Terror and Mourning in Norway

The day after the July 22, 2011 Norwegian terror attack by Anders Behring Breivik that took 77 lives, Vamık Volkan wrote to me:

Dear Sverre,

I am very, very sorry about the tragedy in your country. It will be a huge task to help people to mourn. I am thinking of you.

Your friend, Vamık

It was a national tragedy that affected us all to varying degrees. In the chaos we felt then, Volkan’s words warmed our hearts and gave a direction that was difficult to imagine at the time.

Yes, we know now—it is a huge task to help people mourn. Some losses are not possible to bear. Many who were at the summer camp on the Island of Utøya, where 69 young people were killed and 110 wounded amidst total terror, still suffer and mourn. The survivors of the bombing in the governmental section of Oslo can never feel the same safety when going to work again. But they work on. Life has gotten slowly back into a daily rhythm, but something has changed forever. Grief takes a long time to adjust to, a new and brutal reality that hit too close to home.

We have learned about large-group identity from Vamık. This is a collective identity that is a silent but important part of our personality. On July 22, Norway’s large-group identity came shockingly to the surface. First, most instinctually thought—rather unpleasantly—that this must be a new al Qaeda attack, and as a result, started chasing foreign looking people in the streets. But it was a narcissistic blow discovering that the perpetrator of the attack was one of us, even one who claimed to be more Norwegian than most of us. Thus, we could not project our anger at an alien enemy. Self-blame and guilt came to the fore as well as justified anger at

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the perpetrator.

After this blow, the ceremonies and memorials brought us together on another level; not the one of ostracism and naming enemies, but more in the direction of self-scrutiny. The official and cultural elite took part in the ceremonies and helped the mourning process.

The trial was a shocking confrontation with another large group identity thriving in right wing milieus, especially on the Internet. The perpetrator, Breivik, showed no remorse, was deemed sane and sentenced to life in prison. His thinking and his ideology has, however, a large group of adherents and is thriving still.

Breivik attacked the social democrats in the government and the youth camp of the Norwegian Labor Party. The social democrats were targeted as enemy because they had allowed an Islamic “invasion” in Europe and created what he called Eurabia. To him, it was a religious war, where traitors had to be executed.

An interesting parallel to Breivik’s personal history appeared in the aftermath. The reports made public on his childhood revealed that he lived without a father present but with a mother who treated him as dangerous and evil and tried to control him in every way. Child care institutions were involved in his upbringing, and the recommendation from the child psychiatric team was unanimous: Breivik must be removed from his mother. His father fought for him, but then both he and the psychiatric team gave up after court fights (Aage Storm Borchrevink, A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Road to Utøya, 2012, in Norwegian). Breivik was then left with the evilness his mother projected on him. This led him to form an ideology where Islam became the evil force, and the social democrats failed to protect against it. They were traitors—as his father was—and deserved to be killed (Sverre Varvin, “The Madness of Ideology or the Ideology of Madness,” forthcoming in 2013 in Norwegian in the psychotherapy journal Matrix).

The society Breivik and those who think like him desire is autocratic and segregated: enemies of this social order should either be deported or killed. One could see this as one man’s lunatic fantasies, but the right wing groups flourishing in parts of Europe to-

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day demand it be taken seriously. Violence and persecution of so-called strangers are alarmingly high (Oddbjørn Leirvik, “Islam Is at War With the West” in Sigve Indergard (ed.), Academic Response To The New Right-wing Extremism, 2012, in Norwegian).

Volkan’s theory on large-group identity is of help here. When threatened, large groups regress. Volkan has 20 characteristics of this regression, including, among others: group members lose their individuality and the group is divided into those who “obediently follow the leader” and the bad ones who oppose. The division between “us” and “them” becomes a high priority, and projective and introjective forces are utilised to purify the group. The chosen trauma solidifies identity, and magical thinking dominates (Vamık Volkan, Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror, 2004).

The “Breivik society,” as this lone wolf terrorist described it in his manifesto, is a prescription for a large group to regress, and subsequently, become even more violent (Anders Berwick, A European Declaration of Independence, 2011). (Note that Anders Berwick was the pseudonym the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik used when publishing his manifesto on the Internet.) The terror attack on July 22^nd was preparation for what was deemed necessary to purify Europe; it was a true “anti-Jihadist” action performed by a “lone wolf” but based in an Internet community. This community functions to a large degree as a projection screen for the large group’s regressive and primitive aspects, and it allows for instant contact with and support for the individual, who, even if alone and outside, may feel supported by a large-group identity.

The psychoanalytic view on large-group phenomena may help us counteract this regressive development. The development in Norway after July 22^nd demonstrates what Volkan says about leadership. The leaders, with the prime minister as the central force, helped us through mourning rituals and took care that selfscrutiny could take the upper hand, not projection and revenge.

There is still a ways to go. The task of helping people to mourn is still going on and will have to continue for many years. The insights inherent in the work of Vamık Volkan were available when the terror in Norway happened, and they will continue to be

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available in future atrocities, and this is a legacy that cannot be underestimated.

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