Psychoanalytic Thoughts on 9/11

Hans-Jürgen Wirth

Abstract

This article explores the human potential for destructiveness. To what extent destructive fantasies are acted out or remain within the realm of fantasy depends on many complexly interlinked conditions, such as malignant narcissism, delusions of grandeur, feelings of powerlessness, individual and collective traumatizations, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and paranoid worldviews. Terrorists can only put their superegos out of action by dehumanising their opponents and equating them with absolute evil. Not every person who has a “profound belief” or has embraced a "philosophical or scientific conviction" must immediately be classified as a fanatic. By deadening his empathy, the fanatic has above all rid himself of his own feelings, which he fears as the most threatening of all perils. Misogyny, in particular, fear of the emancipated, self-confident, sexually active woman is a widespread phenomenon in the Islamic world, and represent the fear of love, sexuality, and emotional fusion. This is accompanied by the fear of death and decay, manifested in violent needs to obliterate sexuality and inflict death on others in acts of violent, grandiose, vindictive cleansing. Wirth discusses thoughts on the psychic structure of suicide-attackers and works out some differences and some common aspects between the suicide-murderers of 9/11, the Palestinian suicide-bombers and the personality type of the “military male.” With the help of documents and interviews of suicide-murderers Wirth points out the “Syndrome of Fanaticism“, and describes the psychic role that misogyny, collective traumatization, narcissism, and the “duo of terror and purity” plays in the psyche of the terrorists.

Then Wirth asks how to understand the psychological reactions of the American people to the attacks and how the Iraq war is related to the trauma of 9/11. The destruction of the World Trade Center represents a collective traumatization of the American nation, which has left the Americans’ collective sense of identity and their group narcissism profoundly shaken. And finally the author discusses the psychological meaning of 9/11 for the entire world.

The Syndrome of Fanaticism

Terrorists, in particular suicide murderers, are fanatics. In following Erich Fromm I want to emphasize the fanatic’s “passion” and “rashness,” on the basis of which he “uncompromisingly” and “rigidly” defends his “overrated idea” (Hole 1995, p 37). Erich Fromm (1961) particularly stresses that not every person who has a “profound belief” or has embraced a “philosophical or scientific conviction” must immediately be classified as a fanatic. In fact, the fanatic could be identified “more easily by certain personality traits than by the contents of his convictions” (p 61). The fanatic, he states, has killed off all feelings for other people and projected them to the party or group whose ideology seems reasonable to him. He idolizes the collective and its shared ideology, to whom he has become enslaved. His complete submission under this idol creates a passion within him, whose emotional quality Fromm characterizes as “cold fire,” and “burning ice,” as “passion lacking warmth” (ibid.). The fanatic acts, thinks and feels on behalf of his idol” (ibid.), and is prepared to sacrifice for it everything he still holds dear in life. For example, the Palestinian Nizzar Iyan confessed in an interview with a German journalist (cf. Schirra 2001), that he found his greatest fulfillment in his sons’ sacrifice as suicide murderers in the fight against Israel. When his 17-year-old son Ibrahim actually lost his life in a suicide bombing, his father said: ”My son Ibrahim is dead. I never felt happier than at the moment, when they came and said: The Jews killed your son.” And when the interviewer asked, “But you, after all, are his father, you must feel pain,” the father replied, unmoved, “I am quite honest, I am saying this out of conviction, I do not feel grief, I feel joy, true joy, that my son has accomplished a part of what we believed in. Life has no savor when one cannot accomplish one’s dreams and one’s goals” (p 16).

Typical fanatics “place ideas above people; their dedication to ideas is abnormally powerful, while their dedication to people is strangely blocked or defective” (Hole 1995, p 93). The fanatic lacks “the capacity for empathy,” for “understanding,” for “sympathy,” which “on principle is based on a capacity for love, for openness, for letting other people come close” (p 94). Theoretically speaking, the fanatic is a highly narcissistic personality” (Fromm 1961, p 61).

