Talking with adolescents about terrorism

Psychoanalysts do not content themselves with listening in silence; they can also engage in dialogue, in particular with children and adolescents. I present here counsel given to an adolescent, troubled by terrorism and by terrorists, in order to help him dialogue with other adolescents, some of whom are tempted to approve of them. Parents, teachers, educators could likewise engage in such dialogues with the adolescents they face. This counsel, set out here in the form of a monologue for practical reasons, draws on discussions, individual and collective, that I have had with adolescents. These few pages gather passages from my book Lettre à un adolescent sur le terrorisme (Letter to an Adolescent on Terrorism)¹.

You wish to discuss with other adolescents the terrorist attacks that have taken place in France and in the world, and more generally, terrorism. You feel concerned by them, and rightly so. How could you not be? You hear every day on the news the announcement of new attacks and massacres, and you are afraid of being a victim of them yourself, here. You wonder how men — young men like you, often — can carry out such crimes, such horrors, and you have the feeling of understanding nothing of their motivations. You have begun to speak of it with a few friends, but superficially, and the same arguments came back endlessly, in a sterile way. You would like to go further, to understand the situation, terrorism and the terrorists, and above all the reasons for everyone’s positions. Here is some counsel so that your discussions may be fruitful.

It is preferable that none of the participants show himself there to be a giver of lessons, an “expert” on terrorism, present and past, and deliver a lecture on it or on the so-complex reality of the world today. Each comes to it with his knowledge and his ignorance, his ideas and his doubts, his assertions and his questions. The discussion is not a confrontation in which the stake is to vanquish the other, to convince him of the rightness of one’s own positions, but a space where all respect one another, even and above all when there is disagreement, and seek to understand their own ideas and those of others, to evolve so that no one remains frozen in his certainties. Thus you preserve your chances of being able to continue to live together, by avoiding misunderstandings, divisions, and conflicts, without thereby renouncing what seems to you just. It is in everyone’s interest.

Your will and that of your friends to respect the other, to control your aggressiveness, your violence, your urge to impose your ideas, and to be able thereby to discuss the major questions you are confronted with, will be, in the end, one of your contributions to the struggle against the development of terrorism: to learn to live together despite the fear that pushes each toward looking out for himself, toward defending his interests against those of others. Terrorism frightens, but many other dangers exist, do not forget it, which are causes of misfortunes, of sufferings, of deaths. To be afraid of everything is not a solution, nor is ignoring fear and dangers. Find the right balance between these extremes.

Your words must be simple, easily comprehensible to all, and leave as little hold as possible for misunderstanding, for in a complex, troubled, dangerous situation, we are all hypersensitive and overreactive. Thus, to condemn terrorist acts does not imply being in agreement with the targeted victims; to express one’s disagreement with the latter does not mean rendering them responsible for the aggression, nor approving of the murderers — it is sometimes necessary to make this clear.

In every case, ask yourself whom you are addressing, and how you will be understood, what use will be made of your words, but also of your behaviors and your acts. Your interlocutors, known and unknown, may be numerous and differentiated, often far beyond those you thought you were addressing, beyond also what you would have wished. It is sometimes better to renounce conducting certain debates, certain struggles, out of a legitimate fear that they be misunderstood or co-opted by others, and that they produce, in the end, the opposite effect to the one wanted at the start.

You do not exist outside time and outside the world, and the world today is particularly violent and complex. As far from you as it may appear, it surrounds you, and the difference between the near and the far has been annulled. You say, for example: “I fight so that my place be accepted, by the laws, the functioning of society, by my fellow citizens, in this country where I live, such as it is, with its qualities and its faults.” All, or almost all, here, understand it, and many are those who approve of it. But those who support Daesh or Al-Qaeda, for example, co-opt it and integrate it into their struggle, one of whose aspects is to destroy this country and to replace it with a state with the characteristics that their current practices let one foresee. There lies a fundamental difference between them and you. But does everyone understand it if you do not make it clear? Likewise, it matters that those who disagree with you, who criticize your positions and sometimes condemn them, take into account, to be sure, this current context, but also what you are, beyond the appearance you give of yourself, sometimes in a provocative way. We must take into account our fears, our reciprocal ignorance, our misunderstandings, but also what we have in common, today, and the life we want to lead together, now and in the future.

In every case, it is useful to know how to read declarations and their subtleties, their discretion and their allusions, and to decipher the real messages behind the appearances, whether it be the words of those close to you or those of the media and public figures.

