Page - 172 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

172 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits experiences. Participants discuss together their key experiences of victimhood, which helps them to develop empathy. The adolescents see how hard other par- ticipants’ lives were, too. Instead of being laughed at, they develop together space for thinking and self -reflection. R.’s self -portrait and commentary, showing his inner ambivalence, helps him to find access to understanding and accepting his own feelings. When R. refuses to approach a rival in one exercise, we can recognize his underlying fragility and difficulty with emotional closeness. Violence as a direct path to paradise – the fascination of the jihad Since 2015, we can observe a new radicalization of adolescents in Austria and other European countries, where some adolescents follow the promise of finding a direct path to paradise through the “holy war against infidels”. Seen psycho- logically, this potential for radicalization is a symptom of inner ambivalence and the search for an identity. After being ostracized in European schools and feel- ing inadequate to scholastic or professional demands, these adolescents become heroes by deciding to become warriors of the jihad. Not only will they be rewarded with 21 willing virgins in paradise, but already on earth in the Califat when girls and young women are offered to them for “sexual enjoyment” (in effect, rape). Through the decision to join the jihad, they attain a collective identity by ostra- cizing infidels and joining an elite group of warriors for Islamizing the world. The requirement of following strict Islamic rules seems to overcome every other ethnic and cultural difference. What kind of inner world do these young people have, willing as they are to renounce the security and democracy offered by European civilization in order to risk their lives in this struggle? Benslama Fethi, a French psychoanalyst born in Algeria, has investigated this phenomenon and characterized the inner attitude of the “Super -Muslim” (2016). He uses this term as a prototype for the young man who “cannot be Muslim enough” – a torturing feeling that can blaze into flaming belief. Jihadists declare themselves “dead from love” (2016, 11; Benslama trans- lations by McQuade) and wish to avenge the insult to Islam ideals, converting all “infidels” to the true faith or killing them. This radicalization entails an alteration of values, with murder and suicide becoming a medium of communication. Kill- ing human beings becomes a spectacle and means of propaganda, as opposed to earlier times where murder tended to be concealed and denied. “Terror wishes to be a horribly destructive power, which can be abused at whim” (Ibid, 20). Jihad- ists feel themselves completely innocent of human justice, since God himself is behaving through them. The cry of “Allah akbar” – originally an expression of humble subservience to God, reminding the subject of his lowly status in the face of God – is turned into its opposite, a kind of battle cry into holy war granting the power to do anything in the name of holy law, exempting the jihadist from human law. This is similar to the modification of the word “Muslim”, originally meaning