On the day of the attacks on the World Trade Center, terrorist pilot Muhamed Atta’s luggage, which had not been transferred on time, was found at Boston Airport (cf. Der Spiegel 40/2001, pp 32-33). Among other things, it contained the suicide pilot’s last will, a psychologically informative document revealing Atta’s inner world. Among the eighteen items in his last will, three alone dealt with his fear of the impurity of women:

“Neither pregnant women nor unclean persons shall say good-bye to me—I disapprove of that.”

“Women shall not apologize for my death….”

“Women shall neither be present during the burial nor come to my grave on any occasion thereafter.” (ibid.).

Misogyny, in particular, fear of the emancipated, self-confident, sexually active woman—is not merely an individual characteristic of Atta’s, but a widespread phenomenon in the Islamic world. Within the traditionally patriarchal culture of Islam, the narcissism of Islamic males was enormously inflated by the elevation of males and devaluation of females. Western influence and its egalitarian orientation causes many male Muslims to feel injured in their self-esteem, and to seek reassurance in Islamic fundamentalism, which promises them an ego-boost by elevating them above women and debasing females, as demonstrated by the Taliban system with graphic clarity.

Fear of fusion with a woman and “the development of an armor against women” have been described by Klaus Theweleit (1977, 1978) – a German psychohistorian – with respect to the personality type of the “military male.” His psychoanalytic-psychohistorical analysis points out the psychological role played by military battle in relation to the self and the body: on the one hand military drill promotes the creation of a “body made of steel,” a “body machine,” an Ernst Jünger type of “man of steel” [in German: “Stahlgestalt”] (Theweleit 1978, p 185), but on the other hand, the “military male” longs for the moment when the body armor is blown open and the rigid body-I … disappears” (p 208).

Atta’s last will shows agreement with the type of the military man described by Theweleit: The National Socialists’ cult of purity, who fought for the “purity of the Aryan race,” and the “purity of the blood,” has its match in the ideal of purity among the Islamic fundamentalists. Item nine of Atta’s last will states:

“9. The person washing my body around my genitals should wear gloves, so that I might not be touched there” (Der Spiegel 40/2001, p 32).

And the guide for suicide pilots “in the evening, before you commit your act” (Der Spiegel, 40/2001), also found in Atta’s luggage, reads:

“You must recite that you are dying for God. Shave all superfluous hair from your body, perfume your body, and wash your body. (...) Cleanse your heart from all bad feelings you might have, and forget everything related to your worldly existence.” (p 38)

The fear of death, the fear of the monstrousness of the intended crime, is projected onto the fear of one’s own body, and there is exorcised by such rituals. Along with cleansing of the body, the “heart is also to be cleansed of all bad feelings,” such as feelings of love, pity, sympathy, guilt, fear of death, and shame.

The French psychoanalyst Bela Grunberger (1984) describes purity as a narcissistic ideal seeking to attain a state of perfection through denial of physical instincts, indeed, through the elimination of corporality itself. Grunberger defines purity as an “absolute … narcissistic ideal … from which the instinctual dimension has been completely eliminated” (p 114). Purity is “devoid of instincts,” unemotional (p 116). In holding up purity as his ideal, the fanatic removes himself from the real world, which always includes the dirt and excrements as a component of life. In order to realize his ideal of purity, a projection of the “anality, which is not integrated with the self” onto the external enemies takes place (Grunberger & Dessuant, 1997, p 272). In wars, especially those designated as “holy wars”, the utterly unclean, the evil, the unbelievers, must be exterminated and banned from the world in the name of a “narcissism of purity” (ibid.). The “duo of terror and purity” (Grunberger, 1984, p 119) is found equally with Robespierre as with the Christians of the crusades, in Hitler’s race doctrine and Anti-Semitism, and finally also with the Islamistic fanatics.

How to become a terrorist?

