Terrorism is not only a tactic. It is also a psychic event: an eruption that reorganises imagination, fear, and belonging. It feeds on the mind’s oldest defence, projection, the impulse to evacuate unbearable inner experience, and locate it in a hated other.

Jung named this dynamic with characteristic bluntness.

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”
— Carl Jung

Collectives, like families, inherit what they cannot acknowledge. Terror thrives in that inheritance. It offers a grim clarity: an enemy, a cause, a permission structure for violence, and a story that converts inner chaos into external certainty.

Dynamite, Anarchists, and the Fantasy of Deterrence

Modern terrorism has always had a relationship with technology, not simply because technology facilitates destruction, but because it intensifies the spectacle. Alfred Nobel believed that greater destructive power would deter war.

“My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions.”
— Alfred Nobel

The fantasy is familiar: if the threat becomes absolute, reason will prevail. Yet the psyche rarely becomes reasonable under threat. It becomes primitive. Explosives did not end violence; they made it louder, faster, and more symbolic.

In the late nineteenth century, anarchists used bombs not only to kill, but to speak, striking the state and the icons of capital as if the object could carry the whole conflict. Nietzsche, in his own abrasive way, observed the moral intoxication that can accompany such movements.

“Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society…”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Whether one accepts the critique or rejects it, the psychological structure is consistent: when power feels unreachable, the unconscious seeks an absolute gesture. Terror becomes a bid for omnipotence, a momentary reversal of humiliation.

Terror as Projection and Ritual

From a depth perspective, terrorism externalises what cannot be borne internally: shame, injury, envy, annihilation anxiety, and the desire for recognition. It offers a ritual that binds individuals into a fused identity and substitutes certainty for ambivalence.

That is why terrorism often functions as a theatre of purity. Violence becomes “cleansing.” Complexity becomes betrayal. Doubt becomes treason. In this atmosphere, the enemy is no longer human, but symbolic: a container for everything split off from the group’s self-image.

The Sliding Target of Hatred

Projection rarely remains attached to a single object. It migrates. When one target is removed, another appears, because the real issue is not the target, but the unprocessed psychic material seeking an external host.

This is how terror reproduces itself across generations, not only through ideology or grievance, but through repetition compulsion at scale: ungrieved losses, unintegrated rage, and the seduction of simple narratives.

The harsh conclusion is also the clinical one: what is not reflected upon will be enacted. The unowned psyche becomes fate.

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