Putting the Umm Back in the Umma – Suicide Attack: Understanding the Terrorists’ Deepest Terrors Nancy HATVELDT KOBRIN Psychoanalyst, Hennepin-Regions Psychiatry Training Program, St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. Abstract. This paper attempts to outline how the projected image of the female suicide bomber is directly linked to the prenatal mother. We are all aware how violence is viciously cruel. Terror is different from fear. It is nonverbal and left over from early childhood where it has not been put into words and then acted out nonverbally. This contribution explores the role which the mother plays in the early life of a child. I refer mainly to the works of Melanie Klein who shed light on how we relate to the world nonverbally through the use of objects. She took up where her mentor, Sigmund Freud, had left off by taking the emphasis away from the father to the importance of the bonding relationship between the infant and the “good breast.”i Nowadays neuroscience teaches that the mother-infant relationship is crucial for the development of a healthy well-adjusted child who can grow to trust his own perceptions of the world surrounding him. What does this say about terrorists? Keywords. suicide bombers, jihadists, psychoanalysis, mother-child bonding, imagery How This Work Began When I was eight years old I first learned about the Golden Age of Spain where Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together in convivencia; I was fascinated. I went on to study the languages and cultures of medieval Iberia with a passion. However, my unconscious agenda was a wish to understand how very different people negotiated the same geo-political space, be it Iberia or under the roof of a home. I began working on terrorism then but it was the summer before September 11th when I was invited by a leading psychoanalyst, Dr. Joan Lachkar,ii to participate in a human rights seminar on the suicide bomber. She asked me to provide a psychohistorical backdrop because of my doctoral work on aljamia and the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain.iii My work had been written up in German in the mid 1980’s because of the Gastarbeiter problem.iv While training clinically I turned from trauma survivors to undertake the actual study of perpetrators, the terrorists themselves. I began to see a sadomasochistic dance as in Shakespeare’s Othello. The constant cycling of projection-rage-shame-blame translated into a kind of sexual obsession/addiction, bonding to pain rather than pleasure. Could the banality of murder-suicide be driving a significant part of the suicide attack’s alleged political violence? Let us say, it all begins in utero when the prenatal environment creates the “motherboard” for the baby’s mind. This is a fragile maternal womb, which becomes exposed to a postpartum environment where the female instead of being valued and cherished is denigrated, abused and pathologically controlled from day one. There is no regard for the mother’s stress hormone level or her devotion to her newborn. Ultimately, this not only jeopardizes the infant’s health but can lead to severe ego dysfunction as well as cognitive impairments, such as flying planes into buildings rather than just fantasizing about it.v The mother-child relationship is key to understanding any culture. According to the British-trained Iraqi child psychiatrist Dr. Sami Timimi, in Arab Muslim culture the child is never permitted to separate psychologically from Ummi, that is ‘mommy’ in Arabic.vi The baby becomes an appendage to the mother in a state of fusion (a problematic bond). The mother is over-idealized yet the female is denigrated. The only way she obtains power is by giving birth to a male baby. Ummi comes from the same root as Ummah – so that the Arab Muslim communal self-perception is linked to the maternal. Berko reports that Ummi is the only one who could have stopped her child from becoming a suicide bomber.vii The Saudis repeatedly sent Umm Usama to the Sudan and Afghanistan in order to get her son to behave.viii In Western terms, this could mean a complete loss of self or self-identity. The constellation of devalued female, venerated mother with a rigid honor code is not a far cry from Asian cultures – Japanese, Vietnamese and Hindu.ix According to the kamikaze’s training manual, it guided him not to fear death because when he was within two meters of his target, the face of his mother would appear and he would be rejoining her.x Nor is western culture immune. In patriarchal families, be they Catholic, Lutheran, Mormon or Jewish, ergo a greater possibility for such problematic bonding exists. This is prevalent also in cults, clans, secular or a single parent family, the bond may be too much, or what is known as traumatic bonding.xi To make sense of this, one might