The Psyche of Jihadist Terrorists: Psychoanalytic Reflections

Psychoanalytic reflections on the psyche of jihadist terrorists

Lecture at the Psychiatrists & Psychoanalysts Association ¹

Baku, Azerbaijan, 13 May 2018

1. This lecture for the Psychiatrists & Psychoanalysts Association in Baku (Azerbaïjan) is inspired by an article published in the French journal Psychiatrie Française entitled "Réflexions psychanalytiques sur le terrorisme djihadiste : de l’autopunition à l’autodestruction", in « Radicalité et Radicalisation : une Voie de la destructivité » , Vol. XXXXVIII, 2/17, Octobre 2017, pp. 91-110.

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‘The unconscious aspiration to death would thus go beyond the purely psyc hic plane and would actually be realized, objectively, on a profoundly organic plane...in a direction that would range from silent sadomasochism to self-destruction of the tissue and to the death, organic or total, of the being’ 2 .

Faced with questions and feelings of helplessness following the proliferation of jihadist ‘vocations’ in the French territory, arising regardless of the individual’s culture, their religious background, place of origin, even that of the social environment and the school curriculum, would psychoanalysis have any capacity of enlightening the unconscious processes by which a man or a woman engage in this ‘journey without return’?

I would like to begin my presentation by showing you its genesis and how I became interested in the subject. Then I shall elaborate on four points that open further lines of enquiry.

Before this, however, I will approach our reflexions with two introductory remarks…

In 2003, a group of sociologists 3 noted the conversion of around five thousand Danish women to Islam, a figure that is steadily increasing each year. In a study devoted to these women, the specialists explained that the religious choice of those concerned was due to the attention paid to the ‘rules of morality, food and relationships between men and women.’ Far from trivialising the faith of these new Muslims, complementary investigations showed the new convert’s vital attachment to rituals perceived as ‘visible practice’, their feeling of living, with these ‘duties’, a more ‘physical’ religion and the satisfaction of being ‘integrated in a community’.

The second illustration comes from my professional activity, at the time of my analytical supervision in Lebanon: a friend came in one day to consultation with a fifteen-year-old teenager, living in Haret Hreik, a Hezbollah stronghold located in the suburbs south of Beirut. This young man had directly witnessed the death of his closest friend of the same age, a boy mortally mowed down by a car.

Traumatized, and lost in deep mourning, he kept himself locked up in his room for days. He would ritually light candles in memory of the deceased each day. After one session, and despite his declared intention to return, he disappeared. A short while after, I received information that a fighting unit of the Lebanese Shiite militia had ‘taken charge of him’ and that his ‘commitment to martyrdom’ would no doubt allow him to find a ‘way out’ of his melancholy depression.

What is the difference, you will ask me, between these converted Danish women, this young man from the southern suburbs of Beirut and the French jihadist apprentices? From the only point of view that concerns me, the psychic mechanisms of the unconscious, there is practically none.

If there is one, it lies in the degree of severity and not that of the nature between these three examples.

What interests me here, are the common and increasing number of associated elements between psychic processes and the progression towards jihadism. Allow me to list them here, in no particular order:

The weakening of the Ego, even the collapse of the Ego, as a result of a depreciation induced by the Ego Ideal, the setting up of obsessive defensive mechanisms, the external search for a structured and salutary support system, the progressive fading of the conscious personality for the benefit of a group, the feeling of invincibility of the individual in a crowd, the resurgence of cruel and destructive drives. We have known for a long time, as the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst J.C. Maleval reminds us, of ‘the pacifying function for the psychotic of a life regulated by severe constraints, such as those proposed by religious or military communities’.

In this presentation, I wish to demonstrate how future terrorists will discover in their path towards radicalization and in the accomplishment of their crime, in other words, the act of terrorism (and I deliberately say act and not action, and we will see why later), an unconscious way of supporting, containing and suturing their chaotic drives.

With this aim in mind, I will endeavour to develop the four following points:

-1- The difficulties facing political institutions improperly assessing the jihadist phenomenon.

