Can more psychology help us to understand something more of the 9/11 terrorist ‘attack on democracy’? Or is psychology already too much around us, leading us in the wrong direction as we try to make sense of these ‘strange times’? Psychology generally invites us to think about what people are thinking and why they do what they do, people as torn from social context; but psychological ways of thinking are also in the language we use when we articulate different ways of accounting for what is going on in the world. Some psychological theories are more tempting than others. A case in point is psychoanalysis, even when, and perhaps especially when, it seems to account for group psychology at times of war.

The search for a personal response to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks is one of the easiest things to do in this culture, easier even than the search for the one person responsible; but both kinds of search are driven by an underlying assumption that the most important causes and effects of such an event are to be found deep inside individuals. And some kind of psychology is always already at hand here to help us target what we feel and open it up for others to see. More difficult is an understanding of the material conditions which structure that search and make it seem as if the individual is source and destination of what has been going on since 11 September.