view the horrific holocaust of the suicide attack by “reading” its mute imagery. This unseverable bond is reflected in the suicide attack’s imagery.xii My theory is not meant solely to provide a psychological profile for the suicide bomber, rather to provide understanding of how the rise of suicide bombers has spread throughout diverse cultures and is now at the global level. It is also not meant to blame the mother but to understand how she finds herself and her baby in a hostile social environment. The imagery holds a clue to a predominant psychological problem concerning maternal attachment, its pathological suffocating bond and its attendant psychological fusion which causes developmental arrest, called neotenation, i.e. not being permitted to grow up.xiii For a certain segment of this population, the only way one can liberate him or herself from such bonding is through murder, suicide or becoming a suicide bomber whereby paradoxically one seeks a reunion in death and the fantasy of rebirth. In psychological terms re-bonding through bombing is the only way one liberates oneself. Sadly murder, suicide bombing, terrorism becomes the replacement for normal separation individuation from mother, blowing oneself up paradoxically is far less painful than having to leave the mother and to suffer the pain of separation and become an individuated, responsible adult. The suicide bomber finds consolation in knowing that death provides a reunion with mother in her purest state. There are four things to keep in mind: 1. All behavior is potentially meaningful.xiv 2. People are more alike than they are different.xv 3. Violence is violence. It does not care how we humans label it. 4. Everybody has a mother.xvi When a suicide attack happens, we are hot-wired back to mama. A picture speaks a thousand words - The importance of imagery Let us take a look at what is meant by imagery. Ninety percent of our emotions are communicated nonverbally, especially visually. “Nonverbal behavior is farther removed from consciousness.” xvii How do we understand the pantomime of explosive pandemonium? By returning to the scene of the crime, I asked “What do we have here?” - murdered people, a suicide terrorist, and body parts. Where else do we find this? Murder-suicide in domestic violence, the murder of one’s “own” as in the honor killing, plus serial killing’s body parts. I analyzed its graphic materiality as an unconscious explicit message sent by the terrorists. In classic forensic psychiatry murder-suicide is referred to as a death fusion.xviii Imagine a spectrum of fusion images. On the far left, 180 degrees opposite or mirror image to the death fusion, we encounter the first image in life, that of the prenatal mother carrying the fetus – the life fusion.xix The next image is that of the postpartum mother nursing the infant a la the Madonna and child.xx • The prenatal mother • The postpartum mother • The terrorizing sexual mother The third fusion is sex, but beyond sex is the terror of dependency needs and abandonment. The hidden wishes in the couple are not dying alone and being completely taken care of as if one were a baby. When this cycle is disruptedxxi aggression escalates, even to murder-suicide. It is less painful to die than to have to face the dread of separation, loss and mourning. A good example is the sexual fusion in the Arab Kama Sutra. It is crucial to suicide terrorism because of its honor code - “A man’s honor lies between the legs of a woman.” Its image graphically depicts a sadomasochistic fusion in a culture which is sexually repressed. It is surprising more scholars have not referenced this in this context before.xxii To continue along the spectrum, the next is a mixed fusion of life and death. In Christianity it is the Pieta, the Mother cradling Christ. There is also an Islamic Pieta because the Prophet dies in the arms of his beloved Aisha (Arabic: ‘life’). Everything concerning the life of the Prophet is to be imitated.xxiii One asks – where is the father? The father’s absence seems to reflect the frequently heard complaint in the interview literature of terrorists that their fathers were absent.xxiv We might conclude that the reason terrorists remain forever tied into their mothers is precisely because of the absence of a father in Islamic regimes. The trend continues, the father is tied into his mother, the terrorist’s grandmother xxv It should come as no surprise then that there would be a Hamas “Jadda” bomber, a postmenopausal grandmother.xxvi But a suicide attack’s imagery does not just relate to fusion. There are also the body parts, where “the bad mother” parts get translocated into the object world as in serial killing. The crime scene is often a horrific scene of body parts strewn all over, organized or chaotic. It is noteworthy that if chaotic, it is considered