-2- Further thoughts regarding seduction, heroic identification and acts of terrorism.

-3- The need to use the Freudian concept of sexual drive.

-4- To conclude, asking the question: what should be understood by successful de-radicalization?

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-1- The difficulties facing political institutions in properly assessing the jihadist phenomenon.

Let us recall a number of facts: what did we learn over the course of investigations and numerous press leaks? We learned that one of the Bataclan terrorists frequently uses psychoactive substances and that another was suffering from mental illness. In Valence, did we not perceive the difficulties of the judicial authority to describe the aggressor, who wanted to ‘knock over but not kill’ the soldiers with his car? On the one hand, according to the prosecutor, there were ‘questions about his mental health’ and ‘inexplicable motivations’. On the other, there were ‘images of jihadist propaganda but nothing about belonging to any network’. While these elements were dissociated by the prosecutor in a strictly legal approach, psychoanalysis invites us to join them together. As for the attack on the Goutte-d'Or district police station in Paris, doesn’t a source close to the investigation mention the same aporia? ‘A fake explosive belt, the cries, the allegiance, these are signs that can connect it to a [terrorist] network, but at the same time they can be signs of mental imbalance’.

The same uncertainties carry weight in the tragedies of Dijon and Nantes where, in December 2014, drivers ran down the crowd. In Dijon, the perpetrator even specified to the investigators that ‘[t]o give me courage, I shouted “Allahu Akbar” to annihilate any critical spirit.’ In Nantes, the high blood alcohol content of the driver reveals a means more than an end. More recently, it appears that the terrorist from Nice worked as an escort, which confirms incidentally the Freudian approach of the psyche mixing desire and prohibition 4 , then, from 1920, death and sexuality 5 .

The young German-Iranian fanatic, who committed the Munich bloodshed in July 2016, was indeed suffering from psychiatric disorders. He was fascinated by mass killings and, in particular, by the one perpetrated in 2011 by the Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik on seventy-seven teenagers. He had been, however, preparing his murderous madness for an entire year. ‘A true preparation of the act does not prevent us from noting the binding nature of the drive coming from the unconscious’ Claude Balier reminds us 6 .

The same phenomenon occurred at the Christmas market in Berlin in December 2016. The terrorist escaped the attention of the German counterintelligence services because he was also a drug user and a dealer. The German authorities explained that, notwithstanding the fact that they had placed him under surveillance, his regular consumption of psychoactive substances appeared to be a factor capable of ruling him out as a potential terrorist: ‘the subject’, Serge Lebovici remind us, ‘does not really premeditate his act but there is often an anxious forecast with struggle, doping’ 7 .

Distinguishing terrorist acts from mental imbalance is, in my opinion, a denial of the clear psychological fact: the conflict lies at the heart of instinctual life. It constitutes ‘the essential element of the individual drama’, according to Etienne de Greeff 8 . Admitting the psychic and unconscious dimension of terrorism also implies the need to renounce typologies and other categorisations elaborated by man and intended to reassure him.

We can easily perceive the general resistance of the public to comprehend the mysterious trajectory of the path to terrorism: an enigmatic genesis, almost indecipherable, and a culmination in the polar opposite result, marked by a two-fold seal of reality and horror.

What I would like to demonstrate is the exaggerated importance given to the external presentation, the crime’s behavioural appearance. And this, by justice for obvious reasons related to the formal content of the law. By the press, then, for reasons of immediacy in a commercial race intended to report the information. And ultimately by public opinion: ‘crowds’, Freud reminds us, ‘have never known the thirst for truth but ask for illusions that they cannot renounce’. However, what surprises me the most is the denial of this psychic dimension, though manifest in these acts: a few months ago, in a strictly private exchange, a Paris senior told me that ‘most terrorists are sane’, and she was an expert in counterterrorism.

