The Psychology of Political Extremism

Abstract

Any attempt to analyse the phenomenon of political extremism must seek to explain why choices are sometimes made to articulate such views through violence. It is proposed that such a choice may have little to do with the specific ideology through which extremism is expressed but instead may reflect deeper psychological considerations. Investigations of persons who grew up in totalitarian systems suggest that the state may invade the psyche, interfering with the normal interplay of ego, superego and id. An explanation depending on the construction of a tripartite model of personal, non-personal and impersonal self was developed to explain the consequences of this process. It is proposed that such models may have a wider relevance and can be applied to the phenomenon of violence arising from contemporary political extremism. The advantage of such models is that they can be subjected to empirical investigation.

Notes

¹ ‘The realisation that “objective factors” and ideology are usually insufficient to explain the decision of individuals or groups to opt for terrorism has led to a preoccupation with psychological and biological factors: Is there such a thing as “a terrorist personality”?’ (Lacquer 2003, 23).

² This has been argued in the case of religious fundamentalisms. See Monroe and Kreidie (1997).

³ Of course, the arguments presented here form only a small part of the analysis involved in the original project, since they are designed to link together psychoanalytical analyses and socio-political concepts connected with the problem of political extremism. For the complete argument, see Schmidt (2003).

⁴ This approach arose mainly from work and experiences at the Tavistock Clinic in London, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (e.g. Rice 1969; Obholzer 1987) and the work of Bion (1961). Further concepts were taken from qualitative methods used in social science research.

⁵ The term ‘phantasy’ has a specific meaning in psychoanalysis, in defining mental images created by unconscious psychic processes that condition individual behaviour.

⁶ In one variant, which is not essentially Kleinian in its approach but produces a similar type of analysis, terrorist personalities are depicted as malignantly narcissistic, with their consequent sense of rejection being projected externally onto perceived enemies (Volkan 1994). In another, the so-called ‘psychopolitics of hatred’, the paranoid-schizoid position is adduced as a dyadic good–evil splitting reflecting the linked concepts of God and the devil, which then allows the immature personality to externally project its aggressive hatred onto the supposedly evil object, an action that it legitimises by internalising and idealising the good component (Robins and Post 1997, 88–89).

⁷ Indeed, this is the position that Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and a former foreign service officer who was based in Islamabad from 1987 to 1989, takes towards all psychological approaches, but his own analysis is not immune to criticism (Sageman 2004, 80–96).

⁸ Thus Walter Lacquer (2003, 20–27) argues that the basic psychological explanation has to be based on ‘fanaticism’, which he considers to have religious roots and which, following Nikolai Berdyaev, he considers is based on a persecution mania arising from an environment that betrays core beliefs.

⁹ The action of mental development or cultivation, of giving a mental quality to something (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 1993, 1743).

¹⁰ An unconscious image of an archetype or of someone (especially a parent) which influences a person's behaviour.

¹¹ ‘Ego’: that part of the mind which has a sense of individuality and is most conscious of self; (in Freudian theory) the part that mediates between the id and the superego and deals with external reality. ‘Id’: the inherited, instinctive impulses of the individual, forming part of the unconscious and, in Freudian theory, interacting in the psyche with the ego and the superego. ‘Superego’: in Freudian theory, the part of the mind which internalises parental and social inhibitions or ideals early in life and imposes them as a censor on the wishes of the ego; the agent of self-criticism (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 1993, 788, 1303, 3146).

¹² See, for example, Mazarweh (2004).

¹³ First published as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur in 1930; here Freud (2002).

¹⁴ This refers to a process whereby the psyche separates and projects good and evil influences that it cannot integrate, in order to prevent the evil from destroying the good.

¹⁵ ‘The function [the super-ego] exercises is perhaps its clearest feature. It is to criticise the ego and to cause pain to the latter whenever it tends to accept impulses proceeding from the repressed part of the id’ (Jones 1926, 1996, 34). See also Freud (1963, 525). The ‘pain’ to the ego, the conscious, manifest, component of personality, is of course the feeling of moral guilt. The superego is therefore the repository of the internalised constraints on individual behaviour that condition the id.