more psychotic reflecting the killer’s mind. Serial killers are known to have disturbed relations with their mothers. They often look like “normals” because their psychosis is buried in the personality.xxvii But what do these body parts mean psychologically? Could they be part object representation of the early mother – the breast, the nipple, etc.? I believe so. When a baby is first born he/she does not perceive the mother as a separate person. A baby can grow into looking like an adult but with a shaky insecure maternal experience.xxviii This is part of the reason, it is suggested, that terrorists plug into a charismatic leader or a gang in order to feel excitingly alive and stabilized as a way of compensating for traumatic bonding.xxix The female suicide bomber speaks to such bonding. Accompanying her image is the myth of the womb’s pure, blissful paradise. She is a concrete hallucination of the terrorists’ fantasy about their maternal love-hate relationship at first presented in an idealized way as heroine and then blown to hell. Why must they do this? The prenatal mother arouses in the male terrorist’s mind and in all of us what we may have not gotten from our own mothers – i.e. physical and emotional deprivation. The image arouses envy whose response is to attack and destroy.xxx All the terrorist organizations, which have consciously deployed her, reveal unconsciously, it is suggested, their murderous wishes for their own mothers. The splitting is so profound between conscious and unconscious behavior in terrorism, that we are not even aware of it. Yet together it carries a powerful psychological punch because the chaos seems impossible to make sense of - terror which cannot be explained and put into words holds us psychologically hostage. The deployment of the female suicide bomber signals a psychotic regression on the part of the terrorist organization.xxxi She destroys herself and her womb because she feels devalued. She has internalized male hatred for her as self-hatred. By killing herself she will be appreciated in this perverse male world. Just as the philosopher of war, Sun Tzu, wrote that one must know the enemyxxxii so too must we know their core terror - dependency on the mother. They hide their unconscious rage against their mothers in plain sight by means of the female suicide bomber. While she is proffered as a quest for equality,xxxiii this is only the surface story. The other half cycles around the quest to be liberated from the mother. It is fallacious and naïve to buy into the argument that gender equality is being sought in a male dominated social environment which creates and sends out female suicide bombers; they simultaneously and unconsciously communicate the male’s wish to annihilate the prenatal mother. The terrorists have not been able to reconcile the idea that they are born from a denigrated humiliated female. It leaves them feeling contaminated and obsessed with female sexual purity to the point of delusional thinking, that if it is not pure then, blood must be willfully spilled in order to cleanse honor.xxxiv But I am not one to cast stones at glass houses as it is very dangerous to be a prenatal mother in the West. The leading cause of death is murder by her spouse or partner.xxxv Could this be the hidden problem functioning behind the scenes of suicide terrorism? Could this be both her allure and her terror? Is the suicide attack tapping into our maternal wi-fi? Think of the tragic murder of the pregnant Laci Peterson by her husband Scott.xxxvi Her murder shared many similarities with the suicide attack’s ideological fantasies. A forensic psychiatrist wrote that Peterson acted out a rebirth fantasy by killing off his wife. He felt himself to be an orphan.xxxvii The orphan is very important in Islam.xxxviii In Jihadi Islam the 72 virgins syndrome functions literally as a rebirth fantasy. Jihad holds tremendous appeal to Western converts to Islam too and yet there is an entire body of literature on the psychology of conversion which points to it as an attempt to repair the maternal bond.xxxix Then there is the problem of explaining the “homegrown” jihadis, 2nd and 3rd generation. But weren’t most of their mothers brought over as child brides? Haven’t the grandmothers been providing daycare from birth to age three, when the need to hate and have an enemy is learned in the home?xl How westernized were they really? And as I have just shown, even then that is no guarantee. Bonding with a baby is a laborintensive experience which must be set in a viable social environment where the female is valued. Terrorists manifest highly dissociated behavior. They are terrified.xli They harbor intense feelings of victimization because they were, in fact, victimized as little children. They dissociate from their terrors and transform them into a heroic badge of false pride. They not only feel rage and terror, they become the rage and the terror. Their self-righteous beliefs drive their behavior, which is concrete and literal. While they may use metaphor, such as Usama uses in his poetry, it is superficial because they lack empathy for the enemy. They speak as if they do not have a filter, blurting out their poor perceptions. Try stepping back and pretend that you are a pre-school teacher, trying to make sense out of a hysterical toddler’s behavior, even though it could be so inhumanely gross as a beheading. Like Freud’s famous question, “What do women want?”, I ask “What is it that these terrorists really want?”