Such an assertion is peremptory to say the least, if not dangerous, and raises two subsequent questions:

Who, in the ranks of those in charge of our security, would then take the risk of opposing the hierarchy and calling attention to an individual before the crime would ultimately, alas, be accomplished?

Sane? How in this case can we grasp the transition, sometimes within the scope of a few days, between the relatively dissolute life of these men - and women - to that of their extreme radicalization?

A radicalization of which many elements - the sudden diehard devotion, the total destructiveness of the terrorist himself and that of his targets, the claim of ownership that provides necessary recognition in the aftermath – bring to light the subsurface and archaic work of the instinctual.

This coexistence, this coalescence inside a sole human being of both a fanaticism which verges on dementia and of a calculating sagacity which leaves nothing to chance, can explain the main difficulty to assess the psyche of these criminals.

-2- Further thoughts regarding seduction, heroic identification and acts of terrorism.

The terrorist apprentice commits himself to commit suicide and, in doing so, is granted the status of ‘martyr.’ In a conference held in Nice a few months before the 2016 massacre, which took place on the 14th of July, a DGSI specialist from Paris described the process of Islamist radicalisation in three stages: ‘seduction, deconstruction, reconstruction’. Seduction is a key concept in psychoanalysis. The entirety of Freud's thought, from his letter to Wilhelm Fliess on the 21st of September 1897, from his ‘Three Essays on the Sexual Theory’ in 1905, and all his subsequent works, oscillate between categorical abandonment and ambivalent reassertion of this above notion.

The budding jihadist, especially if he is a teenager, who is at this age often looking for new and glorious identifications, could be ‘seduced’ by the recruiter. Perhaps he is even trying to be seduced? Jean Laplanche 10 reminds us that ‘[t]he fantasy of seduction exists in everyone.’

Aimed towards the recruitment of young people, videos from the internet intelligently collate supposedly intangible, universal, omnipotent, even supernatural values: all of the elements that plunge the teenager into the infantile belief of his omnipotence.

These propaganda films include the required visual effects: the projective identification with the hero, the guilt (that others died for you), the exploitation of the feminine (the maternal softness of the afterlife’s hazy limbo of paradise), the highlighting of the masculine (virility galvanized by the song of war), and finally this glorious journey that awaits the martyr.

This seduction is marked by the asymmetry between the protagonists, which recalls another instance earlier in life, from infancy. All this with the aim of ‘stimulating identifications through guilt’, while the terrorist does not hesitate to call himself a victim of his sacrifice.

Let us recall here that adolescents go through the experience of cleavage between the physical changes imposed by the realities of puberty and the reduced capacities of their psyche, still immersed in the infantile, to understand and to admit the meaning of these developments. It should not be forgotten either that the supreme paradox of adolescence lies in the entry into the adult world, a realm of finiteness, twinned with their discovery of their procreative possibility, of giving birth.

The notion of commitment in working life - the word itself ‘terrorises’ the teenager - signifies the acceptance of the idea of death, a concept capable of enlightening the multiplication of experiences, attempts and mistakes in the individual: so many unconscious strategies to delay this passage into adulthood.

This manipulation also satisfies the three primary needs of adolescents: to distinguish themselves from their parents, to test themselves to regain control of their body impelled by the reality of puberty, which is lived as an active principle, or a sort of alien; and last but not least, to make ‘one’ with the peer group by finding new identifications and affiliations after thinking, rightly or wrongly, to have exhausted those of their parents.

‘Im Anfang war die Tat’(in the beginning was the act). It is not surprising that Freud used this quote from Goethe's Faust to enlighten psychic processes.

In my opinion, the act accomplished by the terrorist, jihadist or otherwise, focuses on a ‘need for punishment’, a claim that something is finally happening for real: an act to allow the criminal to give substance to his unconscious feeling of guilt and the inherent drive to find his own demise. In many cases, the subject feels impelled to act to escape his anxiety and unconscious fantasies 11 .

