Editor’s Preface

The U. S. State Department (2007) defines terrorism as “premeditated and politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets,” i.e., innocent civilians. Such violence is the quintessential culmination of the traumatic phenomenon in the modern era. The goal of terrorism extends beyond damage to a specific victim, since its ability to violate traditional boundaries enables it to produce overwhelming psychological and behavioral shock-effects that also are capable of disrupting socio-economic functioning and destabilizing society.  

At the community level, one could define terrorism as the source of the ultimately effective psychological trauma, since it violates any human sense of safety and integrity, replacing order and stability with fear and immobility. Unlike in the past, such as during the Holocaust, modern terrorists usurp the technology of civilization and use the vast network of mass media, satellite TV, and instant Internet as an effective weapon to dissipate trauma imagery and disseminate fear across communities.

An especially vivid example of modern terrorists using communication technology to dissipate trauma imagery and, thereby, instill fear in society at large, is the deliberately videoed brutal beheading of Daniel Pearl, among other Western civilians, and the distribution of the videos to Western media outlets. The purpose of this method, which imprints barbaric and terrifying imagery in the minds of viewers, is to inflict dread on all civilized communities. Civilian contractors and journalists thus serve both as human sacrifices and as vehicles for the dissipation of horrific violence to a wide audience of collateral targets, i.e., media consumers, who are exposed to such terror imagery. Portraying graphic trauma imagery on a world stage violates the individual’s boundaries by personalizing the experience for the viewer, who identifies with the victim but is, at the same time, deprived the opportunity of being debriefed and reassured about his or her own personal safety. 

Given that terrorist activities today are chronic, modern terrorism has profound consequences for the mental health of tens of millions of people everywhere, both directly and indirectly. For these reasons, it is vitally important that psychotherapists of every kind, as well as politicians and all concerned citizens, understand the psychological consequences of modern terrorism in as much detail and depth as possible.  

Towards this end, the primary purpose of this book is to attempt to address the impact of modern terrorism on the entire spectrum of humans’ psychological functions, including the effects of psychological trauma on individuals’ behavior and affective functions. To fulfill this promise, I have divided this rich collection of articles into three conceptually distinct, but inter-related, sections, discussed immediately below. As will be seen, they reflect the varied nature of psychological trauma, including Type I Trauma, Type II Trauma (a more complex constellation of symptoms that arises in victims subjected to continuous threat), and the effects of terrorism in exacerbating symptoms in cohorts of previously traumatized populations.

Before discussing these sections, I want to emphasize that, although the articles chosen for this book do not focus on therapeutic approaches to treating psychological trauma, I nonetheless feel it is important to address this issue, which I have done both in the ensuing discussion at appropriate places and at the end of this Preface. There, I also propose a theory of the caretaker role, which looks beyond the victim to the role of caretaker failure in contributing to the problem of systemic terrorist assaults on innocent civilians.  

Organization of the Anthology

Section I includes articles that focus on solitary terrorist attacks, such as recently occurred in Madrid, London, and New York, and the consequent Type I Trauma responses related to a single terrorist event, especially post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  These terrorist events are often shocking or catastrophic, and usually totally unanticipated. Survivors of these events may suffer a wide array of symptoms, including intense fear, or even dissociation, where the individual’s awareness and ability to engage psychologically in the present is usurped by traumatic material or defenses. As a result, consciously or unconsciously, the world freezes at the trauma scene and ceases to unfold in a spontaneous, cohesive way. The subject is left in a state of insidious dread, and others objectively experience him or her as being distracted, detached, and emotionally absent. These symptoms are frequently associated with sleep disturbance, anxiety, and distressing trauma recollections (flashbacks). 

At the epicenter of a terrorist attack, 90 percent of surviving victims may exhibit some adverse psychological reaction in the hours and days following the critical event.  While the frequency of psychological distress dissipates as one moves in time or distance from its epicenter, a small but significant percentage of previously healthy individuals continue to bear significant distress. These findings have been demonstrated in demographic studies conducted with local and national populations exposed to trauma imagery. Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, for example, national surveys of stress reactions identified substantial symptoms of stress in Americans across the country (Schlenger et al., 2002; Schuster et al., 2001).

