Body Politics and Pathways to Terrorism, a Social Psychological Study of Philip Roth's American Pastoral

The past decades witnessed a dramatic acceleration in the use of terrorism not only to resolve political disputes but also to give vent to unexplained feelings of anger and violent tendencies. The aim of this paper is to conduct an analysis of the milieu that produced the female terrorist in American Pastoral using a social psychological approach. The paper investigates the dynamics of the terrorist’s personality and how it is damaged by the failure to cope with the complications of childhood especially Oedipus Complex. Failure in this critical phase affects the female terrorist in adolescence and youth and leads her to embracing violent action. Ample reference is made to Freud as well as the seminal works of psychologists such as Bruce Bongar, John Horgan and Randy borum who studied the psychology of terrorism and how a terrorist is made. This paper also studies the bodies and physical appearances of selected characters as essentials for the mapping and interpretation of character and experience referring on the works of Shilling and Baudrillard who commented on the body as constitutive of the self as opposed to the disembodied approach of classical sociology. There is no consensus on what type of background provides the likely culture for a possible terrorist. New genres are required to offer novel perspectives on the phenomenon. The "neuroscience of brutality" is a nascent discipline that examines the possibility that evil could be a disease especially that brain scans reveal significant discrepancy between normal and violent people's ability to generate feelings of empathy and therefore keep their violent instincts in check. Until similar disciplines are developed to offer a much needed immunity against that fatal malady, averting these attacks, i.e. dealing with the symptoms rather than the disease, has proven more practical than unraveling the complexities of this demoniac mélange.