People whose entire lives are full of violence and hatred tend towards the assumption that the entire world is structured according to the victim-oppressor model and that it is therefore better to be an oppressor than a victim. As is known from the biographies of violent criminals, they have often themselves been the victims of physical mistreatment and sexual abuse during their childhood and youth. We know a few things about the suicide murderers among the Palestinians. In particular, the young people who volunteer for suicide attacks have been subjected to constant traumatization from childhood. Throughout their lives they experienced extreme forms of violence, powerlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness. This has desensitized them. However wretched, miserable and bleak their own lives might be, an absolute identification with the ideals of the group compensates the individuals for their disgrace. They receive a group identity that revolves around fanaticism as its central element. “Group narcissism” – as Fromm pointed out (1964, pp 199-223) provides an important prop for an individual’s feeling of self-worth.

Some of today’s Islamic terrorists and Al-Qaeda fighters may have been traumatized in refugee camps, recruited there by the various secret services, and raised and educated in special Koran schools and training camps. In the solitude of such camps, the community functions as a family substitute, and their fanatical leaders as substitute parent figures, so that children and adolescents develop an intense emotional and intellectual dependency. These child soldiers are inoculated with a diminished form of Islam and programmed for their mission. During the recruiting process future suicide murderers are systematically exposed to extreme psychological and physical stresses such as brainwashing, torture, and “artificial” traumatization methods. Thus the Palestinian Eyad Saradsh, who runs a psychiatric center in Gaza, reported that the candidates “had to sit in a room silent and completely isolated for days, or spend 48 hours underground, inside a grave next to a corpse” (cit. after Luczak, 2001, p 89). Such extreme stress leads to renewed traumatization. And this leads to unreserved identification with the group, its leader, and the group’s ideology. The result is a holy warrior, who can find everything that is “good” exclusively in the ideology of the sect, and who has projected everything “bad” and hateful onto the enemy.

This dynamic in particular applies to people living in refugee camps under miserable conditions for several generations, who are traumatized by the everyday presence of violent behavior. However, the New York terrorists were no Palestinians, but well-educated students, and Osama bin Laden hails from Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

As Kernberg (2002) stresses, traumatization not only results from violence felt by one’s own body, but also, from violent acts one has witnessed. If someone is forced to watch helplessly and passively, while a person dear to him suffers violence, injustice, and humiliation, this too may be experienced as a trauma. Such processes have been going on in the Near East for decades. Through their collective identity, the Arabs and Muslims feel close to the suffering of the Palestinian people. They sympathize (that means originally: to suffer with) with the Palestinians, and have developed a collective hatred of Israel and the United States, and in part also of the Western World as a whole. Because of their strong collective identity, many Muslims feel “traumatized —even if they come from a middle-class environment, as did Muhamed Atta” (Luczak, 2001, p 86). Some individuals may feel a particular duty to support the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel and its powerful protector, precisely due to their privileged position. It is even conceivable that a terrorist career, in an exceptional case, may start with genuine human feelings of responsibility and solidarity, which only develop into fanatical hatred over a course of years. Even the German terrorists of the RAF, who launched terrorist attacks on symbolic representatives of the government and the capitalist economic system during the 1970s, were people motivated by high moral principles, involved in various social projects before their violent activities. As the German family-therapist Helm Stierlin (1978) says, these German terrorists were “unconscious delegates” of their parents. In a certain sense they did not act voluntarily, but unconsciously, on their parents’ behalf, caught up in a trans-generational conflict.

The Islamic terrorists joining the holy war are often caught up in a similar generational context: The privileged Arabic families on the one hand live with an almost unimaginable oil prosperity and enjoy the luxury of Western society, yet, on the other hand, support hatred against the West and solidarity with the Palestinian people. This double standard presents a difficult conflict in the clash between the generations, which is resolved in that the sons of economically privileged families, sometimes at the conscious, and sometimes the unconscious, bidding of their parents, will join the holy war of which their fathers only speak and dream. Indeed, after September 11, much information has come out about terror groups being financially supported by numerous Islamic businessmen who successfully pursue their business in Europe and the United States and salve their Islamic consciences through such donations.

