group processes, etc. Over 50 years ago M. Brewster Smith [end p. 208] summarized psychodynamic findings from The Authoritarian Personality: The authoritarian personality . .. characterizes the basically weak and dependent individual who has sacrificed his capacity for genuine experience of self and others in order to maintain a precarious order and safety. Such a person, estranged from inner values, lacks self-awareness. His judgments are governed by a punitive conventional moralism. His relations with others depend on considerations of power ... in which people figure as means rather than as ends.C.G. Jung said about the nature of power in human relationships: "Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror."(13) This one line effectively illuminates and guides us as we assess the power in contemporary politics, business, culture, relationships.... We recognize the predominance of power motives whenever we hear one person defining another -- in commonplace conversations with phrases like "You don't ..., You just too ..., You've always ...." or in the controlled spin of political speech.. None of us are strangers to the forms of manipulation, deceit, persuasion, and intimidation that subtly undermine self-confidence and self-esteem. Our analytic training should include careful study of the moments and places where love and relationship stop and power begins. The psychoanalytic questions I try to remember to ask are: "Who is trying to get whom to believe what? What do we want to believe, and wishes aside, what do we realistically think?" Whenever power motives prevail, then our conversations are exercises in persuasion, seduction, and credulity, whether they occur in analytic sessions, across the dinner table, or on the televised news. [end p. 209] Our day-to-day conversations oscillate between power and relatedness, between claiming or conceding power and the open exploring and revealing characteristic of mature relationship. As psychoanalysts, we need to bring skillful discrimination to all conversations and to see them as vehicles for defining what is real. Talk, we must remember, is powerful. Through conversations -- whether "complex" internal dialogues or face-to-face exchanges -- we constantly arbitrate the very nature of reality. Wise as Serpents Before his arrest, the failed terrorist, Zacarias Moussaoui, attended flight school in Norman, Oklahoma. Despite 57 hours of flying time in a Cessna 152, he was unable to fly solo -- a task usually achieved after 20 hours. When he later enrolled at a Pan Am flight school in Eagan, Minnesota, with a desire to fly a 747, Moussaoui told his flight instructor that he was from France. The instructor tried to speak French with him but Moussaoui did not seem to understand. Moussaoui explained that he had not lived long in France and was from the Middle East. The instructor found it odd that Moussaoui said he was from the Middle East, rather than identifying a country. When his instructor inquired further, Moussaoui became belligerent. Later the instructor "tried to tell him he was wasting his money" because he was so uncoordinated at the controls and had so "little ability to follow the lessons."l4 Here is where the story gets most interesting. Moussaoui's (still unidentified) instructor raised his suspicions with colleagues, one of whom offered the number of an FBI friend. When the instructor phoned, the FBI agent strongly encouraged [end p. 210] him to make a thorough report but gave him the wrong agent to call. The instructor made three more phone calls before reaching the right agent on August 15. "Do you realize how serious this is?" the instructor asked an FBI agent. "This man wants training on a 747. A 747 fully loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon!"(15)Moussaoui was arrested the next day and held on an immigration violation. How many of us would have gotten to the first phone call? It is exceptional that the flight instructor took his intuition seriously enough to go on thinking about it the internal dialogue and then to act on it. He had to go against the common tendency to minimize intuitions that will cause conflict, that will require action, and will make demands on others. The moment when the first phone call was made deserves emphasis. We do not need to act on all of our intuitions, but as this story makes clear, each intuition is worth reflection. The flight instructor obviously told his story effectively enough to be heard the Minneapolis FBI agents. They tried to get a warrant from the FBI lawyers in Washington to search Moussaoui's possessions but they were turned down despite continued requests. When FBI agents in Minneapolis finally obtained a warrant after the Sept. 11 attacks, they found voluminous information on crop-dusting planes on Moussaoui's computer hard drive, similar to material gathered by the hijackers' ringleader Mohamed Atta....