Most follow-up studies of trauma survivors demonstrate that victims, over time, “habituate,” or develop a certain tolerance towards such symptoms. A small but significant percentage of such individuals, however, remain in a state of hyper-vigilance and distressed by the visitations of traumatic recollections or flashbacks. Furthermore, in an unconscious attempt to shield themselves against further trauma triggers, such victims continue to engage in a variety of avoidance behaviors. This, in itself, can become disabling. 

Multiple factors will influence the recovery process.  Younger persons, for example, are more vulnerable than older persons.  The amount of damage done to the individual, the amount of death or devastation that he or she has witnessed, the extent of exposure to the event, the absence of social supports, or the disruption of the continuity of the individual’s life may all impact negatively on trauma recovery. Yet for many victims there is an inner yearning for a life that exists beyond the trauma¾one that is safe, secure, peaceful, and calm.

At the time of this writing, spring 2007, America and countries in Western Europe have been spared the shock-frequency for the citizenry to be symptomatically affected by the tally of cumulative psychological damage.  Following a single traumatic event, most healthy individuals will naturally regain the capacity to self-soothe and function as they had previously. The limited, available data appear to indicate that persistence of disabling symptoms decades beyond a single terror occurrence is very unusual for Type I traumatic incidents.   

Section II contains articles that illustrate “Type II” or “complex trauma” proposed by Dr. Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery (1992; for more detail see The PTSD Workbook by Williams and Poijula, 2002). In the context of this book, this trauma model is referred to as the “continuous terror” paradigm, especially as proposed by Shalev et al. (2006) in “Psychological Responses to Continuous Terror: A Study of Two Communities in Israel.” The uniqueness of the psychological effects of complex trauma that derives from this situation is not in its acute stress symptoms but in its ability to shape (and distort) how the victims think about themselves and the perpetrator, e.g., in the same way one often hears how an abused child believes he or she is “bad,” not the abuser. Such ongoing trauma, which creates a pervasive feeling of terror and helplessness in its victims, is described in the literature as a Type II Trauma.

While identical to Type I Trauma in its intensity and shock-effect, Type II Trauma is applied frequently and unexpectedly over an extended period. The predator (in this case the terrorists) uses the fear of impending death or mass-genocide as a weapon to ferment political change by creating a culture of terror. The constant fear of violation, the uncertainty of one’s future, the disruption of normal social functioning, and the political instability constitute the building blocks of the Type II Trauma paradigm. With it, the objective is the application of a multitude of fear triggers without the respite required for psychological reconstitution or physiological habituation. Through the application of fear, combined with the seduction of safety in exchange for political capitulation, this type of terror becomes an extremely powerful political tool. 

Included in Section II on “continuous trauma” are case studies that demonstrate multiple traumatization that result from terrorism against civilians, compounded by the effect of governmental failure to protect its citizens from injury, separation or displacement. The examples in this section include the genocide in the former republics of Yugoslavia, and the current Intifada in Israel. As regards Israel, for example, Bleich et al. (2006), in “Mental Health and Resiliency Following 44 months of Terrorism,” point out that by 2004, 0.1 percent of the Israeli population had been killed or wounded by 13,000 terrorist attacks. This would represent an equivalent per capita of 300,000 American casualties. In addition, 47 percent of the Israeli population sampled continued to feel a sense of life-threatening danger. Following the subsequent unilateral evacuation of Gaza, hundreds of Israeli families remain “housed” in trailers, consisting of modified Formica containers. Communities have been deliberately dispersed in a brilliant military tactic of isolating the “enemy within.” Terrorist missile factories that rain fear and death over the skies of Sderot, Ashdot, and Ashkelon have replaced the once-thriving Jewish agricultural center of Gush Katif. Household leaders, once gainfully employed from the produce that miraculously sprouted from the desert, beg from communal coffers. Community leaders are held indefinitely in detention lest they mobilize attention or political support. In short, Gaza and the beautiful Mediterranean Port of Gush Katif, once the strategic southern flank of Israel, have been dismantled as a social experiment of appeasing an unrepentant predator.

In my estimation, this situation demonstrates to terrorists and their supporters that the paradigm of continuous terror ultimately fulfills its goal. As the enemy hijacks the victim’s ego-functions, the victim’s beliefs, emotions and political actions are “split off,” and he acts in concert with the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors imposed by his perpetrator. In other words, a structural dissociation sets in, as the victim unwittingly comes to identify with his persecutor, at the expense of sacrificing the “self” and isolating the “soul.” This loss of agency appears to be the ultimate psychological and spiritual consequence of boundary violation characterizing Type II Trauma.