¹⁶ By ‘terrorist violence’ is meant violence used as ‘coercive intimidation’ (Wilkinson 1986, 51) which is formally unbounded and indiscriminate, in which civilians are inevitable incidental and sometimes intended victims, as part of the process of creating fear. Terrorism is not an ideology in itself; it is simply a mode of action, designed to achieve a particular political result. It may not, in reality, be indiscriminate either, as the arguments provided in the testament of Emile Henry (1894) demonstrate.

¹⁷ ‘Jihadist’: the term applied to a modernist and political interpretation of Islamic doctrine that argues that Western aggression requires activist defence by Muslims. The concept is extremely complex and intimately entwined in Islamic doctrine. It is discussed at length in Ruthven (2002, 44–72).

¹⁸ Ibrahim's (1988, 632–57) research centre in Cairo, the Ibn Khaldun Centre, established that, in the 1970s, the typical profile of Islamic militants was of men between 25 and 30 years old (61% of the total sample), had undergone higher education (79%), were often in one of the major professions (51%) and tended to live in small towns (37%) or large cities (55%). By the 1990s, however, this picture had changed dramatically. Now 48% of militants were between 20 and 25 years old and 23% were below 20 years old. Their formal education was predominantly secondary school (29%) or intermediate school (42%) and they tended to live in shanty towns (36%) or small towns (31%), with 18% living in villages (Joffé 1997, 8). This pattern was replicated in Algeria in the 1990s and even appears in modified form in the North African diaspora in Europe.

¹⁹ This is exemplified by a famous interview with an alleged terrorist involved in the 1995 bombings in Paris and a member of the Chasse-La-Rhône group, Khaled Kelkal, who was killed by French police on 29 September 1995. See Kelkal (1995).

²⁰ The concept of ‘source of emulation’ (marja-i taqlid: see the Encyclopaedia of Islam 2003) is also explicit in Shi'a Islam and there is a very powerful replication of the essential religious concepts of submission and emulation within the Arab family.

²¹ Interestingly enough, North African migrants in Europe were linked to political extremism and violence long before the current wave of Islamic activism began, as a study of political violence in the 1980s in Europe would make clear. Even when the Islamist alternative began to emerge in the 1990s, the underlying motivation was often unrelated to Islam and had much more to do with the sense of exclusion linked to the banlieusard phenomenon in France. See Kelkal (1995).

²² ‘Salafism’: a modernist interpretation of Islamic doctrine, designed originally to provide an intellectual background for the construction of an Islamic discourse to counter European liberalism and colonialism in the 19th century. In the 1970s its ideas were revived in Saudi Arabia, particularly as an attempt to reconstruct Islamic culture and society by reference back to the presumed Islamic golden age of the first four caliphs. Its principles have since been combined with jihadism to create an integrated doctrine of resistance to Westernisation and globalisation.

²³ Interestingly enough, this was highlighted by an Algerian newspaper, El Watan, which on 12 December 2003 noted that, out of 529 arrests of Algerian migrants in Britain since September 11 on charges related to possible terrorist offences, only five had been charged with terrorist offences and only two had been accused of being involved with a weapon of mass destruction—ricin! Even those two offences were eventually changed into more moderate charges. Thus, less than one per cent of those accused of terrorist offences were actually charged with them.

²⁴ The fact that such threats may be grossly exaggerated by politicians is not relevant to the argument here.

²⁵ The term is Durkheim's (1987).

²⁶ Martyrdom is permissible in Islam, for death is then an incidental consequence of an altruistic act designed to protect the Muslim collectivity; suicide as self-destruction is not. See Abdel-Khalek (2004, 99–113) and Orbach (2004, 115–30). Orbach argues that training and predisposition create a ‘dissociative state’ in which the act of suicide is psychologically distanced from the individual involved.