Clinic of terrorism: the discourse of a psychopath or a perversion of collective phantasm?

The sixth commandment says: “Thou shalt not kill!” In 1933, the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations, whose subsequent actions proved powerless to preserve peace, asked Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud to answer the question: “Why war?”. In his reasoning, Freud did not for nothing mention the cost of castration, which the subject pays for participating in social exchange, and which he modeled on the example of the Oedipus myth. However, after a hundred years, the topic has not lost its relevance. And in this lecture, we will try to reveal the essence of the question that Freud himself struggled with, but in a different formulation: “Why terrorism?”
The etymological origin of the word “terror” is the Greek word “tromos”. Tromos means to tremble, especially with fear. This is an onomatopoeia formed from the sound “trrr”, which sounds like a trembling person, to tremble.

The thoughts I propose to delve into concern three main parts:

the first – features of a terrorist act;

the second – is there a clinical profile of a terrorist?;

the third – how to work with the consequences for the subject?;

In other words, how can a psychoanalytic clinic respond to this phenomenon of modern civilization?