IDI Fellow Gerard Fromm was the discussant at a University Forum on Terrorism at the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting in New York this past week (Jan. 16, 2015). The two presenters were Dr. Jessica Stern, Harvard lecturer and author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, and Dr. Stephen Xenakis, Brigadier General (Ret.), United States Army, and Founder of the Center for Translational Medicine. Their presentations focussed on an in-depth study of an individual terrorist as well as studies of young men vulnerable to terrorist recruitment but who had not fully joined or committed violence. Dr. Fromm in his discussion, which was largely a close reading of Dr. Stern’s interview with a convicted neo-Nazi, focussed on disturbances in the developmental history, particularly the critical identity phase of a troubled young man’s life, as well as the distinction between acting out violent fantasies in the service of unconscious communication and the more fateful passage-into-action, in which the person, generally impulsively, crosses over into a different and more self- and other-destructive psychology. The role and extreme difficulty of understanding the person who commits terrorist activity and the implications of that understanding for prevention and other policy were part of the discussion. Related to this, the three panel members took up a consideration of de-radicalization programs, some of which seem remarkably promising, as well as the many destructive effects of using torture as a weapon against terrorism. A large audience participated in the conversation for the full three hours of the Forum and appreciated the effort to integrate societal, political, military and clinical perspectives on this important topic.
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