Robert M. Young Online Writings
‘Fundamentalism and Terrorism’
I was asked to give a keynote talk to the distance learning students in Psychoanalytic Studies at Sheffield University on 18 September 2001. When it came time to prepare my remarks, my chosen topic of ‘Psychoanalysis and the History of Ideas’ seemed a million miles from the events in America which had just transpired, so I wrote on fundamentalism and terrorism, using general examples and looking more closely at three: American militias, lynching and Osama Bin Laden’s group. I tried to combine real world analysis with a Kleinian perspective on why people behave in these ways.