Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5(3): 211221 (2008) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/aps.164 Group Phantasy: Its Place in the Psychology of Genocide JAMES M. GLASS ABSTRACT This paper explores the leading role that ideas and beliefs can play in the formation of groups and their political action, with particular reference to the psychology of groups and movements involved in genocide. The paper asserts the notion of the Idea as leader; thus moving away from Freuds more limited notion in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego of the leader as a person, a charismatic gure generating feelings of love and attachment. Alluding to the work of Bion, Neri and Anzieu, the paper examines the political and psychological signicance the willed quality of group phantasy in group-initiated mass murder, from Nazi genocide to the ideology of radical Islamic terrorism. Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key words: leaders, leadership, group, group behavior, skin ego, phantasy INTRODUCTION: CULTURE AND BELIEF Much of the literature on political leadership has been inuenced by Freud and his argument in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud, 1921/1955). The conventional notion is that the leader, a person, leads, a group or followers. And the inuence of the leader on this group leads to the action of the followers. I would, however, like to submit that such a formulation may be too mechanistic, that, in fact, sometimes ideas may lead groups, and ideolo- gies can exercise as much inuence over groups, as do specic individuals. It is also the case that what leads political leadership may not be the leader as such, but a group of ideas or a group of civil associations whose beliefs, values and perceptions may serve as a catalyst to an entire culture, for example the role of medicine and science in Nazi Germany. It may be that the knowledge pushing these associations becomes the true leader in any given culture. It is not that knowledge replaces the leader, but the knowledge clusters coalescing as culture and cultural artifact may create a belief-atmosphere, as it were, that stokes up a society, regardless of class, social position, or institutional structure. In this Glass 212 Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps respect, it could be argued that the idea leads the leader, and these ideas manifest their power in the way groups formulate social attitude, social facts, and intellectual and emotional gestalt. The ability of cultures to wage mass murder depends on two fundamental factors: rst, a willingness of the population to accept such behavior as legiti- mate; and, second, the normalizing of mass murder as essential national policy. Each of these factors in turn depends on the capacity of groups to internalize the belief structure necessary for action and to reach consensus on the methods necessary to implement beliefs. Psychoanalytic group theory brings us at least a step closer to understanding how this process works. It is simply not enough to argue that, in the case of Nazi Germany, it was Hitlers decision or the partys madness, or with September 11 that it was bin Ladens charisma alone. In each instance of mass murder the murder of European Jews, the deaths of thousands of innocents in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a group- willed set of beliefs was essential for carrying out these policies. Masses of indi- viduals, organized into collectives or groups, needed to hold these ends not as just rational calculation but as willed belief. Group phantasy articulates the perception; the very existence of individuals, their bodies, demands annihila- tion, extermination, purication. In Germany, Jews and gypsies constitute this hated, impure Other. For the al Qaeda network, despised otherness appears as the Americans, Western values, the pleasures of the body. Where can we turn in group-psychology theory for light that illuminates the causality behind these actions? Claudio Neri, an Italian psychoanalyst and a Professor of Group Psychology at the University of Rome, offers provocative insights (Neri, 1998). Neri draws inspiration from Didier Anzieu, a French psychoanalyst and theorist of group behavior. Anzieu uses concepts like group illusion and the group as a container; he introduces the concept of the Skin Ego, which I will return to in a moment. Neri elaborates the idea that illusions tie groups together. And the group itself acts as a container for powerful, explosive feelings and channels those feelings into action. Neris own conclusions are derived from watching small groups in action. But I believe we can use his theory to make certain generalizations about large-group behavior or the behavior of what I call culture-groups loose associations of various groups within a given cultural eld, united by an over- riding ideological commitment. Neris small-group psychology offers a beginning point from which to explain action and behavior on a larger scale. I should also add that Neri draws from Wilfred Bion; but for my purposes, his theoretical elaborations of Anzieu are more relevant to the kinds of political groups engaged in ongoing activities of mass murder. Neri argues that groups perform binding functions, in the form of a projection of a mother-image; others in the group provide critical fraternal links or bond- ings. And the community of belief forged by these bondings looks to the external world as the place where the group works. The