So, what is the difference? We decide on an action, but we solely meet with the act: the action would match the rational, meticulous, material preparation of the project. On the other hand, the act corresponds to the unconscious dimension of what is sought by the subject. This is for two reasons: first, a specific characteristic of the act lies in its potential capacity to introduce unpredictable adventure to any situation. Secondly, its potential power to transcend the subject beyond what his project (action) consisted of. The act is the interactive meeting of the subject and an off-topic reality, lived as potentially dangerous because not completely mastered. The act would be, in my opinion, what the sexual drive looks forward to encountering.

What is sought-after in the act beyond action? Maybe they are these ‘weak signals’ that French counter-terrorism specialists speak of: the significance of the act and no longer the hardly hidden preparation of the action, the terrorist project.

Freud already expounded the idea in 1923: an increase in the feeling of unconscious guilt can make a human become a criminal who finds the ‘relief of being able to connect this feeling of unconscious guilt to something real and current’ 12 .

Let us illustrate this using a snippet from our clinic, a statement about this feeling of guilt which ‘exists before the act and which is therefore not the consequence but the motive’. How can we interpret for example - and the example is the thing itself (‘Das Beispiel ist die Sache selbst ’) according to Hegel- the words of a young man during a session whose Muslim confession is not accompanied by any signs of intolerance, even less of extremism: ‘I would like to leave a historical trace in my family...I want them to remember me as someone who has always fought for success’. Do we not detect the morbidity of a guilty subject, a melancholic indictment of self? The gravity of a psychic debt vis-à-vis ‘a poor father born in the Moroccan Atlas’ that would only be corrected by a great feat: social success...or death.

-3- The need to use the Freudian concept of the sexual drive.

It is, I think, under the influence of his feeling of guilt, that the terrorist builds a more complete justification of his act. It is the latent feeling of guilt that forces the subject to overcompensate his real state, to mask his dormant guilt by a system of more or less solid representations, which, in the final analysis, equates to a growing destruction of the intended personality according to Etienne de Greeff 13 . The terrorist apprentices drown their guilt in an impulse release, what we call ‘instinctual unbinding’.

The candidate for jihad is precisely that, a candidate, because of his ‘deconstructed psyche’ (to use the vocabulary of the specialist of the DGSI previously quoted) but a disordered deconstruction, an erratic one, that entirely escapes the subject’s control.

I support the assumption that the offer of jihadism allows the individual whose psychic structure has disintegrated–instinctual chaos - to find in commitment to radical Islam, including the extreme commitments leading to death, a means - illusory for us but full of meaning for the individual - to stop, to weld shut the sexual drive of death: ‘the auto-aggressive or hetero-aggressive tendency that aims to destroy all life, disorganize everything together, either at the social level, or at the level of the existence of the individual organism’ 14 .

This is an unbridled drive, ‘the endless quest does not know pacification’ 15 . A psychic barrier for the criminal but, in reality, a spiralling effect whose outcome, at the lowest level of the libidinal economy, can only mean the absence of all life. From self-punishment, the subject moves onto self-destruction: this destruction becomes a necessity for the offender because of its psychological significance.

Sporadic or episodic destruction is an essential condition for maintaining a balance between feelings of well-being and contact with reality: ‘The criminal defends himself against a painful unconscious conflict by acting outside of this conflict, often by a heroic identification’ 16 .

The outside world must be held responsible. The Islamist terrorist must blame the latter for the injustice of all sorts of misdeeds (heresy) in order to find a justification for his act , but in the end, he projects his own torment onto this external world. Many authors agree that, behind criticisms against society, a ‘serious investigation into the psyche of the criminal’ always reveals ‘pre-Oedipal’ problems 17 .

One of the most interesting mechanisms of crime is indeed ‘the projection of the fault through which the individual - as in paranoia - has the conviction that the outside world has wronged them’ 18 : which allows him to believe that he is acting out of self-defence. He is even entering into acts of ‘resistance’: a term which is today, and for many historical reasons, largely ennobled.