Section III contains articles that focus on the long-term consequences for individuals of early trauma, decades later, and their continued vulnerability to trauma triggers throughout the life course.  Thus, this section describes the long-term, more complex Type II Trauma syndromes that appear among survivors of a prolonged, repeated, and intense trauma.  While it is not yet established that the “chronic survivor syndrome” is synonymous with the long-term effects that will persist after repeated acts of terrorism, the Holocaust survivor represents an opportunity to examine complex Type II Trauma among a homogenous population. Most survivors from the Holocaust settled in New York and Israel, where they remained a protected treasure of Jewish survival.  While many of these survivors have led productive lives and maintained the Jewish European culture, many did this without the joy of life. With increasing frailty, illness, and loss, their continued will to live gradually has been overshadowed by an underlying sense of survivor-guilt, loss and despair. These findings are presented in the articles written by, among others, Shmotkin et al. (2003) and Sadavoy (1997), who examines a multitude of long-term trauma victims in older populations and adds significance to the enduring effects of different trauma events on diverse population samples.

The psychological, as well as physiological and social, responses to collective terror may be predicted by examining the data on Holocaust survivors, since they represent one of the few surviving communities meticulously studied regarding the effects of cumulative terror on civilian society decades following continuous threat. 

I included in this section the article by Solomon and Prager (1992) on the reactivation of PTSD in Holocaust survivors following the Scud missile attack during the first Gulf War. The article by Kinzie et al. (2002), which covers Type II, or Complex, Trauma, is included in Section II since this unique study examines the effects of the September 11th attacks on five different ethnic groups of refugees previously traumatized as civilians in their native war-torn countries. Bosnian and Somalian patients showed the greatest deterioration in their subjective sense of safety and security consistent with the continuous terror paradigm.

Therapeutic Considerations and the Role of the Caretaker

Earlier I mentioned that, although the focus of this book is on understanding the types of psychological trauma that can be expected to occur following different types of terrorist activities, I feel it is important to devote some attention to the role of the “caretaker” as a dynamic link between the perpetrator and victim (a “tripartite hypothesis”), in all forms of interpersonal trauma, including terrorism. While I have devoted some attention to these matters in the foregoing discussion, I now want to focus on them in some depth in the remainder the Preface.

Donald Kalsched, in his book The Inner World of Trauma (1996), uses a Jungian model to explain two of the most disturbing findings in the literature about trauma. His first observation is that the traumatized psyche becomes self-traumatizing.  Trauma doesn’t end with the cessation of external threat. Instead, it continues unabated in the inner world of the trauma victim, whose consciousness becomes haunted by persecutory inner figures. His second finding is the counter-intuitive observation that trauma victims continuously find themselves in life situations that are re-traumatizing. No matter how much the victim wants to change, something more powerful than the ego continually undermines progress. This corresponds to the clinical research findings of disturbed attachment behaviors in victims of childhood abuse made by Marylene Cloitre (2006), where survivors continue to invite relationships that allow the patterns of the abuse dynamic to be permanently perpetuated.

Most contemporary analytical writers are inclined to see this attacking figure as the internalized version of the actual perpetrator of the trauma who has “possessed” the inner world of the trauma victim.  But, according to Kalsched, this view is only half correct. The diabolical inner figure is often more sadistic and brutal than any outer perpetrator, indicating that we are dealing here with more than just a psychological factor let loose in the inner world by trauma. Rather, it appears that we are dealing with an Archetypal traumatogenic agency beyond the psyche. By violating the victim’s psychological boundaries, the terrorist is able to assert this demonic force. Its lingering metaphysical power, once unleashed, is far more sinister than that of the hostage-taker, tormentor, or physical abuser, since it is not confined to time or space. It can neither be contained nor confronted, and as it unleashes other persecutory archetypes, the victim is left without safe-haven within this repetitive trauma complex.      

Primate research done by Coplan, Andrews, Rosenblum et al. (1996) has confirmed what has been observed in the complex interpersonal relationships of abused victims who perpetuate disturbed dynamics in their patterns of attachment behavior well beyond their trauma experience.  These victimized patients continue to utilize intrapsychic schemas based on the understanding of a built-in expectation for ambush. Just as in the intrapsychic sphere–where survivors remain tormented with fear, insecurities, and the painful recollections of the traumas carried into the present–so, too, in the interpersonal context, survivors of childhood trauma may have left the abusive environment but, nonetheless, maintain trauma-generated expectations.