groups purpose is to realize, to bring-into-reality, the fraternal message (for example, destruction of the Other, 213 Group phantasy Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps annihilation of the enemy), and to construct a mother-image, that offers the prospect of healing, a transcendence to a greater unity. External action shores up fantasies of rescue and redemption for example, restoring a shattered mother imago (held in the group unconscious) by striking out at the despised Other. Groups construct communication grids or networks; these networks maintain a set of beliefs internalized by the group. This might be thought of as the group matrix. S. H. Foulkes writes: The matrix is the common shared group which ultimately determines the meaning and signicance of all events and upon which all communications and interpretations, verbal and non-verbal, rest (Foulkes, 1964: 292). The group matrix works on the level of belief, action and cohesion; network and matrix reinforce one another. Communications regarding belief and action are transmitted through a three-layer series of recognitions: the basic matrix, the groups unifying substrate; the dynamic matrix, the groups view of its own action imperatives; and the personal matrix, the relation between the members of the group, and the group itself. In considering the concept of matrix, Neri argues it is essential to look for the constituent elements of the common space and of the group eld in sensorial experiences. In addition to understanding group behavior, one must grasp its terrain, where it works and operates (Neri, 1998: 27). How do we account for linking action in the group space, a concept Neri calls group resonance? Consider that group resonance may have something to do with beliefs, and in the political group, with ideology and a group logic. In the case of Germany, the hatred of the Jews, racist biological theory, and eugenics emerge as a group reason, a grand explanation that spans all cultural practices. Transpersonal phenomena in the group arise from common beliefs and shared psychological and physical space. Shared psychological space appears in how the group orients itself to thought, ideas, to prevailing opinion, for example, the belief that the Jews were the innate carriers of typhus, or the radical Muslim mullah teaching that all evil arises from the West and that Western culture is the mortal enemy of the true believer in Islam. For the political or culture group to work effectively, it must share psychological space that operates on both conscious and unconscious levels conscious in the sense of guiding and orient- ing group behavior (the construction of ghettos to contain Jewish contamina- tion), and unconscious in the sense of provoking similar forms of identication that forge the groups empathic connections. Group resonance emerges as the sense within the group that its shared beliefs represent something special; that its faith in what it believes to be right and just is unquestionably true in Germany a set of virtues rationally congured by a racist biological, genetic and medical science, and with al Qaeda, precepts enunciated through religious verse and study of sacred pronouncements. Glass 214 Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps GROUP AS COMMUNITY Neri offers intriguing categories of group psychological analysis. Take, for example, the concepts of the emerging group state and the fraternal community stage. He asks, when does the group become a functioning coherent unit? At what point does it meld or blend together as a common actor? He argues that every group is built around the idea of a messiah and the fascinating and enthralling ideas that surround the messiah gure [a concept analogous to Bions view of the group designating a leader to save it from imploding (Bion, 1989)]. The group nourishes itself with messianic hope, faith in the future, the enrichment of ones life and life world. Further, the group surrounds itself in illusion, which is a response to a desire for security, a desire to preserve a threatened ego. And group illusion responds to the threat to individual narcis- sism by setting up group narcissism (Neri, 1998: 41). The aim is to form a good group, but the unconscious aims also involve forming bulwarks or defenses against what the group most fears: its tendency to disintegrate, to fall apart. The illusion of the good group is both a reaction to total anguish and bewilder- ment and an initial condition for birth and development (Neri, 1998: 42). Goodness is a quality dened by the groups inventory, its narrative of itself and the world. And goodness, as an absolute, attaches itself to the groups authorita- tive (or rational) explanations of itself, its belief-systems, the knowledge-claims that validate its existence in the present, past, and future. In some groups, members habitually experience a loss of the boundaries of self, through feelings of fear, uncertainty, anxiety-ridden perceptions of the outside; the group illusion deects this phenomenon and contains what are powerfully entropic feelings in the unconscious. Feelings of insecurity and loss of boundary, then, are no longer localized but, according to Neri, diffused and spread across a common or shared space. Belief in this respect may appear as a dream or phantasy that Neri likens to the excitement of people caught up in a party. With their momentary at-one-ness they may be unied with the group, but they still retain a memory of their previous position, that is, their