Thus, ‘the victim is, in his eyes, the culprit and he, the culprit, becomes a victim’ 19 . And what he seeks to punish is none other than his own suffering: seeking to conquer death and to die to stay alive. In this sense, ‘the punishment of others turns into a self-punishment’ and the pathological guilt becomes an ‘all-powerful means of mental repair which can go as far as destruction for self-punishment’ 20 .

-4- Asking the question: what should be understood by successful de-radicalization?

There is a lot of talk of de-radicalization attempts today. I have, for my part, issued ab initio reservations on these attempts, taken up in various places: besides the fact that they aim to calm some societal or even political guilt, they seem to be doomed to failure if they do not go beyond what has been ‘deconstructed’. That is to say, if the work does not go back to the deeper motives that led the person to be receptive, apparently in search of salvation, to the ‘jihadist reconstruction’.

In this sense, the so-called work of de-radicalization makes the mistake of proposing a kind of solution by striving to bring the individual back to the status quo ante, a state before radicalization. Certainly, clinicians disagree about whether it is possible to conduct therapy with criminals: for some, the cure behind bars should be avoided because it ‘would subsume the therapist in the massive negative transference that is reserved for all staff’ 21 regardless of the method used. Others, however, have demonstrated fruitful work in this matter 22 .

From this perspective, the radicalisation or the terrorist commitment must be considered as a symptom: it is, therefore, advisable to not be deceived or misled by the latter without ignoring the significant content of the message and the intended recipient. Hence our doubts about attempts at ‘de-radicalisation’ based on a purely cognitive approach, in other words, a rational and head-on approach; attempts which strive to affect individuals by volition only and in their reality itself, the Ego of those concerned. And this, to convince them of the morbidity of committing to Jihad. How can one explain then that the capacities of understanding and reason given to this Ego were unable to just pre-emptively hinder the individual in his deadly approach?

The ‘overwhelming severity’ of a tyrannical superego - and not its absence, as Melanie Klein subtly showed in her clinic with children - would be more at stake in ‘the necessary basis for the development of criminal conduct’ 23 .

Our clinical work illustrates this in everyday life: it is useless to tell an anorexic that she is dangerously too thin when she is genuinely convinced that she is overweight, just as it is illusory to tell a drug addict a benevolent speech about the misdeeds of psycho-active substances for his health when he cruelly feels any lack of them. Or even to try to demonstrate to someone with a phobia of planes that this means of transport, with statistics to support your claim, remains very safe and therefore the anxiety felt unfounded.

There is a reversal of values when we move from self-preservation to the sexual drive, as Jean Laplanche reminds us: ‘utilitarianism does not take the instinctual element in the delinquent into account’ 24 . It is necessary to look behind the symptom, to go back to the infantile psychic mechanisms whose failures could have provoked hatred, guilt, a need for punishment or expiation: all that relates to primary instincts and leads one to search for a ‘platform’ to give these failures a semblance of consistency, or if not of limit.

During a seminar, a student from the University of Nice asked me: ‘why didn’t you insist on manipulation mechanisms by Jihadist groups?’ My answer surprised him: ‘do you think that the manipulation that you speak of would have been possible without the human being having already been subverted by his own unconscious, making the ground suitable for this second phase?’

We are well aware of this phenomenon in psychoanalysis when we speak of ‘reconstruction’ 25 : what has been lost by the operation of repression cannot be retrieved in its identical nature.

In these circumstances, it seems to me that psychoanalysis is not the most appropriate method for de-radicalizing the Jihadists. This is a question, first of all, of time: analytic time certainly does not correspond to political and media time. Next, it is a matter of finality: the founders themselves of psychoanalysis had to recognize the hollowness of their claim to educational prophylaxis 26 . It is beforehand that it seems appropriate, I believe, to seek the causes of such conversions of belief systems. Here I will also add the question of principle: the ills of our patients reflect those of our society. If we become institutionalized substitutes for societal failures, we will undermine the analytical capacities of our imperatively decentred capacity to understand and listen.