(16) Not only do we need to respect our dark intuitions enough to explore them further, I think we also need to stretch our capacity for thinking about evil, for "serpent thoughts." [end p. 2ll] "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves:Understanding the conditions for imagining evil may be as or more important than the task of understanding terrorist psychology. We have the psychological tools to understand Mohamed Atta, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Osama bin Laden but we lack trained means for an imagination of evil.(l7) It is not easy to be wise as a serpent. Few people have the imagination for evil that terrorists possess. Terrorists have this advantage over us: they have no impediments of conscience to violent goals -- they can think anything. They have failed to learn to value themselves and others -- the narcissistic dilemma. They have succeeded in learning to project everything bad in themselves onto others and to isolate their enemies within a fantasy of evil. Without the inhibitions of conscience, empathy, or pleasure in others, terrorists can think and act upon the darkest thoughts that the rest of us resist. Fortunately, we can think evil and also resist it. Where, for example, we felt the threat of nuclear war and studied its horrors, conscience and fear slowed the progress of military strategies. For decades the U.S. and the Soviet Union imagined nuclear scenarios with great scientific precision but they also conducted "arms talks," signed treaties, and worked to avoid the use of nuclear weapons for over 60 years. As other nations acquired nuclear weapons, they too exercised restraint. [end p. 212] Terrorists do not have the resources of nations for nuclear war but they may possess "dirty bombs" and a host of other weapons and credible strategies for mass violence. In today's world we urgently need to become more skillful at holding the tension between uninhibited guile (the serpent) and deliberate care for peace (the dove). Most of us are psychoanalysts, in part, because we come more naturally to empathy than power. From the vantage point of the post-September 11 world, I think we are compelled to extend our insights and psychological practices (listening, containing, thinking symbolically, etc.) to the analysis of collective power, of violence, and of culture. How are we to feel and think inside the evil we abhor and fear and still hold the tension? What is required of us if we are to anticipate violence? Can our thinking keep pace with terrorists who do not share our inhibitions, much less our values? I think we need to be equally interested in how the detective's mind works and the criminal's. Projections During a recent trip to China with friends, I passed through Langzhou, an industrial city south of Beijing with a large Muslim population. With the help of half a dozen people we found an Air China office -- no easy task! -- where we could buy a ticket to Xian. The two young women from Air China who helped us were bright, animated, open, and generous, and both were Muslim. One member of our small group spoke Chinese, and as our conversation became more enjoyable one woman ventured to ask why Americans hated Muslims. She really wanted to know. And she wanted to know why we hated black people because, as she said, she had heard about what happened to Rodney King. [end p. 213] I do not know if she realized that Americans have been asking why Muslims hate Americans?(18) In that moment in a small office near the bus station in Langzhou five of us were given the opportunity to meet and to bridge our suspicions in the warmth of interest and respect. I have no doubt that we were successful. Generations of analysts and patients have concentrated or "withdrawing projections" and taking responsibility for the darkness we would otherwise deny in ourselves and condemn in others.(19) It serves us well, therefore, to reflect on 1) what we are subjectively inclined to think and feel about the other, 2) what we may go out of our way not to think or feel about the other, 3) how we desire to think about ourselves, 4) what we don't want to recognize in ourselves, and to assess, as honestly as possible, what the realistic and probable truth about both the other and ourselves. I think these reflections and assessments would deepen our insight into the conditions of our own "homes" and into the others we live among. [end p. 214] Analysts exhort patients to examine everything they wish to deny in themselves. But we handicap ourselves if we do not learn to apply the same scrutiny to the shadow of the other. We need to train ourselves to deconstruct our wishes to believe in the "good self" of the other and the other's wishes for us to believe in their beneficence; if successful, we may end with a reliable assessment of the other and of ourselves. Durable trust is built upon skillful timely distrust. There is a vast difference between believing in the goodness of the other and deluding