position of isolation and detachment or depersonalization. The group sweeps them up and makes them feel whole, part of a greater unity far superior to the position of individuality or aloneness. He calls this process forging a common mental state. Moments of depersonalization may become psychological transit points towards other psychical conditions such as closer afnity with the group idea or to even, tragically, more isolation, a condition of paralysis where thinking is impossible, a disassembly of the individual position (Neri, 1998: 43). Emerging group states oscillate between positions of coherence and dis- integration, assembly and disassembly. The group illusion contributes mightily towards the integrative process precisely the function in Nazi Germany of the ideas of race hegemony and the phobic biological properties attached to Jews. These ideas (defenses against disintegration phantasies) ght the feelings of dis- assembly; the nervousness of the self in the group. In addition, illusion coalescing 215 Group phantasy Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps as ideology welds the emerging group state into a mental and psychological unity, and accounts, as well, for the creation of the fraternal, communal bond. It is at this stage that the group becomes identiable as a collective subject speaking with one political voice, a cohesiveness enabling action. To support his thesis of group cohesion Neri draws from the existential phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, 1984/1991). According to Sartre, the fusion of the group leads individuals to emerge from isolation, alienation and impotence (Sartre, 1984/1991: 47). Emergence from individual passivity signals the joining of a group; and in concert, individuals begin to act on the world. No longer facing the world alone, the self merges with others to act towards achieving common goals. This reciprocity of relationship enables change to develop. Each individual has a right in relationship to the group, but the holder of the right is not each individual isolated to himself, but each member of the group in relation to the group itself, insofar as he is a part of the fraternal Community (Sartre, 1984/1991: 48). Rousseaus concept of the General Will runs through this formulation, at least in my reading of Neri, it appears to do so. Each member, unreservedly, gives the self to the community and in return receives back, from the community or the group, emotional life, sustenance and meaning. Rousseaus comments in The Social Contract on the binding character of civil religion suggest not tolerance and individual detachment, but the oppo- site: the fervor of intolerance, and enthusiastic participation in an Idea greater than oneself (Rousseau, 1950). This is especially true in the context of Nazi Germany, because the fraternal community understood itself in terms of a general will drawn from the ideol- ogy of race belief. To be a member of the group, to hold a right in relation to the group, meant that the group enacted or carried the fantasies of each member of the group fantasies including the cleansing and purication of the blood, the removal of infection from the world, and the purging through re of a con- taminated racial and biological environment. What this fraternal culture group creates is a common psychological space that allows for the construction of col- lective forms of thought which both create the world and drive away uncon- scious demons in the groups members, a kind of resonance initiated and maintained by the groups psychological/perceptual afnity. But this common space is also mental or conscious, bounded by prevailing knowledge-claims and practices that provide authoritative justication. Anzieu: . . . the psychical space brings about transformations of sensory qualities into elements of phantasies, suppressed thoughts, which in conscious form may resemble rational argument, scientic proof, cultural practice and professional standards (Anzieu, 1984: 230). Knowledge-claims coming out of the group environment bolster the psychi- cal envelope, enrich the skin of explanation, and offer a reassuring language, words heard weav[ing] a symbolic skin (Anzieu, 1984: 230). Never underesti- mate, Anzieu warns, the power of language to construct the world; the written [and it should be added, the spoken] word has the power to function as a skin (Anzieu, 1984: 231). So this psychical universe a bundle of perceptions fertile Glass 216 Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps with linguistic authority, imagination and feeling, refers not necessarily to physi- cal space, but to the space existing between individuals forming a group, that is to say, individuals bound one to another . . . by the many things which they have in common . . . [Group resonance means the] feeling of belonging and . . . a distinction between what the group is and what it is not (Anzieu, 1984: 49). Now here is where ideology enters the picture with the large culture-group or association (for example, groups considered part of the fabric of civil society). Psychological space is contained or held together to prevent disintegration through what Neri calls a mental skin. The group takes over all psychological boundary functions through the provision of a mental skin (belief systems) that literally adhere to the psychological self. And like Anzieus notion of a skin ego, this mental skin is the protective casing that holds individuals together (Anzieu, 1984: 50). It works both on the