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The press and various human and social science journals have been discussing the theme of terrorism for several years now, but without linking it to the theme of collective fears, which is what I am trying to do here. After reviewing a sample of press articles of recent years relating and analysing terrorist acts of aggression against our country, and identifying the manifest and implicit ideological orientations concerning jihadism, I searched the psychoanalytic, sociological and psychosociological literature for theses, theories and analyses that might help us to understand and elucidate the phenomenon as well as its impact on the populations concerned. Although they do not deal directly with terrorist acts of aggression, the approaches and theories proposed by the social psychology of religions make a notable contribution to the understanding of (pathological) tendencies to cruelty, violence and conversion to a perverted Islamist ideal within social or ethnic minorities who have remained marginalised from economic activity and cultural production and consumption. In the last part of the article I offer some hypotheses concerning the effects of terrorism and the psychological and psychosociological functions that it provides unintentionally.