Who are the torturers and suicide bombers?

Abstract

The world is regularly confronted by occurrences of mass violence wherein specific groups of a population are brutally killed, raped, and tortured by another group that considers its own behavior morally justifiable. There are social, economic, and political crises that lead to the scapegoating of one group designated as the enemy. It represents a mental instrument that validates dehumanizing the chosen enemy and gives “meaning” to the extermination of dangerous “elements” as part of a battle between good and evil. In the case of suicide bombers and terrorists, sacrifice and devotion to the ideology that promises martyrdom and support for sacred ideals are requirements. Some researchers talk about the personality of the torturer, particularly about how some childrearing practices annihilate children’s sense of self by teaching them to be obedient to authority. Others talk about the role of moral disengagement and the role of specialized military training. Psychoanalytic thinkers emphasize that the key mechanisms at work in these atrocities are splitting, paranoid projections, projective identification, sadomasochistic forces, strong mechanisms of negation and dissociation, and an extremely weak social identity. Those who commit evil acts seldom perceive their actions as evil. This paper focuses on the social influences that lead to dehumanizing and blaming the “other,” and childrearing practices that influence the creation of the genocidal mentality.

Key words:

• torture
• personality of torturers
• social trauma
• suicide bombers

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Lijtmaer

Author

Ruth Lijtmaer, PhD, is faculty and training analyst at Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New Jersey. Her latest publication is “Silent broken memories,” pp.171–173 in Sharon Farber (ed.), Celebrating the wounded healer psychotherapist: Pain, post traumatic growth and self-disclosure (Routledge, 2016).