conscious level of reason (knowledge, the professions, social practices), and unconsciously as the affective glue adher- ing group identications and symbols. Boundaries, both rational and psychologi- cal, become membranes or barriers; membranes holding in the collective anxiety; barriers in the sense of keeping out poisonous thoughts, toxins in the environ- ment, defects in the gene pool, polluted esh. The mental skin of the group functions as a transpersonal container and keeps inside those values essential to the belief structure of the group and outside, those values and others the group hates (tainted Jewish blood; in the case of the al Qaeda network, corrupt Western culture). This mental skin provides symbols of identication that will enable members of the group to resist temptation or tendencies to transgress mental and physical boundaries (in Germany sexual relations with Jews; for the September 11 terrorists the ability to live in Western cultural environments and to remain immune to temptation and evil). What is important here is that the group is united by a psychological and not necessarily a physical space. In Germany these interpersonal containers were provided by race theory in its practices, in medical care, art, entertainment, literature, and in the day-to-day group life of civil society probably the most dramatic embodiment of these containers. Bion refers to this in his concept of the binding quality of unconscious phan- tasies (Bion, 1987). In the case of Germany, the unconscious phantasy of puri- cation (and the elimination of lth) received sanction through social and cultural practices reinforcing the boundary that keeps out the bad, and strengthening the ideologys mental skin (the transpersonal pool of feelings, emotions and ideas). Some of these mental forms might be thought of as psychotic cysts split off from the normal function of the group. However, in the case of what I am calling the culture-group, there are no psychotic cysts in the group itself or what the group would call psychotic. In Germany in 1938, the murder of schizo- phrenics, for example, is seen as a normal and necessary part of the culture- groups transpersonal container. The euthanasia program of the late 1930s classied a number of different groups as infectious (either biologically or geneti- cally) and therefore subject to extermination on the grounds of being a danger 217 Group phantasy Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps to the nations (or communitys) health. From the internal point of view that is, from the groups consciousness outwards nothing of their action was per- ceived to be psychotic. Psychotic aspects of the personality are literally normal- ized by the group; for example, we would regard the phantasy of ploughing a jumbo jet into the World Trade Center as crazy, but not for the September 11 terrorists. The phantasy had been normalized and realized through their group, or more specically, through the resilient mental skin that contained the ter- rorists thoughts, phantasies and fears. This eld of the mental state transforms into a eld of hate. Thus, the groups mental skin denes itself through the imagery and symbology of hated objects and through the group imperative, to act to rid the world of the hated unclean objects. GROUP ODOR: A SUGGESTIVE METAPHOR Neri notes the observation by Metter regarding group odors (Metter, 1994). I think this is interesting as a representation of group cohesion and resonance, a kind of olfactory accompaniment to the more visual mental skin. Metter (1994) writes that in certain environments public lavatories, breweries, stations an odor has been deposited, so specic and characteristic that even though the rooms have been thoroughly aired, we continue to perceive that this odor has pervaded the environment. Similarly, going into certain groups, we feel, for example, a sense of longstanding rancor, or of gloom and boredom, that cannot be removed. Going into other groups, we have a sense of mental openness and lightness. If the group produces certain mental elds, these can permeate what Correale has dened as historical eld, giving origin to a quality of culture, of belonging to this certain group, which cannot easily be modied and trans- formed (Correale, 1991: 160). Bions proto-mental systems, primitive mentality, the group at a more archaic level of organization, are other ways of expressing this sense of a group odor (Bion, 1962). It is akin to an automatic or compulsory communication that occurs at the proto-mental level of understanding and therefore is sensed as being there, even though it is not readily denable. This sense of being there, of being in the right place, is a psychological space, dis- tinguished by the intensity of imminent communication. Neri refers to emotive constellations, unconscious thoughts evolving and being picked up by others . . . a constellation that is still being formed and dened (Neri, 1998: 105). In politi- cal terms, the group as self-object knows itself through the mirroring effect of group ideology. Neri addresses the issue of the passage of emotions, thoughts and phantasies from the individual to the group, and for our purposes in understanding political action, the other way around: from the group to the individual. This passage is facilitated by what he calls effective narration. Ideology may be thought of as an effective narration that comes to life and takes its place within the living fabric of the groups thought. These narratives in the case of