Freud, Tourism, and Terror

Abstract Travel and tourist magazines are major sources of information about destinations, events, accommodations, and transportation. The majority of this information is conveyed visually through colorful, stimulating, and seductive photographs of familiar landscapes and destinations. We examine a dozen popular U.S. travel magazines in the five months following the events of September 11, 2001 to discern the extent to which issues of risk, security, and anxiety are addressed or disavowed in editorials, articles, advertisements, and photographs. There is little mention of the tragic events on the magazine covers, in photographs, and articles; however, editors and regular staff writers often discussed security and risk and their impacts on destinations. In evaluating the magazines' responses, this paper draws on the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to offer the most rigorous utilization of psychoanalytic theory in tourism studies to date. In so doing, we seek to initiate a belated dialogue between critical tourism research and psychoanalytic approaches deployed in the disciplines of geography and social theory. Psychoanalytic concepts such as “symptom,” “ego,” “defense,” and “fantasy” enable us to critically understand the uncanny disjunctures between the exotic, vulnerable, terrorized, and sunny tourist worlds that traversed the pages of post-September 11 travel magazines.

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