. Are we mind readers? I believe they want nothing more than a genuine human connection. Why? Because my hunch is, that they have rarely experienced it. While it will always be important to “read their lips”, it will also become increasingly important to “read” all their other sensory perceptionsxlii, in addition to imagery as I am suggesting. We are only in the opening phase of understanding the phenomenon. References i Freud struggled to understand the female in part because he was too close to his own mother. On Freud’s relationship with his mother, see L. Breger. (2000). Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Elsewhere I have argued that Freud had a profound identification with the Golden Age of medieval Spain. His thinking was quite Sephardi and that this is something, which “Reb” Derrida understood. It was Western philosophical tradition which appropriated psychoanalysis. Klein followed in this “non” Western aspect of psychoanalysis. Cf. “Uriel Acosta, J.M. da Costa, M.D. “What’s Freud got to do with it? or How Ladino and Sephardic Culture inform psychoanalysis and trauma studies,”, ed. D. Bunis, Conference Languages and Literatures of Sephardic and Oriental Jewry, ed. by David M. Bunis, Yaakov Benttolila and Efraim Hazan. Proceedings of the Misgav Yerushalayim’s Sixth International Congress, June 11-162000. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Press. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Press, in press. ii J. Lachkar. (1998). The Many Faces of Abuse: Treating the Emotional Abuse of High Functioning Women. Northvale, New Jersey/London: Jason Aronson Inc.; J. Lachkar, (1993). Paradox of peace: folie a deux in marital and political relationships. Journal of Psychohistory 20(3): 275-287. iii N. Kobrin, Moses on the Margin: A Critical Transcription and Semiotic Analysis of Eight Aljamiado-Morisco Legends on the preIslamic Figure of Musa. 2 volumes, Minneapolis, 1983, Ph.D. Thesis. iv N. Kobrin, (1988) Die psychoanalytische Ubertragung al historisches Symptom: Freud und seine fueros. In Materialitat der Kommunikation, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 94-105; (1986) Aljamía - Lebenstil und Gruppenbindung am Rande des christlichen Europ, transl. by Ludwig Pfeiffer, in Stil: Geschichten und Funktionene eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselements, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 463-474; (1985) das sprachproblem: kreolisierung, kulturpluralismus und das beispiel der morisken. übersetzung - ursula link-heer. kultuRRev olution: zeitschrift für angewandte diskurstheorie. 10 fata morgana multikultur?nr. 10 oktober, 63-66.k v S. Rose, The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind, London: Vintage, 2005; A. Schore. (1994). Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associatees, Inc., Publishers; F. de Waal. (2005). Our Inner Ape, New York: Riverhead Books; R. M. Sapolski. (2005). Monkeyluv, New York: Schribner; R. M. Sapolsky. (1998). The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament, New York: Simon & Schuster; D. Prince-Hughes. (2004). Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, New York: Three Rivers Press; D. Niehoff. (1999). The Biology of Violence: How Understanding the Brain, Behavior and Environment Can Break the Vicious Circle of Aggression, The Free Press; A. Raine. (1993). The Psychopathology of Crime: Criminal Behavior as a Clinical Disorder, New York: Academic Press. vi S. Timimi. (2002). Pathological Child Psychiatry and the Medicalization of Childhood, New York: Brunner-Routledge, p. 22. vii A. Berko, A. (2002). The moral infrastructure of chief perpetrators of suicidal terrorism: Cognitive and functionalist perspectives. Unpublished dissertation, Bar Ilan University. (in Hebrew); A. (2004). The Path to the Garden of Eden: The World of Female and Male Suicide bombers and their Dispatchers. Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth Press. (in Hebrew); (2006). On The Way to Paradise: Inside the Mind of the Female and Male Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers. New York: Praeger Publishers; Berko, A. and E. Erez, “Ordinary People” and “Death Work”: Palestinian Suicide Bombers as Victimizers and Victims, The Journal of Violence and Victims, Volume 20, Number 6, December 2005; Berko, A. Wolf, Y & M. Addad. (2005). The moral infrastructure of chief perpetrators of Palestinian suicidal terrorism, Israel Studies in Criminology, 9, 10-47. Viii “The Saudi Government continued its dialogue and sent many delegations to bin Laden and tried to persuade him to retreat from his jihadist policies. This was because of the strong relations between the bin Ladin family and the ruling House of Saud. Sometimes they sent his brothers [half-brothers, technically] and sometimes they sent his mother. At one time, the Saudi Government sent his mother and his half-brother on the maternal side by a special Saudi plane that landed at Kandahar airport. When they arrived there, they tried to convince him. Sheikh Osama said: “This is a principle. I keep it in my heart and I have promised God not to abandon it. Like one of the Companions of the Prophet, who said: “By God, you will not be able to deviate me from my path even if you have one thousand souls and these souls are given up one by one unto death.” Yet he was very kind to his mother and he treated her well and used his own methods to convince her. She returned empty-handed.” (as related by bin Laden’s bodyguard, Abu Jandal.) P.L. Bergen. (2006). The Osama Bin Laden I Know. New York: Free Press, p. 239. The mother has been used as bait in the case of the engineer, Yehiya Ayyash, as well as the Pakistani practice of stripping the mother naked in front of her jailed terrorist son in order to get him to talk as reported by R. Gunaratna, “The Brain: Khalid Sheikh Muhammad”, Playboy, June 2005, p. 169. S. Katz writes: “There had always been certain unwritten rules etched in the Shin Bet’s playbook as to what they would or wouldn’t do in counterterrorist operations. Suspects, informants, or any of the other characters that came across their path could be manipulated, threatened, roughed up, and in some cases, tortured; but a different set of rules had always applied to women, especially Muslim women. In a region of the world where butchery was an accepted practice of settling disputes, sexual respect had remarkably been maintained. Israeli troops and Shin Bet had a markedly superior record to their Palestinian counterparts who, according to claims made by Amnesty international, had routinely threatened male prisoners that their wives, mothers, and sisters would be raped before their eyes if they did not cooperate, confess or compromise fellow operatives.” S. M. Katz. (2002). The Hunt for the Engineer. New York: The Lyons Press, p. 204. Bouyeri was his mother’s favorite; she died of cancer and then six months later he murdered Van Gogh. Cf. I. Buruma. (2006). Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. New York: The Penguin Press, p. 207. Similarly, Zarqawi’s mother, Umm Sayel, died on February 29, 2004 from leukemia. He mourned her the traditional 40 days and then abducted Nicholas Burg on April 9 taking him hostage and beheaded him on May 11. This inaugurated his rampage of beheadings. J.-C. Brisard. (2005). Zarqawi: The New Face of Al-Qaeda. New York: Other Press, p.131. This is a common phenomenon seen clinically where the loss of the mother will precipitate more aggressive, even violent behavior. Law enforcement might benefit from tracking the health of the mother for detainees. I found that when I asked specifically about the mother, hoyoo, in Somali, the detainee opened up and revealed important insights. ix J. Miller, God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a militant Middle East, Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, p. 118. The Saudis commissioned a 17 member team which assessed 2800 jihadis just returned from Afghanistan in the early 1990s and the psychological profile which came into focus is that many had experienced child abuse and had witnessed the abuse of their mothers. Their fathers were violence and absent. Many jihadis had developed addictions which are known to be related to maternal attachment and traumatic bonding. To the best of my knowledge, no counter terrorist expert has ever referred to this study. I have not been able to locate it either to substantiate Miller’s report. It could be a virtual goldmine for understanding the mindset of the jihadis and the Saudi understanding of that phenomenon back then. x To attempt suicide one must become habituated to it. It is a slow evolving process. To what extent have these suicide bombers been family scapegoats? Cf. T. Joiner. (2005). Why People Die By Suicide, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, p. 143. xi D. Dutton and S.L. Painter. (1981). Traumatic bonding: the development of emotional attachments in battered women and other relationships of intermittent abuse. Victimology: An International Journal 6:139-155. D. Dutton (1995). The Domestic Assault of Women. Vancouver: UCB Press. There is an entire body of literature on maternal bonding and addictions. xii While the focus is on the mother, it is not meant to blame her, if anything to further explain the hostile social environment in which she finds herself with her child. xiii T. Grandin. and C. Johnson. (2005). Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. New York: Scribner. xiv Howell refers to cultures such as this as dissociogenic. E.F. Howell. (2005), p. 263. The Dissociative Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, “Dissociation is the one way that the psyche modifies its own structure to accommodate interaction with a frightening but needed and usually loved, attachment figure [the mother].’ (Howell, p. 3) J. Zulaika. (1984). Basque Violence. Reno/Las Vegas, NV: University of Nevada Press, detailed these phenomena, noting that journalists characterized ETA terrorists as lacking verbal skills. “Current thinking concerning highly dissociated, traumatized behavior stresses the concrete, its literal use of language, narrative rigidity and lack of metaphor, common to the sociopath.” (Howell, p. 257) xv Ibid. xvi This was the header for the New York Times Magazine on Zacarias Moussaoui, Dominus, 2003, Everybody has a mother, The New York Times Magazine, 9 February. xvii S. Nowicki, Jr., and M. Duke. (2002). Will I Ever Fit In?, New York: The Free Press, p. 14: “Nonverbal communication is further removed from awareness than verbal language.”; “The initial and most important significant other from whom we receive feed back about what we are like is our mother. . . Since we do not begin to develop effective verbal language until we are about 18 months to 2 years of age, our initial reflected appraisals are communicated and secured nonverbally.” P. 41; “Nonverbal language is the language of how we feel about ourselves.”, p.47. “Nonverbal behavior takes place outside of awareness, p. 56. xviii S. Orgel (1974). Sylvia Path: Fusion with the victim and suicide, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 43:272-273. K. Ablow, (2005). Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson. New York: St. Martin’s Press. A. Falk. (2002). Political Assassination and Personality Disorder: The Cases of Lee Harvey Oswald and Yigal Amir, Mind and Human Interaction, 12 (1): 2-34. xix The Sheikh’s New Clothes: The Naked Truth About Islamic Suicide Terrorism was in press and pulled from production in September, 2006 by www.looseleaflaw.com because of the comments made by Pope Benedict XVI concerning Islam and the ensuing violence. The publishing house felt that they could not protect themselves or their staff against Islamist violence. MartinBarbero, The West’s Moral Weakness, 10 October 2006, www.frontpagemag.com and A. Taheri, Preemptive Obedience: The West’s Self-Imposed Censorship, Gulf News, 13 October 2006, http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24903. xx Ummi’s lap is of particular importance in Arab Muslim culture and most especially for the terrorists. Mohammad Atta sat in his mother’s lap until he went to college and he witnessed his father’s physical abuse of his mother and experienced it himself. Ummi’s lap is found in martyr’s wills and testaments, cf. M. M. Hafez. (2006). Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers, Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, p. 87: “ I write to you my last will and testament while I am alive, before my martyrdom (God willing). I write it with my tears, not with the ink of my pen. I write it with my tears not out of fear for myself, but in sadness for my mother, whom I urge not to cry when she hears the news of my meeting my Lord. I ask her to rejoice and raise her head high in the sky. O Mother, I know that being nestled in your lap [my emphasis] is gentler and kinder on me than my burial grave, but this is God’s calling and the calling of my country.. . “ xxi Via projection, shame and blame. xxii The imagery calls to mind the Hindu Kamasutram which influenced Arab eroticism. See M. Chebel. (2006). Le Kama-Sutra Arabe: Deux mille ans de littérature érotique en Orient, Paris: Pauvert. A. Bouhdiba. (1998). Sexuality in Islam, London: Saqi Books, 1998. Lest we forget the Tamil Tigers are raised Hindu and there is the custom of sati, burning the wife on the husband’s funeral pyre. xxiii This ‘mixed fusion’ is also found in Shiite Islam but it quickly shifts into a double death. Initially, Baby Ali is shot through the heart by an arrow while being held in the arms of Hussein who in turn is killed on the battlefield of Karbala. Baby Ali is literally described as going “from cradle to grave” in the passion play. K. Scot