Try to be precise about words, definitions, questions. Vagueness risks increasing misunderstandings and conflicts, prevents constructive dialogues and the good resolution of problems. Thus, are the “attacks” acts of isolated individuals, or of individuals who belong to a group, restricted or vast; acts of delinquency, of protest, of blackmail, of war? Do they aim to obtain partial advantages (the recognition of certain rights, the liberation of prisoners, etc.), to punish the government, or the citizens, to eliminate some of them, to provoke a change of regime or of constitution, to seize power, to subject the country to a foreign power, or to destroy it? The message of the attacks is not always clear. Does an attack against a kosher supermarket mean that one must kill Jews because they are Jews, or because they are supposed to support the State of Israel and its current policy against the Palestinians, or because this state has no place in the Middle East and must be destroyed, or is it a way of supporting Iran, or Hezbollah, or Al-Qaeda, or…?

In your discussions, do not hesitate to develop your ideas at great length, and above all if the acts and the motivations of the terrorists seem incomprehensible to you. You will thus see the fragility of your ideas and your arguments, sometimes their absurdity or their danger, or on the contrary their force and their solidity. Do not hesitate either to imagine a great number of hypotheses, of explanations or of predictions in order, in a second stage, to reject those that seem to you the most improbable or the most unrealistic. They will have had their utility: to stimulate your reflection, to reinforce the solidity of those you keep. This effort to understand the terrorists does not have the aim of excusing them, totally or in part, but of avoiding being passive (“I understand nothing of it, it’s too complicated, it’s none of my business”), or of delegating to others (political parties, military and police, “experts,” legislators, intellectuals and journalists, militant groups, etc.) the responsibility of explaining them, of supporting them or of combating them through speech, through the Law, through various weapons. We struggle effectively only against those whom we have learned to know and understand — including through our controlled intuition and imagination. But it will eventually be the judges and the trials that will make it possible, perhaps, to understand them, supposing they themselves are conscious of the reasons for their commitment and their acts and are capable, or willing, to explain themselves.

It is necessary that this teeming freedom of thought be balanced by a minimum of knowledge, about the international situation and the stakes of the current conflicts in the world, as well as about the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To allow oneself to say just anything only adds to the confusion and the disarray. Do not remain shut up in the present and its difficulties, even if it has all its importance; try to circulate freely in the future as well, to imagine, and in the past, familial and collective, near and far, to recover, to know, to make your own. Likewise, inform yourself about the forms of terrorism that preceded those raging at present; it is not time wasted. The current situation, in France and in the world, is complicated. Listen to the radio or read articles and books, of several different opinions; do not content yourself with scrolling at top speed through the punctual news items and the messages on the internet and the social networks. Forge your own opinion, do not take as absolute truth everything that is said, even by people you like or admire. You do not do so on other questions, nor for what your parents or your teachers tell you. Even if many people think this or that, that does not mean they are right, nor, moreover, that they are wrong.

Do not seek for the moment globalizing, unique explanations, which would explain the origin of the terrorists and their trajectory, or those of the terrorist groups that exist in other countries. They always lead to catastrophic simplistic solutions: “all you have to do is…” The nature and the objectives of the terrorists can be very different: revolted populations, ambitious warlords, mafia cartels, armies in the service of one or several states for economic, political, diplomatic, military objectives, or to seize a territory, its riches or its geographical conveniences in order to found their power there, etc. But tell yourself nonetheless that at the origin of the terrorists and of the groups, there are numerous factors, economic and social, cultural and political, military and diplomatic, the religious question being only one among many others. On these possible causes, the geographers, the economists, the politicians, the sociologists, the jurists, the historians, the diplomats, the anthropologists, the literary scholars, the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, etc., have and would have many things to say and to discuss among themselves. Try to read them or to listen to them. Discussions are not tennis matches where the players (rather than the adversaries) would endlessly send the ball back and forth: on one side “it’s your fault, you are responsible, guilty,” on the other “they are victims, we didn’t know how to do better, it’s all our fault.” Guilt, compassionate pity, excuses or a priori attacks are bad guides. Numerous are, alas, those who have known misfortune, misery, oppression, humiliation, exploitation, the risk of dying, whether by the fault of men, of illness, of nature or of chance. They have not for all that committed acts of barbarism, nor terrorist acts. Reality is complex, the causes are innumerable, and each must grapple with them to resolve them where he finds himself.