Germany evolved through research and practice in professions charged with administering and Glass 218 Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps disciplining the body and self (medicine, psychiatry, education), organizing the public space (bureaucracy and regime), building and constructing (engineering) and creating and disseminating new ideas and concepts (the arts and sciences). Groups become fertile, but this fertility, birth of action and idea, a movement from sterility to regeneration, nds itself nurtured by social and cultural prac- tices. It is groups and civil associations that stimulate the phantasy of being cured, the projection of the bad outside, and rid the psychological and physical universe of that polluted outside. But groups also develop the strategies, mecha- nisms, technologies and institutions that embody and carry out whatever psy- chological imperatives push the construction of group phantasies. Indeed, the agent of the group phantasy emerges as the cultures practices, particularly as those practices affect the body, its internal and external regulation, its admin- istration and discipline. THE SKIN EGO Anzieu speaks of the imaginary skin, which covers the ego (Anzieu, 1989). It may become a poisoned tunic, suffocating, burning, disintegrating. Groups go to considerable lengths to put out this kind of re, this toxicity. A toxic skin ego means the group-community fears for its life, thus the drive for regeneration and purication. And in the group that drive appears as ideology, circulating through public representation, and stimulating the dread of being touched, the fear of contact, the phobic relation of the self to the object, the fear of contagion. The prohibition on touching contributes to the establishment of a frontier, an interface, between the Ego and the Id (Anzieu, 1989: 123). We crave the touch of the familiar; we are scared mightily by the presence, particularly the physical presence, of the strange, the foreign, the horrible, or what the group projects as the horrible. Anzieu writes: To exist at all the group needs an overarching agency [skin ego] that envelops it. Thus the group is organized around the same agencies as the individuals composing it. . . . The unconscious and conscious functioning of the group will differ depending upon the agency that serves as envelope to the group psychical apparatus; the enveloping agency also affects the behavior of the group, the goals and attitudes towards external reality. (Anzieu, 1984: 101) The group defends against its narcissistic wounds, it resists the impact of feelings like fragmentation anxiety, dismemberment. And the phanticized reality of the group, its protective envelope, is the messianic hope of being cured. The group itself becomes the curative agent and simultaneously, the curative process. . . . [T]he group reality is a product of collective phantasies and their symbolic representations (Anzieu, 1984: 101102). For example, in Germany, draconian race and marriage laws may be understood against the backdrop of the skin ego, and the impenetrable membrane constructed to keep out those seen to be lthy, contaminated and biologically and genetically impure. 219 Group phantasy Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps These laws (the membrane taking political form), instituted in 1935, legislated extreme punishment for race mixing, particularly in the realm of sexual contact between German and Jew. Punishments for Jews, for any sexual contact with a German, could be death. For Germans it could mean imprisonment and/or nes. CONCLUSION The issue here is how to explain the workings of political and cultural groups and their relation to mass murder; therefore to draw from small-group theory to explain these kinds of public phenomena may present analytical difculties. To see the small group as a laboratory sufcient to explain the action of large culture groups ignores the place of ideology as a group container and thoroughly over- looks the political signicance of group resonance. It may not be the leader that drives and denes action; rather, the signicant motivator may be the resonances carried and shared by the groups psychological space. Stanley Milgrams labora- tory at Yale lacked sufcient historical and physical scope to explain the mass murdering of Jews during the Holocaust (Milgram, 1974). It ignored the impact of ideology, cultural practice and group phantasy. While Christopher Brownings Ordinary Men presents credible evidence for the ordinary Germans complicity in mass murder, Browning subverts his argument by relying, heavily, on Milgrams experiments (Browning, 1992). What may provoke groups to engage in mass murder may entail more than obedience to authority, a kind of mindless acquiescence to the commands of superiors. Browning argues that there is precious little evidence showing that ordinary German soldiers or irregulars were punished for refusing to shoot Jews. If the inclination was there to exercise restraint, it could have been done without fear of reprisal; but in his study very few soldiers refused to engage in rounding up and killing Jews. The evidence suggests more than carrying out the wishes of authority. Such action took on a willed quality, with many participants exhib- iting enthusiasm at their task of killing. Similarly, with the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. No evidence, at least so far, demonstrates that par- ticipants were coerced into the plan. It appears to be the opposite: a great joy