Homeland Insecurity: The psychological origins of America's Terrorism fantasy - Part One.

In this series of posts, I will propose a new theory on the psychological origins of the American fear of impending terrorist attack. I will demonstrate how a fear of terrorist attack on the borders of the body of the country; is in fact a subconscious-projection of an attack that has already occurred in most American homes: An attack on the borders of the child's body. Physically and/or mentally.

I will demonstrate how widespread childhood abuse in the United States is concealed. And how the psychic affect of this trauma is recast, through elaborate metaphor, into a popular fantasy: A fantasy in which a citizen is under constant threat of obliteration by an abstract 'other' called The Terrorist.

I will show how this fantasy of terrorist attack serves an important social function in a country where, in reality, you are more likely to be crushed by badly-designed furniture than attacked by a terrorist¹ but where more than 1 in 3 girls, and 1 in 6 boys, will experience sexual abuse.

Rather than recall the traumas of early childhood trauma, the 'War on Terror' allows American citizens to displace their anger at parents, and instead scapegoat foreign enemies.

I will explore the resulting collective American trance. A trance in which the signs (in the semiotic sense) of childhood abuse are transposed into a new symbol relationship. A relationship in which the real threat of obliteration by the parent in childhood, is later transposed into the fantastical threat of obliteration by the terrorist in adulthood.

We will look at how the object-relations theories of Donald Winnicott² can be used to explain how the free-floating anxiety of widespread childhood trauma finds itself channelled onto the object of The Terrorist.

These posts will also explore how the insecurity felt by American children in the home, is the true Homeland Insecurity and then how –– in classic Orwellian doublespeak –– it is recast in its bureaucratic form, in adulthood, as a quasi-police force called: Homeland Security and a psychological fantasy called The War on Terror.

This mythic protector-persecutor quasi-police force and the imaginary foreign enemy it protects against, then provides a psychic container for the rage that would otherwise find itself directed against parents and government.

The unconscious process of symbol-switching parent for terrorist provides several cultural functions: But the central one is that it prevents change and maintains systemic and governmental homeostasis. This is because it attributes affect away from the country and onto 'the other'. Preventing self-reflection or conscious analysis of the root trauma. As the psychologist Alice Miller explains:

"The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure."

We know from biological systems theory that evolution prefers repetition with small variation. And so, the tacit societal-taboo against fully remembering childhood perpetuates homeostasis.

When we refuse to analyse the root causes of our anxiety, we maintain our current systems of government and commerce without question. This blindness to (many of) our childhoods makes exploitation and inequality seem entirely natural and inevitable processes. It makes changing the abusive systems of government as impossible as the child's initial attempts to be heard by a wounded parent. This is because it is a blind repetition of the same psychic process; and seeks the same tragic outcome.

In the Freudian sense, America (with many other Western countries) is engaged in a mass Compulsion To Repeat. The Compulsion To Repeat is an unconscious urge to recreate the circumstances of early (now unconscious) trauma in an --often misguided -- effort to resolve it. In this way, the circumstances of many American family homes (divided; aggressive; at war) is then accurately recreated in the global theatre of 'The War on Terror'.

It must be emphasised that these antagonistic and destructive parenting habits are not an act of malice or conscious choice by parents: It is precisely because each generation fails to consciously remember the pains of its own childhood that it simply repeats them blindly on the next generation. As Alice Miller puts it:

"The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves."

Then, in this fantasy landscape of impending-terrorist-threat in America, the psychic energy (anger) that would otherwise be used to appraise, rise up against, and reform parenting habits, is instead harnessed by the governing state. The state then invites the population to project this anger onto 'the other'.

I will explore the geopolitical landscape that permits this unconscious trauma-repetition on a global scale and the wounded-leaders who re-enact their childhoods on other wounded adult-children. As Alice Miller puts it:

"Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation."

I will then describe the process by which the media and government amplify fear of the absurdly rare phenomena known as 'a terrorist attack' into a major cultural fear. And the way in which this process can be dismantled.

Finally, we will look at the most overt re-enactments of childhood sexual trauma in American adulthood. Including the recapitulation of early abuse dynamics through the use of intrusive assaults and 'body-scanners' at airports, manned by adult victims of childhood abuse in uniforms marked Homeland Security.

We will also look at phenomena like Abu Ghraib, where American victims of childhood abuse unconsciously acted-out their own sexual abuse on Iraqi 'terrorists'; repeating the cycle.

Part II coming soon.

Footnotes

¹The real risk of terrorist attack:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/23/youre-more-likely-to-be-fatally-crushed-by-furniture-than-killed-by-a-terrorist/

²A short introduction to Donald Winnicott:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Winnicott