Breakable and Unbreakable Silences: Implicit Dehumanization and Anti‐Arab Prejudice in Israeli Soldiers’ Narratives Concerning Palestinian Women

This paper argues that the United Nations (UN) Security Council counterterrorism policies have largely failed because they did not address many of the conditions that make certain parts of the world a fertile ground for the emergence of terrorism, including the historical antecedents that lead to violence; the lingering and pervasive influence and hegemony of UN Security Council Members; the UN Security Council members' self‐serving and morally inconsistent exercise of their power of veto or in condemning violent acts perpetrated by Member States; and the double standard in the implementation of its policies (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999; Farer, 2002; Glennon, 2003). Utilizing a critical geopolitical perspective, as well as the conceptualizations of the “normative unconscious” (Layton, 2002, 2006) and the “absent referent” (Adams, 1990) of and Benjamin's framework of witnessing and the “moral third” (Benjamin, 2018). The paper further argues that much of what is taken as the status quo in United Nations Security Council counterterrorism policies is derived from ideological principles that were ultimately created in the service of the state apparatuses (and their signature exploitative practices) that governments unconsciously feel compelled to sustain. By making explicit these proclivities, and exposing terrorists as the absent referent of the United Nations Security Council's discussions, the paper offers a psychoanalytic framework to explain the logic behind such counterterrorism policies. Further, following Benjamin, the paper suggests that by moving away from Eurocentric, zero‐sum, and colonial logic, there may be a way to organically recognize populations that are aggrieved by these state apparatuses in a way that could obviate the use of political violence and, inter alia, terrorism.

Section: Social Scientific Determinants Of Terrorism In Ansasmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Social Scientific Determinants Of Terrorism In Ansasmentioning

confidence: 84%

The Normative Unconscious Of Nations: A critical geopolitical and psychoanalytic perspectives on the United Nations Security Council's counterterrorism strategy

Khouri¹

2019

“…The crisis‐provoking and conflicting relationships of CRG members with nonmembers can also be interpreted as the result of their paranoid anxieties surrounding persecutory objects, which are projectively identified onto others, whether individual unbelievers or nation states (Cohen, ; Post, ). The dominant characteristics of CRG members—a Manichaean view of the world, no tolerance of ambiguity, no acceptance of diversity, and intolerance of critical thought—is a product of such primitive psychological defenses.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The interplay between antisocial and obsessive‐compulsive personality characteristics in cult‐like religious groups: A psychodynamic decoding of the DSM‐5

Rahmani

Hemmati

Cohen

et al. 2019

Self Cite

The antisocial and violent behaviors of cult‐like religious groups (CRGs) and the maladaptive social consequences of their activities suggest clinical or character pathology and invite diagnostic and dynamic formulations of their members' personalities. The current study utilized secondary reports in the commercial media about CRG members, combined with the lived experience method of two of the authors. The resulting core characteristics of CRG members were then classified following the alternative DSM‐5 alternative model for personality disorders. The overall clinical picture is then discussed in terms of the shared psychodynamic sources that undergird the behaviors of the antisocial‐obsessive‐compulsive personality disorders. By tracing the personality characteristics into their unconscious sadomasochistic conflicts, these insights shed light on the paradoxical frequent co‐occurrence of antisocial and obsessive‐compulsive characteristics among extremists, in contrast to the patient population at large.

“…The fact that the studies used primary sources in the original Arabic is both consistent with psychoanalytic preference for the experiential language and lends ecological validity to the findings. Similarly, in a corpus of 1373 testimonials of Israeli ex‐military against the occupation (‘Breaking the Silence’), Cohen () found evidence for lingering unconscious dehumanization of Palestinian women in the unconscious tendency of the narrators to describe the presentation of these women while in distress in behavioral, rather than emotional, terms.…”

Section: Integrative Psychoanalytic Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The unconscious in terror: An overview of psychoanalytic contributions to the psychology of terrorism and violent radicalization

Cohen

2019

Self Cite

This overview provides a brief survey of the major psychoanalytic frameworks and concepts that were put forth throughout the years for understanding socio‐political violence and terrorism. In lieu of exhaustiveness, which is hindered by scope limitations, this overview maps the general ‘phylogenesis’, or the intellectual evolution and derivation of psychoanalytic theorizing about the subject, while putting more specific models within the context of the major developments (or splintering) in psychoanalytic theory that inspired or preceded them. Geared towards the English‐speaking reader, this overview attempts to undo some of the Americanocentric cultural bias that may still exist in the psychoanalytic literature in general and that of political violence in particular ‐ especially after 9/11. As such, it preferentially expounds upon theories that may be more popular outside the United States and/or have not yet been comprehensively translated to English, such as Marxist, post‐structuralist and ‘continental’ philosophical approaches to political violence. Further, since theories of political violence are arguably more prone to amnesia and to ‘reinvention of the wheel’ for a variety of reasons, this overview is slightly more detailed in describing early concepts and scholars that may still be useful in conceptualizing present‐day terrorism. The overview ends with a selective survey of innovative clinical and empirical approaches that allow for integration of psychoanalytic frameworks to flexibly understand political violence through cognitive products and primary sources.