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Foulkes 1948; Glatzer 1992; Lebowici, Diatkine and Kestenberg, 1958; Bion 1961). Psychoanalytic group therapy, as practiced today, (McKenzie, 1992; Kauff, 2011; Papiasvili 2011) has grown into an internally coherent multiperspectival field. The group, taking on the multi-transferential, as well as developmental emergent function, provides a unique dynamic reservoir of the interplay of activated unconscious processes/drive derivatives and characterological defenses, which might otherwise not come into full view. A group analyst’s function is to provide safety from regressively activated unconscious impulses being acted on, and maintain boundaries and frame, largely via interpretation of unconscious conflicts and fantasies, including sexual and aggressive strivings, when they present resistance to the individual and/or group’s progress. VII. Ba. Contemporary Perspectives on Social Violence, Terrorism, Historical Trauma Kernberg’ s (2003a, b) Sanctioned Social Violence describes a spectrum of regressive, malignant, narcissistic-paranoid mechanisms that provide a common (unconscious) matrix for analysis of those aspects of social psychology that sanction violence. Kernberg extends Freud in that he adds the dimension of the dread of consequences of aggression that mobilizes defenses of a narcissistic and paranoid kind. In this type of process of group regression, normal functions and defensive operations are replaced by the broad gamut of primitive defensive operations typical of paranoid-schizoid mechanisms , originally described by Klein. According to Kernberg (2003) and Green (2002b), this uncontrolled powerful regressive potential toward primitive defensive operations centering on splitting to deal with primitive aggression may be the most important evidence of the basic motivational system Freud designated as the death drive , the counterpart of libido. Similarly, Louis Brunet (2007, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019) and Casoni and Brunet (2005, 2007) describe the complex regression processes in violent cult groups and in radicalized or terrorists’ groups allowing individuals to commit individual and mass murders. Partly based on the study of the Rwanda genocide and a violent religious cult, interviews with radicalized young people who became terrorists yielded a model of the effects of group regression on the individual psychic apparatus, favoring the enactment of extreme violence. One proposition was that a group, whose members share ideals or passions, creates the equivalent of a “group mind”. One of the many mechanisms involved is radical regressive reversal of the investment of the superego and the ideal ego. This radical reversal makes it possible to disregard the usual moral convictions and thus allow the individual to act as if he was above the law. The ideal ego, as the reservoir of omnipotent fantasies, aims at total and unlimited satisfaction of all desires and drives, eclipsing the restrictive, repressive, ‘forbidding’ superego. Casoni and Brunet (2005, 2007) argue further that the strength of a person’s use of identification with the aggressor is fueled by the subject’s own destructive drives , rendering any acting out based on this mechanism liable to degenerate into extremely cruel behavior because of his or her regressed social functioning. In addition, the unconscious use of manic
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