at being able to accomplish the destruction. Therefore, to assume that deference to authority explains group-initiated mass murder ignores the critical factor of group belief, the culturally internalized narratives pushing both individual and group, and the circulation of phantasies providing adhesive identications in the group itself. Likewise, the articial Tavistock group, the weekend experiment of strangers sitting in small rooms, is not sufcient to explain why intelligent, educated men smash airlines into 110-story buildings. There needs to be a new language of interpretation for political groups whose singular purpose is murdering, and for those groups in civil society that support this political logic. This interpretative language may require drawing data from the role of the professions and the Glass 220 Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps function of knowledge and religious belief in performing leadership guidance for groups. I want to stress here the notion of the Idea as leader; thus moving away from Freuds more limited notion in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego of the leader as a person, a charismatic gure generating feelings of love and attachment (Freud, 1921/1955). Why not consider a charismatic form of Knowledge? Ideologies in this respect become shared fantasies, psychological spaces where forbidden wishes may be deposited or displaced. In Anzieus terms the group illusion constructs a collective defense against potentially lethal per- secution anxiety. And these illusions, understood politically, may transform into ideology. He speaks of ego ideal, ideal ego, and super ego; ideology functions more like the groups ego ideal. It protects against fragmentation anxiety and fragmentation fantasies. And the professions through their authority, inuence on cultural practice, and knowledge-claims contribute to the construction of these ideological defenses. Anzieu also speaks of phantasy resonance, or ideas that grip an audience through unconscious associations and connection (analo- gous to Metters notion of the group odor), and he notes the power of the circula- tion of phantasies shared by a group as an implicit understanding of the world (Anzieu, 1984). Phantasy enables a group to split its containing functions into persecution and idealization. Idealizing the groups rescue functions, its curative ego ideal, and persecuting the hated Other, keeps group boundaries intact. Indeed, both functions may need to occur simultaneously to keep the group from splitting apart. It is a case where with the culture-group ideology becomes leader, with a set of informal leaders (in the professions), as opposed to the more narrow Freudian view of one singular leader. Bion refers to ideology as bible making, an interesting analogy because the scriptures of the bible contain unvarnished and undisputed truth (Bion, 1987: 80). The groups psychical envelope becomes this truth. It is inviolate, and it energizes, it points the way, provides the justi- cation and facilitates the action. Jews are the evil, or the radical Islamic declara- tion that Western culture contaminates the world. For too long group psychology has been under the impression that it is the leader who denes the goals. Bion, Anzieu and Neri demonstrate that it is often the group itself that shows the leader what to proclaim and declaim, that the group denes its parameters through ideology. Group leadership then may have as much to do with articulating the groups underlying proto-mental system (its odor, if you will), as it does with the thoroughly mistaken idea that it is the leader who drags the group along willy-nilly. Nothing in the case of Nazi Germany and the al Qaeda Network could be further from the truth. For the actors in both these mass-murdering environments, action comes from the faith in belief and ideology, as much as it does from the orders of the leader. 221 Group phantasy Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 5: 211221 (2008) Copyright 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps REFERENCES Anzieu D. The Group and the Unconscious, translated by Kilborne B. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Anzieu D. The Skin Ego, translated by Turner C. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Bion WR. Learning from Experience. London: Karnac Books, 1962. Bion WR. Clinical Seminars and Four Papers. London: Karnac Books, 1987. Bion WR. Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1989. Browning C. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. Correale A. Il Campo Istituzionale. Rome: Borla, 1991. Foulkes SH. Therapeutic Group Analysis. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964. Freud S. Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In Strachey J. (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XVIII (19201922). London: Hogarth, 1921/1955. Metter I. Genealogia. Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Milgram S. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. Neri C. Groups, International Library of Group PsychoAnalysis 8. Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998. Rousseau J-J. The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by Cole GDH. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company Inc, 1950. Sartre J-P. Critique of Dialectical Reason, vols. I & II. London: Verso Editions, 1984/1991. James M Glass PhD Department of Government and Politics University of Maryland, College Park, Md. USA jglass@gvpt.umd.edu