Suicide Bombers

This summer marked the 75th anniversary of the battle of the Somme. Out of the 20,000 young men who died on the first day of the battle we can assume that many hundreds would have ran willingly to their deaths. They did it for King, God and Country. A dream-like dissociated quality would have accompanied many of these deaths - a common defence against extreme fear. Many of the men would have imagined themselves as the hero of their own stories, and the event itself may have became part of the phantasy life of the doomed protagonists. My father confirms this in his own case during some of the early horrendous tank battles of the Desert Campaign in the second world war.

But what might be the structure of such a phantasy? In his paper "Creative writers and daydreaming" Freud writes of two types of motivation for phantasies and creative stories. The first are ambitious wishes 'which serve to elevate the subject's personality'. These are moulded into the action adventure stories that, often with a military theme, show the invulnerable hero battling through adversity and danger to final victory. It is the attainment of glory and esteem that is the key - the medal pinned to the breast by the commander-in-chief, the gratitude of a political leader. The second are motivated by 'erotic' wishes, by which Freud means everything to do with 'love'. These are the 'romances' which show the hero or heroine also battling through adversity to find, in this case, the glory of love. But the difference is not always clear.

Freud continues:

"But we will not lay stress on the opposition between the two trends; we would rather emphasise the fact that they are often united. Just as, in many alter pieces, the portrait of the donor is to be seen in a corner of the picture, so, in the majority of ambitious phantasies, we can discover in some corner or other the lady for whom the creator of the phantasy performs all his heroic deeds and at whose feet all his triumphs are laid."

So Freud would not be surprised to learn, as I did recently, that the young Palestinian men who are groomed for suicide bombings in Israel - the ultimate act of heroic self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement one would suppose - are not only told that their self-sacrifice is for God and Country, but that when they get to Paradise they will be greeted by 'seventy virgins'.

And if it is said that to consider the phantasy life of these duped children is to miss the political and strategic reasons for the abhorrent tactic, then Freud would perhaps answer: Wouldn't it be more logical for the old men to go on the missions? The one's who have already had their virgins here on earth?

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Freud today | Education page