ourselves by a <i>wish to believe</i> in their goodness. We are trained as analysts to "hold the tension of opposites," of impossibly conflicting stories. Our daily practice from session to session consists in telling stories about stories. Psychoanalysis, therefore, is a postmodern discipline. To clarify, we are pre-modern if we live with only one story, we are modern if we live surrounded by many stories, and we are postmodern if we posses stories about stories. Hope and Dread "We hope vaguely, but dread precisely": I used to think that Paul Valery's words captured the predicament of our time. I knew that our fears were astonishingly precise. Jonathan Shell showed us exactly what to fear in the 1980s when he wrote about nuclear war and demonstrated that the "unthinkable" was, in fact, very "thinkable." In The Fate of the Earth he described in precise, vivid detail the stages of destruction from a nuclear blast -- beginning with the first second at "ground zero" and spreading out from the epicenter and forward in [end p. 215] time through radioactive fallout and radiation sickness.(20) Since then we have become more acquainted with other well-defined fears: economic recession, overpopulation, global warming, melting polar icecaps, disruptive climate changes, deforestation, topsoil erosion, ozone depletion, poverty, famine, war, and ever more pollution of every kind. Our hopes, by contrast, have remained vague. We seem to have an impaired capacity to imagine a credible, desirable future, a future that would attract our best energies, our most sustained thought. t still think that Valery's assessment is correct; however, since September 11, I think we remain shaken and unsure about what to fear and how to respond. Integrating the shadow we project onto others is only half the story in any relationship. We cannot move intelligently in the world without also knowing the other and the other's shadow. We need to know at least as much about the other's capacity for evil as we know about our own. September 11 taught us that we cannot underestimate the violence in the world. Our subsequent behaviors taught us not to underestimate our aggression. As psychoanalysts, we are familiar with our extraordinary capacity to forget, deny, dissociate, and avoid. Perhaps we will not numb ourselves to the September 11 tragedy this year or next but our alertness to danger will not naturally remain awake indefinitely. In fact, haven't we already half-forgotten the anthrax contaminated letters? Perhaps we can extend our interpretations of denial and avoidance in analysis to include the terrors that overshadow our communal lives. What else can we as analysts and as psychological citizens do to educate our hearts and minds for this new world? It is our practice to pay close attention and to reflect psychologically, symbolically. Although we most often reflect on intrapsychic dynamics or interpersonal relationships, we now need [end p. 216] to think about the larger world we shape and that shapes us. The subjects of psychological reflection have to include terrorism, "isms" of all persuasions, religious traditions, historical tides, political movements, human rights, changing climates, and more. The disenfranchised, threatened people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, and other nations and regions deserve our best efforts at psychological understanding relationship, not power. Terrorists may make the most dramatic claims on our attention but our best should go to the people without a voice, not to the "martyrs." It remains our most important task to appreciate what despairing people need and why they need it and to give what we may spare when it is needed and not years later when they are famished and gone.(2l) Over time I hope we can find a psychological vocabulary and the practices to reflect usefully on the stories we tell ourselves and others about the larger world -- a cultural psychology. Our analytical training always includes reflection on the unsanctioned personal stories that we avoid telling; we can now add the unsanctioned cultural and political stories to the personal ones we attend to so skillfully. When world events mobilize nations and armies, it is useful to recall that reflecting and interpreting are also mobilizing actions. We will do well to remember Jung's late words, "Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long."(22) A more expansive line from Memories, Dreams, Reflections makes a good companion: "We do not know how far the process of coming to consciousness can extend, or where it will lead."