Before those of January 2015, attacks had already taken place in Paris. The one on the Champs-Élysées in 1986 (2 dead), committed by the Lebanese Hezbollah to punish France for its support of Iraq, then at war with Iran. The one against the synagogue on rue Copernic in 1980 (4 dead). The one against the Jewish restaurant Goldenberg in 1982 (6 dead). The one on the RER at Saint-Michel in 1995 (8 dead, 117 wounded), claimed by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA). The one on the RER at Port-Royal in 1996 (4 dead, 170 wounded), the same claim of responsibility. The one in front of the Tati department store in 1986 (7 dead, 55 wounded), the last of a series inaugurated in 1985, of thirteen attacks (in all, 13 dead and nearly 300 wounded) attributed to the Lebanese Hezbollah; etc. There were also during those years numerous attacks in Ireland, in Italy (responsibility of the mafia, of the far left, of the far right), in Spain (due to the Basque ETA: almost a thousand dead and innumerable wounded); in France and in Algeria, committed by the FLN or the OAS during the Algerian War; and many others still. What were their results? Deaths for nothing? Does knowing the history of the twentieth century help you to discuss with your parents and your grandparents who knew and underwent its tragic moments, to understand better, perhaps, the origin of their mistrust, of their disillusioned weariness, of their sadness or their anger, of their reactions or their words, sometimes excessive and irrational, which astonished you when you were younger? In those moments of crisis, of war, of dictatorships, that so many people knew, on which side were they — that of the victims, of the executioners, of the witnesses? What remains of it in the family memory, what did they transmit to you of it, what would you now like to know?

Knowledge about the great monotheistic religions, as well as about the functioning of the state, the laws, and the principal institutions of the country in which you live, is also useful. Learn also the universal moral landmarks, which structure every human community. Know also the bodies of the country and the usual functioning of society (the press, the parties, the associations, etc.) and of the state. Learn to know your fellow citizens, beyond the misunderstandings and the caricatures that you perhaps have of them. The massive demonstrations after the attacks of January 2015 in Paris showed that they could react and protest, but also avoid and refuse the conflations between terrorists and Muslims. You can take part in discussions, groups, associations or parties, even at a local level, support or create a newspaper, express yourself on the internet. To struggle against those who use weapons and bombs, there are not only weapons and bombs. The important thing is not to remain passive and to leave the terrorists and their supporters alone to express themselves, by weapons and by all the means of communication that they know how to use so well.

The discussion will thus help you not to remain alone with your ideas, your reflections, and your emotions, to find the right balance among them, to find the position that seems to you the most just, provisionally or durably. Among your friends, some will say that they understand nothing of it, that it frightens them, or seems to them very far from their life; others will express their total opposition, even if they may feel close to or in agreement with some of the justifications of the terrorist acts; others will say “I don’t agree, but I understand, or one must understand them,” which is quite close to an excuse or a support; others will express, in a clear or allusive way, their fascination or their temptation to join them, which does not mean that they will do so. Whatever your position, do not consider the others as adversaries, but try rather to understand their reasons, rational and also in part irrational and unconscious — in relation perhaps to their personality, to their social or familial situation, to their history — but also your own. You perhaps have more in common than you think, and your divergences are not necessarily where you situate them.

Try to understand the motivations of your interlocutors, to make them understand yours, find and accept compromises in order to be able to continue to discuss and to live together. Discuss thus with your friends, your brothers and sisters, your parents and grandparents, your teachers too, without breaking with them in case of disagreement, without following them blindly. I suppose that when you discuss with adults, in particular with your teachers, your first words are “reasonable,” go in the direction of what they want to hear. You observe them, and if they are naive and taken in by your fine words, you will then no longer have much trust in them. You are relieved and in confidence, even if it is more difficult, when they let the discussion continue, waiting for your more authentic thoughts to appear, even in disorder, confusion, or provocation, with, in the background, your fantasies, your fears, your disarray. When you seek to evaluate your interlocutors, in order to put forward good arguments, draw a clear distinction between those who already belong to a militant group, those who individually approve the actions of the terrorists, those who express their solidarity with them and defend them when they are attacked, pursued, or judged, and those who simply feel sympathy.

