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2009 Abstracts Stage 3

The Threat of 21st Century Global Terror: are Terrorist Organisations Psychotic [Freud]?

Nick Symonds, 2009, Stage 3

Territory: Terror and the Suicide Bomber.
Terrorism is not a new weapon but in the 21st Century we have seen it used to devastating effect. A 21st Century phenomenon is the suicide bomber, the human bomb willing to sacrifice their own life for terrors cause. The suicide bomber is an utterly baffling weapon 9 times out of 10 it is unable to be defused and its explosive force can cause widespread damage to infrastructure, troops and civilians. For counter terror organisations around the world the suicide bomber presents the ultimate nightmare and risk to the civilian population. It is a bomb combined with human thought and human emotion, a bomb that shouldn’t exist.

Concept: Freudian Psychosis.
The aim of my project is to engage with the terrorist’s mind-set, in particular the suicide bombers with respect to Freudian psychology. The simple answer is to declare terrorism and its follower’s psychotic thought, but could this assumption merely be just a Western attitude?

Secondary Concept: Levinas’s Autrui.
For further discussion I will also engage the terrorist with Autrui [the Other] to discuss if the suicide bomber truly understands the people it destroys as Autrui.

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