I would prefer to put forward two other perspectives: if there were to be a cure, it should be, as Jacques Lacan pointed out in 1951, ‘only an integration by the subject of his true responsibility’ 27 . One could even suggest that it is sometimes more human, with the punishment, to allow the subject to find this responsibility himself.

Would it not be better to underline this tendency towards identity communitarianism –be it religious, sexual, cultural, culinary... - not to mention the ‘ghettoization’ as a stringent impermeability compartmentalising groups, allowing the contemporary subject to be unburdened, to dilute, within a human mass, an individuality which has become a burden too heavy to bear 28 .

Another criticism targets the fact that criminology, by decriminalising sanctions, tends to confuse the humanisation of the treatment of the culprit with the psychic effect sought by the accomplishment of the punishment: a paradox regarding responsibility described here again by Lacan with an almost prophetic acuteness: ‘in the case that the man makes himself known by his peers for the acts for which he assumes the responsibility’ 29 .

The question of responsibility, as we can see half a century after the Lacanian formula, lies at the heart of the analytical problem of terrorism. Would it not be the same psychic essence even, for the terrorist, to seek this responsibility, this ultimate recognition of his instinctual chaos? Is it not permissible to ask oneself: ‘if by denying his own responsibility, does one not also end up annulling the impact of his act and denying it any meaning?’ 30 .

In this sense, some will believe that Jihadists have surreptitiously reintroduced the death penalty for themselves. I would rather think that terrorists do not accept others imposing it on them as a sanction, that they wish to claim ownership of it through self-punishment. For them, this functions in a closed circuit: they can decide the real method by which they will die, but what matters most is, without a doubt, the psychic and unconscious mechanisms that sign their own death sentence. As we recently pointed out 31 , the civilization of the performance cannot know anything more about the expiatory meaning of the punishment 32 .

Conclusion

As mentioned in my introduction, I believe the above opens the following three avenues for further discussion:

1• The scopophilic perspective of the terrorist act also continues to pose a challenge. To see, must one kill? Does killing make an absence disappear or get rid of a lack? We must question the meaning of the Jihadist selfies taken at his future crime scenes, a practice that cannot be reduced to mere preparatory features of his act. We must question all the riskier sightings in times of surveillance and telephone communication controls. Should we detect in these examples of the terrorist’s camerawork the reinstatement of a failure, an issue of identity ‘containment’? 33 What role, moreover, does the recording of a video of allegiance play, as if the letter as a mode of communication now suffers from a deficit of credibility? Is it not appropriate to relate this phenomenon to the weakening of language and the depreciation of writing? The word is no longer the murder of the thing, contrary to the famous assertion of Freud. Finally, how can we not discuss the message of information in this ‘violence of seeing’ that seems to replace the traditional role of the journalist illuminating the plain facts from a demanding perspective? Showing is equivalent in psychoanalysis, in the sense of the primary processes of reversal in its opposite, to that of dissimulating: ‘it is necessary to have a punishment even if it does not reach the culprit’ 34 .

2• Collective expiation: Attitudes after the attacks indicate the emergence of a form of fragility tinged with guilt, a depression-like compassion with a melancholy tendency: less for the survivor than that related to the inability to psychically assimilate all this horror. It is far from being a paradox for anyone who knows the capacity of the psyche to surreptitiously change faces and to endorse, in a mechanism of collective expiation, a part of the other’s crimes. One of our patients, Niçoise by birth, explained to us that ‘I could not accept what happened. For a week, it was as if these events had happened far away from me. I did not lose any of my relatives, nor any of my friends, but it sent me too violently back to my inner chaos’. Having overseen the psychological support of the Lufthansa teams at the Nice Côte d'Azur airport after the crash of the Germanwings in 2015, I can testify to the fact that a murderous public tragedy, with no apparent personal link, still reactivates intense personal problems.