The convention of cognitive-behavioral exposure therapy, otherwise known as “narrative storytelling,” creates a safe therapeutic environment that allows the patient to relocate the trauma in the past. The therapy creates a safe-haven which is orderly, logical and controllable, re-establishing the individual’s sense of integrity. The recovering trauma victim begins to reformulate a safe and healthy sense of self and other, one that becomes anchored in the present, and is chronologically distinguished from the grip of the traumatic past. 

In the field of cognitive behavior therapy, there is also an emerging emphasis on the pursuit of “emotionally-engaged” living.  Much attention is now being paid to developing skills in social competency among trauma survivors crippled by avoidance behaviors.

The Role of the Caretaker

From an object-relations perspective, one needs to extend the study of the trauma survivor into a construct larger than that of self and other by including the behavior patterns of the designated caretaker. As mentioned above, a “tripartite hypothesis” of trauma would postulate that three parties are involved in any act of trauma: the perpetrator, the victim, and the caretaker. The role of the caretaker is mysterious; often blatant, sometimes invisible, but in either instance usually contributory. In terms of prevention or cure, caretaker functioning can be the most elusive component in the formula, but the most critical function to address. In the remainder of this discussion, I will give anecdotal examples of this hypothesis, applying it to various trauma scenarios that culminate in its relevance to terrorism.

The perpetrator, or “predator,” in order to reach the victim, has to cross the barrier posed by the caretaker. In order to do so, the predator sometimes has to temporarily function as a “trickster”¾a vital archetype in Jungian literature. By so doing, the predator manages to establish collusion with either the victim or the caretaker, thus allowing the predator to bypass the obstacle posed by the caretaker.

To understand this process better, especially as it pertains to modern terrorism and its victims, let us begin with a more common example of a predator from everyday life, the pedophile. The pedophile usually has some relationship with the caretaker, which allows him access to the potential victim. After the abuse has occurred, the victim may be threatened to believe that his or her survival depends on keeping the event secret, thereby allowing the violation to continue. In the mind of the victim, breaking the pact is tantamount to suicide. Collusion is established, in this instance, between the victim and the perpetrator. The child may show physical or psychological signs of injury, which he or she attempts to conceal. But the caretaker has passively colluded through his silence and inactivity. If that were not so, how could the victims’ profound physical or psychological trauma continue to be undetected by the very person entrusted to safeguard their well-being?

What happens, however, when the caretaker himself or herself is the perpetrator? Civilized society has educated teachers, physicians, and other healthcare providers to recognize signs of child abuse and act in a definitive way, by alerting government agencies to intervene and take over the caretaking function.

In most cases where children are abused or women have been battered to death by their jealous ex-lovers, the criminal investigators uncover a trail of warnings and missed opportunities, e.g., caseworkers not reporting disturbing signs to their supervisors or judges allowing felons free access to their victims, even after the victims have exhausted their efforts in crying out to their caretakers to be rescued. Such cases force one to assume that the predator has exploited or outwitted the cracks in the system that allow him or her¾as trickster¾to outwit the negligent or indifferent caretaker, thereby reaching the helpless victim.

Why is this concept so critical to trauma management? From a preventative point of view, society needs to be reassured after a tragic event that life is still safe, or safer, not less so. A lesson has been learned so that potential victims will be better protected. Society will pay for improved resources, but it will not tolerate repeated betrayals by appointed caretakers.

Mental health professionals involved in trauma healing have to, before anything else, begin the process of allowing the victim to believe that the world is safe again. The empathic bond established early in the relationship may constitute the first building-block in replacing the patient’s sense of chaos and danger with one of order and predictability. The microcosm of safety in the therapeutic relationship, however, can only be effective if it is mirrored by a safe, social infrastructure or “holding environment.”

In the case of terrorism, governments often assume the role of caretaker. The British Government, for example, during the civil war in Ireland over the past several decades, fulfilled the caretaker role effectively. The article by Curran (1988) in Section I, which covers terrorist violence in Northern Ireland over a 17-year period, documents the limited long-term trauma-related symptoms on the civilian population. This is not a coincidence. Terrorism only works if it creates a pervasive feeling of fear, disrupts the functions of the social infrastructures, and impairs safe travel and access to help. Using the tripartite model of trauma presented above, it can be said that, in its quest for autonomy, the IRA, or “predator” in this case, remained within certain parameters in its methodology, never resorting to the barbaric savagery of radical Islam. In its response, the British Government (caretaker) never left an iota of doubt regarding its efficacy in the caretaking function. Thus, despite the attack on civilians, social order was not disrupted, damage was contained, and healing could begin. This was mirrored by the caretaking role exhibited by Mayor Giuliani after the attack on the Twin Towers, where he was able, through “compassionate articulation,” to provide emotional containment to a city in chaos (Korn, 2001).