September 11 as a Collective Trauma

In addition to the psychology of the terrorists, the psychological condition of the Americans exposed to collective traumatization on September 11 is of far-reaching significance for world politics. A trauma is an experience of such intensity as to overwhelm the mind’s capability for dealing with it. The trauma is accompanied by feelings of extreme fear, frequently, the fear of death, terror, powerlessness, and total hopelessness. This leads to a collapse of central functions of the self, and a fundamental shock to the entire personality. If this happens to a large group of people simultaneously, it is called “collective trauma.” The destruction of the World Trade Center represents a collective traumatization of the American nation, which has left the Americans’ collective sense of identity and their group narcissism profoundly shaken. This not only applies to people who lost relatives and friends but to the collective as a whole.

As a result of the terrorist attack the United States as the only world power was confronted with the experience of vulnerability, the finality of life, and helplessness in the face of “evil.” What did not agree with the conception of the world and self-image of America at all, became a terrifying, yet irrefutable reality: Even the super-power of America may be harmed. Neither the Secret Services nor the atomic weapons could protect America from this attack—to say nothing of the nuclear shield.

The catastrophe caused a wave of mourning, sympathy, and readiness to help. The question still remains whether the Americans will be able to successfully work through the suffered trauma. In the last chapter of my book »Narcissism and Power« (Wirth 2002, pp 381 f.) written in December 2001, I made a prediction and unfortunately this prediction came true. I stated: “Should the Americans not succeed in collectively dealing on a psychological level with the trauma they have suffered, they risk developing a post-traumatic stress syndrome, which could manifest itself through constant reliving of the traumatic event, as a mental fixation on the trauma, as uncontrolled panic attacks, and as equally violent and abrupt outbursts of aggression against others. American society might be tempted to ward off the collective trauma by fixating on the trauma and making it the central reference point of its national identity. As a “selected trauma” - as Vamik Volkan calls it - it would be constantly present, and would provide steady justification for the country’s own paranoid aggressive attitudes. America would endlessly have to prove its military superiority by defining enemies, pursuing, and annihilating them. Their function would be to compensate for the narcissistic injuries to the feeling of self-worth and to compensate the humiliations by revenge.”

George Bush: on a mission from God

Before 9/11, Bush seemed to be a weak president. His democratic legitimization was on shaky grounds. It was not quite clear whether he would be able to step out of his father’s shadow. American newspapers printed countless jokes about Bush’s visible flaws. These jokes included bashes on his incompetence to improvise when addressing the public, his awkwardness, and his lack of worldly experience. This changed drastically after 9/11. 9/11 gave his dull presidency a higher meaning. When Bush made the decision to go to war, he was finally taken seriously. Bush took his private need to be taken seriously to formulate a maxim for his policy: the world should take America seriously again. In Bush’s eyes, Clinton had been a weak leader who was responsible for the reason why the world was laughing at America. Bush said in an interview: “I think that people had the idea of an impotent America – a weak, you know, technologically efficient, but not an especially strong country. In the world there is the idea that America has no values and that we will not defend ourselves if we are attacked” (Woodward 2003).

Bush wanted to replace the weak-willed image of America with the image of a powerful and forceful America. He was always determined to take over the role as a rescuer of America’s honor and saw the chance of a lifetime to be known in history as a significant president. 9/11 became the »chosen trauma« and was the most important issue in the world. There were no thoughts other than of revenge and retaliation. The passively suffered trauma should be defended in order to make others the victim of a trauma. If this concept influences America’s political and military decisions, America will not really win back its sovereignty, but will be caught up in a narcissistic collusion with its enemy. Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq was unconsciously influenced by his collusive partner Osama bin Laden. The unconscious dynamics of the relationship between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden follows the pattern of a narcissistic collusion. The Americans, who are armed to the teeth with weapons, are confronted with a fast, treacherous and invisible enemy who operates in dishonest ways from secret hideouts. The terrorists’ intention is to provoke the Americans with terrorist attacks, threats and alarming videotapes to cause a military overreaction. They want to involve America in a war, wherever and however possible. The Americans decided to go to war against Iraq even though nearly all nations and all people were against it. The Americans did not listen to the advice of their friends and allies, and they did not obey the United Nations because they were only interested in their narcissistic revenge. They fell into the »relationship-trap« and therefore did exactly what the terrorists wanted them to do.

