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The Depressive Personality: The Personality of The Terrorist, Conservative Republicians, Evangelical Christians and Others Who Must Obey Too Much

by Peter A. Magaro PhD

198 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #06-2555; ISBN 1-4251-0797-4; US$18.00, C$20.70, EUR14.79, £10.35

A description of those who need to obey so much they become our worse nightmare of what it means to be too good. A revealing picture of the person behind grisly terrorist acts and other forms of social violence.

About the Book

This book is an analysis of the personality who is the backbone of most extreme political and religious groups including those who spawn the terrorist. The book applies contemporary psychological constructs to explain why people join extreme social groups ranging from the fanatics in Khomeini's Iran, ultra-conservative Republican parties in America, and Moslem terrorist organizations in the Middle East and Afghanistan As contrasted with other current books on terrorism that place the cause of terrorism in nebulous cultural concepts or tribal artifacts, I have written a psychosocial work that profiles the complete personality of this person and reveals how his Everyman commonness contains the telltale signs of his eventual destructiveness. My emphasis is on the attributes of a person who is drawn to a life of obedience and the social avenues that are available to express his singular personality including but not limited to acts of terrorism.

They are the most controversial people of our time; the most despised and the most revered. Their life is a paradox in that they create whirlwinds when they are not living in complete obscurity. As individuals they are the dullest, but as actors they are the most outrageous. They certainly have captured the prize for the most press coverage of any one group of individuals. Considering all the attention they have received and the accomplishments they have realized their most surprising characteristic may be their ordinariness. While ordinary, they are the time bombs in our society. They sit passively waiting to explode into our consciousness and in many cases change the course of history

The point of this book is that social actions do not occur in a personal vacuum. People's needs and wants fill them until they coalesce into a recognizable form which is the shape of a public group. The decision for social action originates under the skin; only later is it exhibited as a public posture. This book reveals the person behind the social action. I will describe the psychological processes and feelings of a breed of individuals as they blend into a group that promotes and creates a social course of action.

This is the story of the death-bringers; those most willing to kill themselves and others in the most fanatical acts. This particular breed justify any violent social act as a religious-political rite, and within this context celebrate their person.

About the Author

Dr Magaro is an author of three psychology books and over 50 articles in professional journals. He has been studying personality types for over 25 years developing the specifications for what would be the terrorist personality as well as other social actors. He has been a Professor of Psychology at leading Universities and is currently Director of the Alzheimer Treatment and Memory Training Center in New York. Dr Magaro currently lives in New York City with his wife and children where terrorists are a personal matter.

Excerpts