Depth in 21st-Century Cells? European Salafi Jihadi Terrorism and Psychoanalysis in the Luciferian Age

The psychoanalytic interpretation of Salafi jihadism and terrorism, or the application of psychoanalytic categories to said issues, are not very common. Indeed the mobilization of psychoanalysis in this context very often prompts accusations of orientalism and cultural imperialism. Both academic discourse and, to a lesser extent, policy, tend to “explain,” whether genuinely, strategically or tactically, or diplomatically, the emergence of “home-grown” Salafism by pointing to social, welfare, or educational deficits in the jihadists’ biographies. In this article we make an attempt to focus on psychoanalysis (or “depth psychology,” as it was sometimes called in a now-bygone age) to shed light on the phenomenon. Taking cues from Jan Hendrik van den Berg’s neo-Freudian and phenomenology-inspired critique of classical psychoanalysis on the one hand, and Peter Sloterdijk’s recent work on bastardy on the other, we offer a reading of European home-grown Salafi jihadist and terrorist inclination as reactions to failure, and as manifestations of a deep sense of inadequacy, in some of those who are unable to live up to what has become the predominant, imperative code in the cultural mainstream: to live one’s life in radical, complete, and total sovereignty, undetermined and in absolute omnipotence. This code, and the exigencies it imposes, we suggest, have become mainstream in the age which we have called Luciferian.