http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/pap135h.htm
It contains the following explanation of an incapacity to tolerate uncertainty (Bion pointed to Keats' "negative capability". The incapacity is closely connected to "splitting" and to "contempt".
"Thinking about the dynamics of this way of thinking intrapsychically, why do people become fundamentalists? People or peoples or groups somehow come to feel deeply threatened. Poor people, disenfranchised people, displaced people, embattled people, refugees. In a reduced state people cannot bear uncertainty. What people do when they feel under threat is to simplify. To simplify in psychoanalytic terms is to regress, to eliminate the middle ground, to split, dividing the world into safe and threat, good and evil, life and death. To be a fundamentalist is to see the world perpetually in these terms to cling to certainties drawn from sacred texts or the pronouncements of charismatic leaders.
"The baby whose needs are not met blames the provider who has not provided or who has removed what one needs and is experienced as abandoning or withholding. One feels attacked, as it were, by lack, hunger, and one wants to retaliate. It is so tempting to defend oneself from feeling so abject by becoming in phantasy the opposite and attain a position of complete self-sufficiency or certainty. Bin Laden¹s father died when he was 10; the young Hitler was a failed painter. ŒI am nobody and am sure of nothing¹ becomes ŒI am powerful and sure about everything: it is in the book¹. If fundamentalists were really sure they would not have to be so intolerant. People who feel threatened in this way see others in very partial terms as part-objects. They suffer from phantasies of annihilation and defend themselves against these psychotic anxieties with rigid views. They lose the ability to imagine the inner world, the humanity of others. Sympathy, compassion and concern for the object evaporate, and brittle feelings of blaming and destructiveness predominate. They act out. Where acting out is, thought cannot be. It is not seemly that Vice President Cheney said over the weekend that he wants to have the head of Osama Bin Laden on a platter."
Ted