Projection, Terrorism, and the Fate of America’s Psyche
Whatever we experience as fate has its roots in the unacknowledged parts of the psyche. Jung was clear: projection is at the heart of the unlived life. When the self is emptied of content, it becomes devoid of meaning. Yet projection holds its own paradox — if all is pushed outward, one may eventually bump into recognition.
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” — Carl Jung
This irony pulses through America’s engagement with terrorism in the U.S. Since the towers fell, the U.S. has launched a “war on terror”, yet refuses to see how much terror was seeded in its own psyche: in obsessions with property, power, projection, and repression.
Dynamite, Anarchists, and the Promise of Peace
Alfred Nobel once said:
“My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions.” — Alfred Nobel
He believed that enabling greater destructive power would deter war. But instead, dynamite became one of history’s tools of terror.
Anarchists in the late 19th century adopted explosives to strike both the state and capitalist symbols, declaring the state itself complicit in violence.
“Anarchists are mouthpieces of a declining stratum of society; when they work themselves into a state of righteous indignation demanding ‘rights’, ‘justice’, ‘equal rights’, they are just acting under the pressure of their own lack of culture…” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Anarchism in the U.S. emerged as violent protest against capitalist enclosure and instrumental state power. That movement was suppressed with force, and the disowned parts of the American psyche — resistance, rage, the refusal to submit — were cast out as “foreign” or “radical”.
Projection and Repression
The U.S. government responded with sweeping repression. Anarchists were crushed, imprisoned, silenced. The link between anarchism and immigration was forged, shaping the legacy of U.S. immigration and repression. The disowned shadow — America’s own critique of concentrated power — was projected onto the outsider.
What the state could not own, it suppressed and demonised. The immigrant, the minority, the alien turned into scapegoats for a society that refused to listen to its inner contradictions.
Nobel’s Awakening vs. American Blindness
Nobel himself lived a parallel drama. After a mistakenly published obituary dubbed him “merchant of death”, he awoke to the cost of his inventions. His legacy became philanthropic, in part to atone for what his inventions had wrought.
America, by contrast, never paused. It doubled down on repression, telling itself that security justifies silence. The archetypal drama continues: projection, suppression, then the next backlash.
Fate Without Reflection
Projection tangles our being. The more reflection is avoided, the more the unconscious forces itself outward. Individuals and nations alike pay the same price: pain, fragmentation, history haunted by repetition.
Today, the United States enacts the same blindness: deporting its own citizens, stripping people of belonging in the name of purity and control. What began with anarchists and immigrants now repeats with new scapegoats.
This is the horizontal sliding of projection’s target: when one figure is repressed or expelled, another takes its place. As long as there is no reflection, the psyche will keep creating new enemies, new outsiders, new objects to carry what cannot be borne within.
The psychoanalysis of terrorism reveals a harsh truth: the psyche unowned becomes fate. And for those unwilling to look inward, destiny is already cast.
Author’s Note
I write Depth of Field to explore how history repeats itself when the psyche is ignored. In this essay, I turned to Jung’s idea of projection to examine America’s long entanglement with terrorism — from anarchists with dynamite to today’s deportations. The same shadow reappears, sliding horizontally onto new targets, until reflection breaks the cycle.
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Because fate begins where reflection ends.
References
Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (CW 9ii). Princeton University Press.
Nobel, A. (quoted in historical sources).
Nietzsche, F. (1889). Twilight of the Idols.