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Putting the War on Terror on the Couch: Vamik Volkan’s Blind Trust

By Elizabeth Kiem

Fall 2004

In his new book, Blind Trust, psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan offers starkly different terms for what he sees as a troubling "societal regression." Volkan looks at bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the Bush administration and sees id, ego, and superego; he sees the war on terror as a series of "psychodynamics" and explains foreign policy as trickle-down Freudianism. Welcome to the world of psychopolitics.

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The Ministry of False Alarms

By Salman Rushdie

Fall 2004

In post-9/11 America there has come to be what I think of as the Ministry of False Alarms. The Ministry of False Alarms constantly raises the level of fear inside the United States. I’m not sure what these various rainbow-colored alerts are supposed to do: How does one react when the alert goes from yellow to orange? What does one do to deal with orange danger that one would not do in dealing with yellow danger? How do you relax when the level drops? The only purpose of these alerts is to scare people.

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