The war in Afghanistan destroyed the Taliban regime and forced many of the Al Qaeda fighters out of their hideouts. The triumph of this victory didn’t give the Americans enough peace of mind, since the U.S. military was unable to capture their leader, Osama bin Laden »neither dead nor alive«. The narcissistic wounds were not healed at all through this military action. Therefore, Bush looked for another enemy, who he thought he would be able to catch, and immediately thought of Saddam Hussein. His name was already brought up on the evening of September 11. Saddam Hussein at least seemed to be easily located and perfectly fit the role of the bad guy. Therefore, Saddam Hussein’s regime had to suffer. The displacement from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein allowed Bush to get even with Hussein for trying to murder his father several years before. Bush is convinced that his presidency is part of God’s plan. His belief in God’s divinity gives him certainty and devotion.»We do not know the ways of certainty, but we can trust in it«, said Bush when he addressed the nation. Bush, who is known for getting up early every day, reads his prayer book every morning, and then his first official act is to be informed of terrorist threats by the Secret Service. The beloved God and the evil terrorists are his source of inspiration. His simple devoutness is not only a private quirk but also part of his political stance. It is a ritual in the White House to open cabinet meetings with a prayer. The closer the Iraq war came, the more forceful his rhetoric mentioning of god became. Bush acts »On a mission from God«, as the German magazine Der Spiegel wrote on its cover. His black and white thinking is one of a fanatic teetotaler. The splitting of good and evil gives him power and shape. Bush has the personal characteristics which characterize many dry alcoholics: self-discipline, a strict diet, being active in sports, an imperturbable belief in God and the strict division of the world into good and evil. Bush speaks openly about his earlier tendency to drink alcohol and to party excessively, which he has now overcome: “You know that I had an alcohol problem. If everything had continued in this way, I would be sitting in a bar in Texas now instead of the Oval Office. There is only one reason, why I am here in the Oval Office and not in a bar: I found God.” On his fortieth birthday he had his first rebirth and swore never to drink alcohol and party again. The defense mechanism of splitting into the absolute opposite of good and evil, of addiction and self-discipline, of god and terrorism, of »the coalition of the willing« and the »axis of evil« distinguish his views of the world. Bush stated: “This will be a monumental fight between the good and the evil. But the good will come out on top” (Woodward 2003, p 61). Not only the terrorists but the American government as well has fallen into fanaticism, which is characterized by a narcissistic self-concept, as if Bush were to say: America is something very special, unusual, one of a kind. It is God’s own country. America is equipped with immeasurable power. That is the only thing that matters. The world should not love us, but admire us or, even better, fear us. America will not be vulnerable anymore and not show any weaknesses. It only trusts its own power. America is suspicious and even looks at its friends and closest allies condescendingly or even with disdain. Who is not on our side is against us. If they do not support us, we will buy them. If they are not “for sale”, we will push them to the side as if they were irrelevant. America certainly doesn’t depend on anyone. America has everything under control and does not trust in anything and anyone except its own military and economical power. Bush has devoted himself to this idea, which is the only concept that he believes in. Early on it was important for Bush to not let other countries make up the conditions of the war. »It is possible«, he said, »that we will be the only ones left over. I have nothing against it. We are America« (Woodward 2003, p 98).

How should the trauma of 9/11 be dealt with?

Individual terrorists and terrorist groups may be tracked down militarily and wiped out. Yet, terrorism is primarily a “communicative strategy” whose aim is the “provocation of power” - as Waldmann says (1998, p 13). Terrorism is the weapon of the powerless. Terrorists are fanatics, who themselves are pursuing a communicative strategy to deal with the public, and in the case of September 11 used “the whole world as their sounding board” (p 4), while at the same time not allowing themselves to be influenced by communication.

