Externalizing faults
An analyst’s analysis of Hasan; it’s a little better than the media’s excuse of PTSD. (The media have been even more dreadful than usual in covering Hasan and his obvious motive, by the way):
Where once the usual description for the source of tormenting thoughts might have been demons, imps, djinns, or the devil, the modern patient uses quasi-rational technology. In 1919 the machines contained cranks and levers, running on electricity. In 2009, the “persecutors” take the form of available technology. Thus, the modern day psychotic may believe that secret rays are being directed at his brain, or tiny computer chips have been implanted in him to cause him to have terrible thoughts and impulses. Whether the persecutor is internalized or remains externalized the salient point is that the cultural surround supplies the elements around which the psychosis coalesces.
How does this relate to our “lone, deranged” attacker? Current versions of fundamentalist Islam, which depend on externalizing all the faults of the Ummah, which project all the negative attributes of the Ummah, and which not only support but idealize those who act on such paranoid constructs, directs and reinforces the very projective, externalizing tendencies of the paranoid which lead to aggression…
Paranoid patients have an internal persecutor, an ambivalently held parental object representation, which is projected onto the external world. This is often enough to supply the paranoid with his delusional persecutors and remove responsibility for his actions and failures. Now it is the externalized, projected enemy who contains the unacceptable/disowned thoughts and impulses of the paranoid. When the disease progresses, the object/persecutor can be re-internalized or (re)introjected, at which point it often takes the form of an influencing machine.
So the paranoid person has an imaginary persecutor that he projects onto the external world. Gee, is this anything like being in the White House and claiming that you “speak truth to power“?