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SÖYLEDİKLERİ VE YAZDIKLARI
that engendered guilt-feelings in the first place. Therefore they
feared such success. To redeem themselves they unconsciously
looked for punishment from the political authority. The foolish
mistakes they always made testified to that fact. Religious,
fundamentalist terrorists did not suffer feelings of guilt because of
their faith. Hence, they remained at least partly outside the scope
of such an analysis.
Despite those pathological characteristics of terrorism, it was
surprising to see that there were supporters of terrorism, along
with its more understandable opponents. The question arose of
how some intelligent people could defend terrorism.
An experienced psychoanalyst drew a parallel between reactions
caused by patients in a clinical setting and by terrorists in national
and international contexts. When a hospitalized patient presented
one side of his character to certain staff members and the other
side to others, that often caused the staff to take highly polarized
positions regarding the patient. If left unrecognized and
unresolved, projective identification often led both in clinical
settings and political arenas to a regressive and polarizing group
process. Then a confused response to terrorism occurred. That
served to enhance the feelings of justification and victimization of
the terrorist.
That situation was occurring in some western human rights
circles. The sympathies of some NGOs with ethnic groups could be
explained as an unexpected outcome of the European integration
process.
The purpose of analysing NGO attitudes was not to discourage
or deter them from criticizing human rights violations and their
perpetrators. On the contrary, if they recognized and resolved the
psychological mechanisms at work in them, they could more
objectively and soundly develop and direct their critical faculties.
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