In dealing with terrorists, it is above all necessary to avoid “traps of countertransference”, as Otto Kernberg pointed out for dealing with borderline-patients. One must neither be carried away into reacting vengefully, nor be misled into under-estimating the terrorists’ viciousness. One must on no account allow the terrorists to dictate the logic of one’s own actions by unconsciously taking on their paranoid worldview and becoming a player in their aggressive interactive pattern. In addition, victims of violence must beware of identifying with the aggressor. Should the Americans engage in such identification with the aggressor, they would adapt to the fanaticism of the terrorists and, to an extent, become fanatical haters themselves, fighting a battle against evil without regard for the consequences. It might even happen to the American government that it might identify with the terrorists in this way and retaliate on the same level and by the same methods. In that case, its military actions would not be guided by a military logic, but would occur for the sake of psychic stabilization. The objective military function of the military actions would be secondary to their psychological importance, that of making up for the narcissistic injury.

Which answer to terrorism America will choose depends on how Americans deal with the trauma they have suffered. George W. Bush accepted the news of the catastrophe with an expressionless face and did not show any irritation, quite in contrast to Bill Clinton, who, in a television interview directly after the attacks, seemed downright shaken. This total separation or suppression of spontaneous feelings is not exactly a sign of success in dealing with trauma; on the contrary: to overcome trauma it is necessary to live through the phase of depression and sadness. It must be admitted––it must not be repressed. The Americans must attempt to integrate the events. It will take a long grieving process, which will occupy America—but also the global public—for months, and probably years.

How patients in Germany reacted to 9/11

In the following section I will talk about some reactions of my patients in Germany. I believe I can tell from my patients’ reactions that the emotional distress was very deep, as it impressed and shocked most people, and undermined their sense of security to a greater extent than any other catastrophe of the last decades. Within the therapeutic setting it is rare for political events to take up so much room. When patients talk about current political events during the therapy session, they generally do so only if this event is very significant to them personally. It hardly ever happens that a certain political or social event becomes a topic during many therapies with different patients at the same time-period. This is due to the “stimulus shield” provided by the therapeutic situation, which prevents current external influences from reducing the patients’ concentration on their internal world.

I personally had found out about the events on 9/11 in a 10-minute break between two sessions. When the patient came in, I did not notice anything unusual about her and immediately assumed that she did not yet know about it. I wondered if I should tell her, but decided not to do so. In retrospect I would have felt better if I had told her and we might have talked about it. But at that point in time I still felt so overwhelmed by the event, and so incapable of intellectually categorizing its possible effects and emotionally processing them, that I preferred not to talk about it with the patient.

I shall briefly describe several other typical reactions I was able to observe with my patients:

One patient who had her therapy session in the evening of September 11 reported that she had immediately felt stomach pains on hearing the news.

The next day a patient said that he had “trembled all over his body” when he learned of the catastrophe.

Over the next few days, reactions turned even more varied. One patient initially needed to pull himself together in order to voice the opinion that the Americans were now “paying for their arrogant policies.” This was a masochist and aggression-inhibited patient, who generally has a very difficult time in voicing his aggressive feelings. Under the impact of the terror attacks, his usually repressed sadistic impulses were stimulated to such an extent that they were expressed through this opinion. In part he identified with the terrorists’ sadistic position.

A 51-year-old patient, who is an airplane pilot, appeared almost completely unaffected by the catastrophe. He minimized its significance and considered the worldwide reactions in the media “exaggerated”. The patient’s father committed suicide when the boy was ten years old. I think the patient became so threatened by the terror’s destructiveness, which reminded him of the destructiveness in his own life, that he had to play down the drama of the events. In addition, his professional activity as a pilot was the only area in his life in which he felt truly secure and competent, and which he subsequently sought to protect through narcissistic denial.

A 43-year-old patient spoke of America for an entire session. He remembered having admired and idealized the U.S. as a teenager. When years later he fulfilled his wish of hearing the “Stones” live in New York, he had quickly felt at home in Manhattan. He had developed – as he said – “a personal relationship” towards the two towers of the World Trade Center, and therefore had been “downright wounded” when he had to witness their destruction on the screen.