(23) Finally, we can ask ourselves again what our consciousness is <i>for</i>. Our day-to-day tasks are often completed more efficiently when our actions are routine and unconscious. In contrast, consciousness serves us best when we face the unexpected, the new, and the future. As analysts, this is the consciousness we try to bring to every analytic session. We prepare ourselves to notice, feel, articulate, and contain anything at the edge of what is known, anything symbolically unfolding, present but not spoken, spoken but unnoticed, anything emergent. We need to know more about the mechanics of evil and the workings of power just as we need to feel the pulse of credible, hopeful visions of the future we may create. Balancing fear and hope, telling stories about stories we engage in actions that are as revolutionary today as they were in 1900. We are, each of us in C.G. Jung's timely words, "second creators" of the world.(24) Donald Williams is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in Boulder, Colorado. He created and developed (1995-2005) the C.G. Jung Page website (www.cgjungpage.org) and is webmaster for the International Association for Analytical psychology (www.iaap.org). He has contributed articles to Jung and Film, The Soul of Popular Culture, The San Francisco Library Journal, Folklore Forum, Screenwriter's Forum, Hollywood Screenwriter, The Psychoanalytic Review, and other publications. Notes: 1. "With Pakistan's Schools in Tatters, Madrasahs Spawn Young Warriors" by Peter Fritsch: wsjclassrooomedition.com/tj_10020l_madr.htm. The Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition, Oct. 2, 2001. 2. "Pakistan's Jihad Hatcheries" by Ben Barber, a State Department correspondent for the Washington Times. www.worldandi.com/public/2001/December/jihad.html 3. Ibid. 4. Anderson, Walter Truett. Reality Isn't What It Used To Be. p. 267 5. Ibid. p. 195. 6. Ibid. pp.26-27. 7. Barber. wsjclassroomedition.com/tj_l00201_madr.htm 8 "Inside the Terror Network: Chronology of the Sept. 11 Terror Plot." PBS online, 2002, and wgbh/frontline. www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/network/personal/cron.html 9. "Inside the Terror Network: Who Were They?" PBS online, 2002, and wgbh/frontline. www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/network/personal/whowere.html l0 "Inside the Terror Network: Chronology of the Sept. 11 Terror Plot." PBS, 2002, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/network/personal/cron.html 11 "Inside the Terror Network: Instructions for the Last Night." PBS online, 2002, and wgbh/frontline, www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/network/personal/instructions.html 12 M. Brewster Smith's Foreword to Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism by Bob Altemeyer. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, l988. 13 "The Undiscovered Self" in The Undiscovered Self with Symbols and the Interpretation of' Dreams. Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 57. 14 "Eagan flight trainer wouldn't let unease about Moussaoui rest" by Greg Gordon. Minneapolis-St.Paul Star Tribune. Published Dec 21, 2001. www.startribune.com/stories/1576/913687.html 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17. Paul Oppenheimer (1996) remarks that the word 'evil' is reappearing in the journals, because of the "growing awareness that it is the only word capable of bringing certain awesome events into our sphere of intellectual proxy, of diagnosis...." he feels that "other familiar terms, such as 'criminal' and 'sociopathic' fail adequately to describe the monstrous acts to which they are addressing themselves." Appearing in "Evil as Love and as Liberation" by Ruth Stein, Ph.D. Paper presented to the "Terror and Aftermath: perspectives on the WTC Tragedy" program, October 29,2001 at NYU Medical Center. Published online at: psychematters.com/papers/stein.htm l8 See: "Impossible Histories: Why the many Islams cannot be simplified" by Edward W. Said. The article contains an invaluable critique of Bernard Lewis' writings on Muslim rage. <i>Harper's Magazine</i>. New York, July 2002. For background on Lewis, see "Coming to Grips with Jihad: Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified" by Bernard Lewis in The AtlanticOnline. Sept. 1990. www.theatlantic.com/issues/90sep/rage.htm 19. C.G. Jung: "Nothing promotes understanding and <i>rapprochement</i> more than the mutual withdrawal of projections. ... Recognition of the shadow...leads to the modesty we need in order to acknowledge imperfection. And it is just this conscious recognition and consideration that are needed whenever a human relationship is to be established." "The Undiscovered Self" in The Undiscovered Self with Symbols and The Interpretation of Dreams. Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 56-57. 20. The Fate of-the Earth and The Abolition by Jonathan Schell. Stanford University Press, 2000. 2l. A Generous Man by Reynolds Price. Atheneum, New York, 1966. 22. The Undiscovered Self, p. 57. 23. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, Vintage Books, New York, 1965, p. 340. 24 Ibid. p.256.
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| Last Updated on Monday, 04 January 2010 02:09 |
Stories About Stories by Donald Williams, p. 203-218.