Aghaie. (2004). The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi’I Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran. Seattle: University of Washington Press, cf. insert of photograph with the caption: “Women carrying the cradle of Ali Asghar. . .in that the infant Ali Asghar went directly from cradle to grave.” No page cited. xxiv This is a good example of transgenerational transmission of trauma through neglect. Cf.. A. A. Schützenberger (1998). The Ancestor Syndrome. London: Routledge. xxv A. Berko, A. and E. Erez, “Ordinary People” and “Death Work”: Palestinian Suicide Bombers as Victimizers and Victims, The Journal of Violence and Victims, Volume 20, Number 6, December 2005; Berko, A. Wolf, Y & Addad, M. (2005). The moral infrastructure of chief perpetrators of Palestinian suicidal terrorism, Israel Studies in Criminology, 9, 10-47; J. Lachkar, (2006). Terrorism and the borderline personality, The Journal of Psychohistory, vol. 33, no. 4, spring. xxvi The sons are essentially married to their mothers psychologically so their unconscious murderous rage gets acted out in a concrete manner in the case of 57 year old Fatma Najar sent by Hamas. H. Greenberg, (2006) “Woman suicide bomber’s family: We’re very proud,” 23 November, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3331878,00.html. xxvii B.M. Biven. (1997). Dehumanization as an Enactment of Serial Killers: A Sadomasochistic Case Study, Journal of Analytic Social Work, 4(2) 23-49.; R. I. Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior, Washington, D.C. & London: The American Psychiatric Press, Inc., 1996. xxviii M. Mahler; The Internal Mother: Conceptual and Technical Aspects of Object Constancy, ed. By S. Akhtar, S. Kramer, and H. Parens, Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1996. xxix P.A. Olsson. (2005). Malignant Pied Pipers of Our Time: A Psychological Study of Destructive Cult Leaders from Rev. Jim Jones to Osama bin Laden. Baltimore: Publish America; I. Schiffer. (1973) Charisma. Toronto/Buffalo: The University of Toronto Press and The Free Press. xxx See also E. V. Welldon. (2000). Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood. New York: Other Press; R. Morgan. (1989); and The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. New York: Washington Square Press. xxxi Regression is “a return to a more developmentally immature level of mental functioning.” “Regression” in Moore and Fine. (1990). Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, p. 164: “It usually occurs when a phaseappropriate mental organization is substantially disrupted. Regression is regarded as one of the mechanisms of defense.” xxxii Sun Tsu, The Art of War, ed. J. Clavell, New York: Delacorte Press, 1983. xxxiii Female Suicide Bombers: Dying for Equality?, Ed. Y. Schweitzer, Memorandum 84, The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel, August 2006. xxxiv F. I. Khuri. (2001). The Body in Islamic Culture, London: Saqi Books. xxxv G. Pingree and L. Abend, Spain’ lessons in fighting spousal abuse, The Christian Science Monitor, 26 November 2006, http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1127/p06s01-woeu.htm xxxvi B. Nacos. (2002). Mass-Mediated Terror. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. xxxvii See (Ar. Yatiim) “Orphans,” in The Dictionary of Islam, ed. T. P. Hughes, Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1994, p. 448. Osama bin Laden felt himself to be orphaned, cf. J. Burke, 2003, p. 43-44. xxxviii J. Lachkar, (1983). The Arab-Israeli conflict: a psychoanalytic study. Doctoral dissertation. Los Angeles, CA: International College. xxxix N. Kobrin, Psychoanalytic Explorations of the New Moors: Converts for Jihad, Clio's Psyche, 9(4)171-187, 2003. xl V. Volkan. (1988). The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. xli M. Klein. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. In Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1921-1945, pp. 311338. London: Hogarth, 1950; (1949). Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1921-1945. London: Hogarth; (1952). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In Developments in Psychoanalysis, ed. J. Riviere, pp. 242-321. London: Hogarth; (1957). Envy and Gratitude. New York: Basic Books; (1975). Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945, ed, R,E. Money-Kyrle. New York: Free Press. xlii Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. C. A. Jones,Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, p. 36. The eight senses are: visual, auditory, motor, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, thermal and pain. It will be necessary for a comprehensive exploration of these eight senses in different configurations, for a more accurate understanding of the mindset of the terrorist and the different psychological states for suicide terrorism.