From the same perspective: ‘to mourn’. We see the bereaved relatives of a victim awaiting a trial, so the murderer can reveal the motives of his act. But how could this criminal furnish them with a revelatory meaning of which he himself is ignorant? Mourning is the recognition of the unconscious, anachronistic and timeless vows of death that we use to feed the memory of the loved ones we have lost. This is what relatives want to be exonerated from and that no confession can bring to them.

3 • Here I will dare to explore a speculation that came to me after a tough discussion with an Iranian colleague. According to him, a Fundamentalist, Muslim fundamentalism (this means a very radical reading of the Coran) should be assimilated to the Unconscious, to the Id. The Muslims of today and moderate approaches to Coran interpretation are then, and as Freud explained in ‘The Ego and the Id’, this part of the Id which in contact with the external reality, which detaches itself to form the Ego. But one must consider, then, what Freud did say about Ego throughout his work, and it is not very encouraging! As a reminder, in the ‘Five Lectures on psychoanalysis’, Freud likens the Ego to the circus clown who thinks he is the director. In ‘The Ego and the Id’, he writes that the Ego behaves like a rider who claims to tame his horse while the latter finally leads them to where it desires to go. And, last but not least, in the XXXIst Lecture named ‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality’, Freud describes the ‘poor’ and ‘weak’ Ego as surrounded, even torn between three masters, the Id, the Superego and the external reality. So, the intellectual construction of my Iranian counterpart becomes clear: just like the "Ego", overworked, crossed, manipulated - even if this word now connotes many other meanings - by the unconscious impulses, is it not possible, without being automatically condemned, to question the instinctual and archaic forces that can act, without being recognized as such, within the so-called contemporary and moderate Islam?

Lecture at the Psychiatrists & Psychoanalysts Association1

Baku, Azerbaijan, 13 May 2018

By Jean-Luc Vannier

Psychoanalyst

Assistant Pr. at Nice Côte d’Azur University, at Edhec and Ipag PG Business School (Nice & Paris)

France.

Notes

2 Alain Hesnard et René Laforgue, « Les Processus d’Autopunition en Psychologie des Névroses et des Psychoses, en Psychologie criminelle et en Pathologie générale » . Rapport présenté à la Vème Réunion des Psychanalystes de langue française, Revue Française de Psychanalyse, Tome IV, n°1, 1930-1931, p. 78.

3 Courrier International, n° 658, Juin 2003.

4 Sigmund Freud, Manuscrit K, Lettres à Wilhelm Fliess , 1887-1904, PUF, 2007, pp. 210-211.

5 Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Entre le rêve et la douleur , Tel Gallimard, 2004, p. 242.

6 Claude Balier, Psychanalyse des comportements sexuels violents , PUF, Coll. « Le fil rouge », 2008, p.29.

7 Serge Lebovici, Pierre Mâle, Francis Pasche Psychanalyse et criminologie, Rapport Clinique, Revue Française de Psychanalyse, Tome XV, n°1, janvier - mars 1951, p. 53.

8 Etienne de Greeff, Les instincts de défense et de sympathie , PUF, Coll. « Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine », 1947, p. 9

9 Sigmund Freud, « Psychologie des masses et analyse du moi », Œuvres complètes , XVI, 1921-1923, PUF, 2003, p. 18.

10 Jean Laplanche, Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse , PUF, « Quadrige », 2ème édition, 2008, p. 103.

11Gérard Mendel, L’acte est une aventure, Du sujet métaphysique au sujet de l’acte pouvoir , Editions La Découverte, Coll. « Textes à l’appui », 1998, p. 397.

12 Sigmund Freud, « Le moi et le ça » , Œuvres complètes , XVI, 1921-1923, PUF, 2003, p. 295.

13 Etienne de Greeff, op. cit . , p. 214.

14 Jean Laplanche, Le primat de l’autre en psychanalyse , Champs Flammarion, 1997, p. 66.

15 Jean Laplanche, Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse , Coll. « Quadrige », PUF, 2008, p. 125.

16 Daniel Lagache, Psychanalyse et criminologie, Rapport clinique, Revue Française de Psychanalyse , Tome XV, n°1, janvier - mars 1951, p. 123.