In contrast, consider the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where one-third of the population became displaced, and the threat to life was compounded by the governmental failure to accept or deliver disaster relief to non-combatants. Critical household providers were killed or removed, information was withheld as to their whereabouts, and relief agencies were denied access to disaster areas. No leadership (caretaker) function was provided. This chaotic effect of state-sponsored terrorism on psychological function is discussed at length in the article by Savjak (2003), in Section II of the anthology. Similar compounding of traumatic effects of personal horrors in the face of breakdown of civil order are described among Cambodian and Afghan refugees, even when studied many years post-trauma in New Zealand and the United States (Cheung, 1994).

The articles by Shalev et al. (2006) and Bleich et al. (2006), previously mentioned, regarding the Intifada, speak not only to the compounding effects of continuous terror, but also to its connection to the absence of the governmental caretaking function.

At this point I will attempt to explain, using various trauma models, how the collective failure of an entire nation to maintain this caretaking function has occurred and brought the nation to the brink of annihilation.

For victims of Type II Trauma, the symptoms of PTSD are more enduring because of a process termed “neurological kindling,” whereby the fear-circuitry thermostat is reset at a higher baseline level of vigilance and arousal. While intending to serve a protective function, this state of chronic apprehension drains and depletes the individual emotionally, preventing him or her from creative engagement.  

Patients suffering from chronic PTSD, in addition to having difficulty with affect-regulation, find it hard to stay in the present. They may also accept the perpetrator’s projections about themselves as being true. An example of a “negative introject” is when a rape victim is repeatedly told by her or his perpetrator (and comes to believe) that the victim “wanted this.” Such victims lose their sense of faith of ever regaining a sense of personal agency in relations with others. Their interpersonal schemas become distorted into an entrapment of introjections, and they find themselves living within the belief-systems of their own internalized tyrannical masters.

The above-mentioned symptoms then dominate the psychological and behavioral functions of the trauma victim, who not only participates in but also becomes victimized by gathering forces that constellate in tandem as archetypal persecutory agents. I believe that this process can be used to describe the Israeli Defense Force who responded to a cross-border invasion and kidnapping by terrorists into Lebanon. Their efforts were undermined by their government’s survivor guilt compounded by the perpetrator’s propaganda in a dramatic irony and role-reversal on their victims (Israeli society and its leadership) to believe that they (the victims) were functioning as persecutors. The “cry-foul” chorus, which was led by the terrorists and then echoed by the leaders of both the Western democracies and the United Nations, illustrates the so-called “Participation Mystique,” described by Carl Jung. At the epicenter of this delusion is the belief by the victims that they truly are responsible and deserving of their misfortune. This is the classic propaganda template of the terrorist paradigm: the exploitation of the unconscious willingness of the trauma victim to participate in the “repetition-compulsion’’ of abuse. For the abuse survivor (of terrorism), the victim-victimizer dyad is the template for relating. The terrorist is able to identify and exploit the victim’s template, which, as long as it remains unconscious, lacks any strategy to free itself from participation in the abuse dynamic. My hypothesis is supported by the Winograd Commission, whose findings indicated that there never was an operational plan to rescue the kidnapped hostages, and which stated that the prime minister never inquired as to whether such an operational plan existed.

In my personal work as a psychiatrist, after treating hundreds of Holocaust survivors, I was dismayed to find how symptoms of psychological trauma returned with such voracity following a current traumatic event, such as loss of a spouse or severe physical illness. Review of the few long-term follow-up studies on survivors of solitary terrorist attacks failed to illustrate the profound pathology observed in patients 60 years after the Holocaust or after profound childhood trauma. This observation convinced me that using the perpetrator-victim dynamic was insufficient to explain how solitary trauma (“A”) could lead to chronic enduring effects of trauma (“C”). In most circumstances, only complex trauma (“B”) emanating from the “continuous terror” paradigm, discussed above, could lead to “C.” I also propose that this occurrence requires the participation of the caretaker in an enabling role or in some form of collusion with the perpetrator.