The psychological meaning of 9/11 for the entire world

With about half of my patients the events of September 11 came up as a topic in the therapy sessions. This is something I had never experienced, not even concerning Chernobyl, the Gulf War, or a change in government. The enormously broad spectrum of emotional reactions evident in these few patients shows that apparently for many people, the “view of the collapsing towers was an intrusion into their private world” (Sznaider 2001, p 25). Yet in spite of being highly affected emotionally, these people did not let themselves be compelled to react exclusively with moral indignation, but also allowed themselves to have spontaneous sensations not considered “politically correct.” The secret sympathy with the terrorists, which may be glimpsed in some of the statements, does - in my opinion - not involve any agreement with methods of terrorism, but rather the dim recognition – as the German psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter says - that the “secret power of the powerless, and the repressed power of the powerful are linked in an inscrutable mutual dependency” (Richter 2002, p 16). You surely know Arundhati Roy’s (2001) words about George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden resembling one another like twins, which hit the nail on the head exactly. Only by perceiving the “mutuality of the suffering both inflict on each other” (Roy 2001) would they be able to recognize their collusive inter-relationship—and dissolve it.

Natan Sznaider (2001) compares the social thematic focus on the terror attacks with the commemorative culture of the Holocaust. I quote Sznaider: “The Holocaust represents the breach of civilization in modern times, and the borderline between it and barbarism” (p 28). An equal function could also be claimed for the terror attacks. Both offer an opportunity for civilization: just as the greater part of humanity agrees in regarding the holocaust as a “breach of civilization,” a crime against humanity, the world public might also agree on choosing September 11 as a symbol that it is necessary to develop global ethics. Such ethics would commit all peoples, nations and states to develop a new culturally comprehensive concept of self in order to safeguard the future of all humanity. In practical terms, this would mean, for example, that the establishment of an International Court of Law should rapidly go forward.

At the moment it is the Americans, most of all, who must learn to understand how vulnerable they are. If America assumes that it is immortal, invulnerable, and independent of other nations, the U.S., the greatest economic and military power in the history of mankind, will be subject to a collective narcissistic delusion of grandiosity. In fact, even the mightiest power of the world depends on other nations and must adapt to communicating and working together with the losers on the margin of the world. Just as individuals have to accept their own mortality, the collective also faces the task of recognizing its finality and vulnerability to obtain a realistic worldview. Narcissistic injuries are hard to bear, hard to accept, but they always involve opportunities to learn something about ourselves and our relationship with the world. The terrible events of September 11 might lead America to the insight that it must relinquish its self-idolization. The enormous economic, military, political, and cultural power of America is in a dialectic relationship with powerlessness: the more progressive the scientific-technical development, the more grand the successes in subduing nature and man appear, the more complex—and therefore, also delicate and vulnerable—are also the social processes that go along with it. The increasing social complexity leads to an increase in power on the one hand, but on the other hand, to an ever-increasing inter-dependence of individuals and peoples.

Paul Klee’s painting “hero with one wing” symbolizes this dialectical relationship of omnipotence and impotence that characterizes the human condition. This – no doubt masculine – hero embodies the narcissistic “omnipotence-impotence complex”, as Richter says (1979). This figure is symbolic of a world destroying its own basis for living and completing its self-destruction in the illusion of its own grandiosity and power.

We are living in the historic phase of globalization, in which all parts of the world are connected. All over the world resistance is gathering within those parts of the world population who feel disadvantaged and oppressed. The terrorist acts have been generated from powerlessness, though associated with mighty sensations of triumph and grandiosity. All modern societies must admit that due to its complexity, our modern civilization is extremely vulnerable. The economically and militarily powerful societies therefore ought to develop a great interest in what goes on in the minds of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the oppressed. It behooves the powerful and privileged of the world to use the solidarity and sympathy shown toward America after the terror attacks from all parts of the globe as a chance to demonstrate that they are truly interested in a fairer world. September 11 could give the impetus for supplementing the globalization of world markets with a globalization of ethics and human sympathy.

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