17« Beaucoup de réactions criminelles, en effet, sont en rapport avec une perte de confiance dans les autorités à l’occasion de quelque injustice infime à laquelle l’individu a réagi par une attitude systématique et disproportionnée de haine progressive envers toute la société. Mais lorsqu’on pousse l’analyse jusqu’aux mobiles profonds et permanents de l’acte, on remonte régulièrement jusqu’aux conflits dérivés des tendances oedipiennes », Angelo Hesnard et René Laforgue, op. cit ., p. 73. Et plus de quarante ans après cette assertion: « Cela dit, quand même, quand on étudie bien à fond les choses, on retrouve très souvent dans les antécédents quelque chose de l’ordre d’une liaison amicale ou amoureuse, ou encore une relation avec un parent…Cette relation a compté énormément sur le plan affectif…et s’est effondrée brutalement sans raison… », Henri Grivois, Urgence folie , Synthélabo, Paris, 1993, p. 16,cité par Jean-Claude Maleval, op. cit . , p. 125.English translation : ‘Many criminal reactions, in fact, are related to a loss of confidence in the authorities in the event of some slight injustice to which the individual reacted with a systematic and disproportionate attitude of progressive hate towards the whole society. But when one takes the analysis further to the deep and permanent motives of the act, one regularly goes back to the conflicts derived from the Oedipian tendencies’, "Angelo Hesnard et René Laforgue, op. cit ., p. 73. And more than forty years after this assertion: ‘That being said, nevertheless, when one studies things thoroughly, one finds very often in the antecedent something in the order of a friendship or love affair, or a relation with a parent... This relationship counted enormously emotionally... and collapsed brutally for no reason’. Enri Grivois, Urgence folie , Synthélabo, Paris, 1993, p. 16,quoted by Jean-Claude Maleval, op. cit ., p. 125.

18 Angelo Hesnard et René Laforgue, op. cit ., p. 74.

19Ibid.

20 Guy Rosolato, op. cit ., p.38.

21 Serge Lebovici, Pierre Mâle, Francis Pasche, op. cit . , p. 57.

22 Gérard Bonnet, Psychanalyse d’un meurtrier, Le remords , Payot, Coll. « Désir », 2014.

23 Mélanie Klein, La psychanalyse des enfants , PUF, Coll. « Bibliothèque de psychanalyse », 1993, pp. 24, 153 et 157.

24Jean Laplanche, « Réparation et rétributions pénales », La révolution copernicienne inachevée, 1967-1992 , PUF, Coll. « Quadrige », 2008, p. 176.

25 Sigmund Freud, « Constructions dans l’analyse », Œuvres Complètes , XX, 1937-1939, PUF, 2014, p. 62.

26 Anna Freud, Le normal et le pathologique chez l’enfant, Coll. « Connaissance de l’inconscient », NRF Gallimard, 1968, p. 2 ; Sigmund Freud, « Nouvelles conférences d’introduction à la psychanalyse », Œuvres Complètes , XIX, 1931-1936, PUF, 1995, p. 196.

27 Jacques Lacan, op. cit . , p. 86.

28The philosopher Hannah Arendt and the socio-psychoanalyst Gerard Mendel have indicated this phenomenon to a great extent in their works.

29 Jacques Lacan, op. cit . , p. 85.

30 Gérard Bonnet, op. cit. , p. 17.

31 Jean-Luc Vannier, « Le Livre de la jungle 2016 : un Mowgli infantile et asexué ? », Qu’est-ce que penser ? Psychiatrie Française, Vol. XXXXVII, 2/16, février 2017, pp. 167-172

32 Jacques Lacan, op. cit. , p. 18.

33 Serge Tisseron, Psychanalyse de l’image , Pluriel, 2010, pp. 255 et 258.

34 Sigmund Freud, « Le moi et le ça », Œuvres Complètes, 1921-1923, PUF, 2003, p. 288.

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