The politics of fear and its defense mechanisms : a terror management theory perspective to Ahmad Khaled Tawfik's Utopia

Abstract EN

Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a social psychological theory inspired by the existential psychoanalytic writings of Ernest Becker.

In fact, this existential psychology began in reaction to Freudian theories as they both explore the motivational consequences of human unconscious conflicts.

TMT posits that the clash between humans' desire of life and their awareness of the inevitability of death stimulates paralyzing existential terror.

This terror could be managed by cultural worldviews that provide a set of prescribed valuable standards which, if met by individuals, will help acquire self-esteem and develop the sense of being important and valuable in a meaningful reality.

These prescribed standards of cultural worldviews will, eventually, give the hope of transcending death and attaining immortality in either a literal or a symbolic sense - either through a strong belief in religion and the afterlife or being part of something more enduring than ourselves like families, ethnic groups or professions.

This study examines the psychodynamics of traumatic cultural disruption, its consequences as well as its defense mechanisms with reference to a dystopian science fiction discourse - Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's novel Utopia (2009).

Through exploring the anxiety-buffer and the mortality salience hypotheses, the study analyzes characters' attempted maintenance of psychological shields against the awareness of death and their continuous minimizing of the threats to their cultural systems and personal values.