«You will pay because you insulted the Prophet!» the terrorists shouted before starting the massacre. How can a religious ideal be used to justify barbarism? Psychoanalyst Gerard Bonnet offers his explanation.
Psychologies: How can a religious ideal be distorted so much that it becomes a weapon of terror?
J.B.: Like everything that comes from the depths of the psyche, ideals are loaded with impulses, desires, fantasies, and therefore they contain an incredible energy that can become a weapon of mass destruction. Moreover, in the unconscious, the desire for life and the desire for death exist side by side. A more constructive and hopeful part, the ideal, coexists there with the spirit of chaos and destruction, namely with cruelty. The unconscious has a peculiarity: opposites ripen in it, not excluding each other, and can be used by religious ideology in the most destructive form! Fundamentalists, whatever their faith, do not distinguish between their ideal and the dogma they would like to impose on others through violence.
And in the name of their religious ideals, they attack the republican ideal: freedom of speech?
J.B.: This is the property of perversion: to get pleasure from the denial of the ideal of another person. They harm the ideal to which our republic is committed, because they know that by doing this they will wound us to the very heart, that this is the most precious thing we have. Since ideals are formed in the earliest childhood, they are the hooks with which we are most easily caught and which penetrate us very deeply. In the first period of life, the infant survives only because he is surrounded by people with ideals: justice, for example, when he is breastfed, respect for life and human dignity, since his own life is considered sacred; his health is also an ideal, because adults see to it that he does not harm himself, and so on. Ideals are directly related to our physical survival. Therefore, we are ready to do anything to protect them — the most beautiful and the worst.
- Why are we so deeply affected by the shooting of cartoonists?
Does this explain the deep shock that we all experienced?
J.B.: There are several reasons. First, it is important that the attack was directed at the public figures we all know. Therefore, we had the feeling that we had lost our loved ones. There is also demonstrativeness, theatricality of this attack, which exacerbates the trauma. And this, by the way, was done on purpose: in response to the symbolic violence that some saw in the cartoons, the killers tried to cause a mirror shock, but this time it was quite real, because they do not distinguish between symbols and reality. Generally speaking, it is paradoxical that those who are offended by pictures are able to use our society’s passion for spectacle so well to return the insult with a thousandfold force. I must say that they turned out to be good students!
And thus cause horror all over the world …
J.B.: Perverts strive to catch the eye of another, to make him look at himself. Horror in this case hits right on our pupils. But it is also the horror of each of us before our unpredictable unconscious impulses. And here we are also very deeply affected. In our society, where the “I” wants to believe that it is civilized and calm, we suddenly become convinced, against our will, that we are driven by blind impulses about which we do not know and which can suddenly break free. Because such violence can provoke the desire to kill, latent in each of us. Previously, such an event was followed by public executions and executions. Today, some are calling for the return of the death penalty instead. The big risk is that hatred of Muslims will rear its head. Let’s not forget that brotherhood is also a republican ideal, which is dear to us and which overcomes all faults.
How to resist barbarism?
J.B.: It is not enough to simply turn to the ideals that unite us — freedom, equality, fraternity — as is happening spontaneously today. Fundamentalists will oppose them with others, those in whom they believe as strongly as we believe in ours, and sometimes stronger. This has always been the case in all wars. It is necessary to realize that ideals always have two sides and that in the name of ideals people have been killing each other for centuries. Those who attack us do so, unconsciously relying on the same values that we talk about, but using them in their own way. The ideal becomes dangerous as soon as it is confused to the point of indistinguishability with this or that person, system, structure, any battle where it is somehow abused. It becomes dangerous even when it is impossible to talk about it, it cannot be discussed with the help of words, images, feelings, knowing that no one has a monopoly on the truth.
What then to say? That we are all Charlie? It’s enough?
J.B.: Since freedom of speech, that is, the ideal underlying our understanding of a person who is dear to all of us, has come under attack, we are all, indeed, Charlie. But let us be vigilant that our response is not one in the name of ideology. The ideal, becoming collective, can justify the most terrible things. We saw this on 11/XNUMX and in the wars that followed, when it was deemed enough to return violence for violence. Another way to counter barbarism is reflection. It is terrible to see that the two killers, like many other jihadists, are French citizens who were brought up in the schools of our Republic. How did it come to this, how could this happen to our children? Something at some point did not work, something went wrong. And now is the time to think about it. Perhaps we didn’t give them a chance to really get to know the roots of the culture they belong to so they could show the world its riches in a different, positive way.