Do not remain alone, shut up in your small group, where all share the same ideas, the same tastes. Still less within yourself. And learn to make good use of the vast, almost limitless community of the social networks, which gives you the feeling, in part just, in part illusory, of a formidable strength, but also of a total irresponsibility and impunity. Mingle and confront yourself with others, different, not always in agreement with you. Hear their points of view, their arguments; that will help you to reflect on your own. Dare to say no when you do not agree; defend your identity and your values, but without necessarily feeling attacked by those who disagree with them. The debate can be bracing, but respectful, without violence or contempt.

If you consider that you have absolutely nothing in common with the terrorists, that they are extraterrestrials who live in a world a thousand leagues from yours, you will not have to reflect well on the situation, and you will risk remaining in the position of the spectator — fascinated, frightened, voyeuristic, irresponsible — whereas you wonder how you could, at your level, slow the development of terrorism. To understand them — as far as possible — and above all those, around you, who are or could be tempted to support them or to follow their path, try to see what your common points are. It is unpleasant and troubling, but necessary. These “footbridges” will help you to draw a little closer to them in thought, to see them a little less as frightening strangers, and above all to understand those around you who are sensitive to their discourses and their acts. The terrorists conduct their struggle with all the weapons at their disposal, including those of speech and of image. With them they address themselves, in a very conscious and mastered way in their propaganda, to the points of fragility, of doubt, of disarray, of suffering, of enthusiasm and of revolt of adolescents and young adults, and particularly of those who share the same culture, but who have also gone through — they or their parents and grandparents — major ordeals. These were wars, genocides, dictatorships, the being torn between a country of origin and a country of welcome, too many bereavements, difficult social and economic situations, etc.

It is of course not because you too have known difficult situations, nor because you find between them and you common points, that you could become one of them, nor that the radical difference that separates you will disappear. Seek within yourself, in the present as much as in the past, thoughts — especially the most buried — temptations, emotions, fantasies, fears, that you think you find in them, even pushed to the extreme or deformed; that will help you to understand better the current situations and to reflect on them.

Think likewise of the common points that exist between the exceptional character of terrorism, in total exteriority to the rules of life in society, and what exists in the usual functioning of that life, or again of all the intermediate elements between these two situations. But do not for all that topple over into a disillusioned, depressed relativism, excessively tolerant, indifferent in truth, which would claim that in the end everything is of equal value, give or take a few details, as though you lived on the Moon, as though you no longer made any difference between the unacceptable, the intolerable, and the rest, as though you no longer saw when the limits of morality and of human dignity are crossed. This position would end by making you accept everything, by leading you to irresponsibility and to powerlessness.

You are frightened, and rightly so, by the actions of the terrorists. They seek to make a clean sweep around them and to impose their ideas and their objectives through the use of a very great violence. It seems to you to be part of a universe other than your own. But tell yourself that we all have within us violence and that we sometimes make use of it, but, unlike the terrorists, this use is neither systematic nor exclusive, and does not kill. We have also learned to limit it, we see to it that it does not overflow us, does not drag us into an escalation dangerous for our “adversary” and for ourselves.

Some of your comrades will perhaps say that it is better to forget the attacks, not to speak of them, so as not to give them publicity, that everything has already been said about them and about the terrorists. But does terrorism belong to the past, have its multiple causes disappeared by miracle, does it not still have, alas, much future? They are afraid to speak of it, or no longer want to; they say that they know enough, that it frightens them, that they have spoken enough of it. They ought to know that the ostrich policy is the worst way of protecting oneself. We speak in order to continue to reflect on the possible causes, on the consequences, in the short and the longer term, on the means of avoiding their repetition. Ideas, reflections, come little by little, one idea makes another come. Those of others, whether you agree with them or not, allow you to see the solidity of your own, to make them evolve, to be better prepared for what may happen. But there are also many other subjects of discussion than the attacks and terrorism, religion or racism.

Others will maintain that there is no other way of making oneself heard, that when one asks nicely, politely, one obtains nothing. That is, moreover, what their parents sometimes say. It is sometimes true, but not always. Above all, they do not take into account the longer-term consequences. The one who begins to use violence will not long remain alone; others will take it up, and society will quickly become unlivable. No one will any longer have trust in its usual functioning, will no longer count on the elections, the political parties, the associations, the unions, to make his voice heard, and no more on the Police and Justice, nor on his neighbors and his fellow citizens to be protected. Each will feel himself a victim or in danger and will consider that it is his right to defend himself by every means, including by attacking before being attacked, or again by taking justice into his own hands. Can you imagine living in such a society?

Notes