My theory about the importance of the caretaker role is further corroborated by my personal experience treating trauma victims from both the riots in Crown Heights, New York, which occurred when David Dinkins was mayor, and the Brooklyn Bridge shooting, which occurred when Rudy Giuliani was mayor. In the former incident, the community residents perceived the mayor as being sympathetic to the rioters, and so the residents felt less safe. In particular, Lemrick Nelson was acquitted of the murder of Jacob Rosenbaum, despite being identified by the victim and making a personal confession. After the acquittal, the jurors held a dinner-party, which was attended by Mayor Dinkins. New York City, however, was forced to compensate residents for personal and property damages resulting from the police allowing the rioters to continue unimpeded for seventy-two hours. In contrast, after the Brooklyn Bridge terrorist attack on the same community, during the tenure of Mayor Giuliani, the perpetrator was rapidly apprehended and sentenced to fifteen consecutive life sentences. Despite the terrible sacrifice of having one student killed and another paralyzed by the attack, the community felt safer after the attack, and after five years none of the direct survivors showed signs of PTSD. 

Traditional PTSD follow-up studies examine trauma models where the cataclysmic event occurs beyond the perimeter of the victim’s safe “holding environment.” In such circumstances the victim is afforded the opportunity to return to his safe world and heal, or “reconstruct,” using the trusted resources of predictable caretakers and intact social agencies. In contrast, the unrecovered patient remains imprisoned by traumatic fears and memories. Certain traumatic memories can never become extinguished, and such patients are eternally held hostage by the overwhelming fear remnants that have been permanently encoded by the trauma. Such traumatic memories are easily reactivated with sufficient cuing.  Examples of this proposition of trauma reactivation are the so-called “anniversary reactions,” where certain environmental cues or circumstances serve as triggers and re-evoke the experience of the original trauma.   

While recovered survivors of trauma develop a representational form of memory, one that is abstract and organized into a coherent picture, the unrecovered victim remains struggling with highly affect-laden sensory fragments and sensations.  The intrusions into consciousness of these frightening fragments of memory produce the flashback, a terrifying image or reliving of the traumatic past. Such victims are never allowed to feel the luxury or the safety of the present.  Furthermore, the unrecovered survivor remains locked in this state of dread, easily startled, never at comfort within himself, and vulnerable to the visitations of his sadistic tormentors, real or imagined. He or she is locked in the past, since life has became frozen at the point of traumatic impact. For this trauma survivor the clock has stopped.  Often when meeting such victims, one is struck by their absence.  Such survivors have either not been given the opportunity of recovery, or have been sabotaged by subsequent events, so that the healthy process of habituation and stress-tolerance never took place.  Fear is only one of the many emotions that are generated by trauma.  Others include shame, sadness, grief, or disgust.  Any or all of these emotional components continue to contaminate the emotional field of the survivor, who remains captive to his traumatic experience.  

In trauma recovery, the cornerstone of treatment is providing an environment that is physically and mentally safe. The survivor needs to be convinced by an empowered, benevolent caretaker or agency that he or she is currently free of physical danger, and can now safely reassume a sense of personal agency. Such conviction provides the survivor with a choice of belief systems and engagement in patterns of thinking and emoting that reflect this newly found self-awareness. The feeling of safety includes social, political and religious life, where the umbrella of protection allows trust and belief in a higher power and freedom from external threat.    

At the microcosmic level of healing, i.e., during the process of healing the individual victim, the therapist replaces the perpetrator, but the power conferred to the caretaker is now devoted to healing and benevolence, where the integrity and sanctity of the individual become categorically reestablished.  At the macrocosmic level, i.e., the task of healing traumatized societies, the role of caretaker has to be fulfilled by balancing the benevolent power of government agencies with the caretaking function, by establishing the integrity of boundaries while being willing to strike mercilessly at those who desecrate its inner sanctuary. These political guardians elected by democracies that were established following a century of horrendous slaughter and genocide, however, straddle on the brink of apathy and indifference. As the emboldened predator prepares in the shadows for his lethal attack, the guardian sleeps.

How apt of Behzad Hassani (2005), in the opening article of this book, “Trauma and Terrorism,” to quote William Blake: 

“O rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark, secret love

Does thy life destroy.”

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