Before Blood, Before Mind

The unfinished self — and how it is being exploited by Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah

This is the fourth piece in a series. The first, “The Visual Holds the Key,” examined how images of violence function as psychological weapons. The second, “We Need This Blood: Hamas’ Blood Charter 1988,” traced the ideological and symbolic roots of Hamas’s use of bodily spectacle. The third, “First the Blood. Now the Mind,” analyzed Iran’s penetration of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies as an assault not merely on information, but on the institutional space in which thought itself is generated. Those three pieces made an argument about strength. They said: democratic societies possess a developmental capacity — the ability to think under pressure, to symbolize conflict rather than merely discharge it, to hold complexity without collapsing into reaction. That capacity, I argued, cannot be hacked or stolen. It is what Iran and Hamas are up against, whether they fully understand it or not.But there is a harder question that must follow.

What if that capacity is unevenly distributed?

What if, within a democratic society, there are populations for whom the developmental foundations of thinking, feeling, and self-determination have not been fully laid? What if the unfinished self is not the exception, but — in certain communities, under certain conditions — closer to the norm?

This is the piece I have been building toward. It is the most uncomfortable one to write, and probably the most important. AI translations in Hebrew, Portuguese and French can be found at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack where it was originally posted.

I. The Years Nobody Remembers

There is a period of human development that is almost entirely invisible to the people who lived through it. The years from birth to approximately three — the zero years — leave no conscious memory, no narrative, no retrievable story. And yet they are, in the most precise sense, the years that determine everything.What is built in those years — or not built — shapes the architecture of the self that will follow. Not as destiny, and not without the possibility of later repair. But as foundation: the substrate on which all subsequent development rests.Three information processing systems must come online and, crucially, integrate during this period. The first is sensorimotor — the body’s encoded experience of safety or threat, of being held or dropped, of warmth or cold, of attunement or absence.

The second is emotional and relational — the felt sense of being seen, responded to, and known by another person; the earliest experience of what it means to exist in the mind of someone else. The third is symbolic and cognitive — the capacity to represent experience in images, then words; to hold a feeling in mind rather than simply discharge it through the body.When these three systems integrate — when the body, the relational world, and the symbolic capacity develop in concert — the result is a person capable of what developmental psychologists call theory of mind: the ability to imagine another’s inner world, to think rather than simply act, to understand that other people have thoughts, feelings, and perspectives distinct from one’s own. This is not a luxury. It is the foundation of empathy, of ethical reasoning, of the capacity to negotiate rather than dominate, to deliberate rather than attack.

When integration fails — when trauma, neglect, violence, or the absence of attuned caregiving disrupts the process — the result is fragmentation. Not madness, necessarily. But a self that is more rigid than flexible, more reactive than reflective, more fused with the group than differentiated from it. A self for whom doubt is dangerous, ambiguity is intolerable, and the other is more threat than person.

II. Separation, Individuation, and the Democratic Self

Margaret Mahler described the process of separation-individuation — the gradual emergence of the child as a distinct self, separate from the mother and from the group, capable of standing alone without dissolving. It is a process, not an event. It takes years. And it is never simply completed; it continues, in subtler forms, through adolescence and beyond.Democracy, at its deepest level, is a political system designed for individuated selves. It assumes citizens who can think for themselves, tolerate disagreement, defer gratification, hold the tension between their own interests and the common good. It assumes, in other words, people who have traversed enough of the separation-individuation process to function as autonomous agents rather than as extensions of a tribe, a family, a leader, or an ideology.But a democratic passport does not confer a developed self. Citizenship is legal. Individuation is developmental. The two are entirely different categories, and confusing them is one of the most consequential errors a society can make.You cannot wave a wand and produce an individuated citizen. You cannot legislate it, decree it, or assume it. It must be grown — in the earliest years of life, in the quality of caregiving, in the safety of the environment, in the presence of adults who are themselves sufficiently developed to offer what the child needs.

III. The Symptoms We MisreadLook at the places within Israeli society where the social fabric is most strained. The extremist settler fringe, where ideology fuses with identity so completely that doubt becomes apostasy. The Arab mafia networks in the north and center, where clan loyalty overrides civic law and violence is the primary language of dispute resolution. The high rates of domestic violence across multiple communities, where the home becomes a site of domination rather than a holding environment. The religious coercion that substitutes the authority of the group for the judgment of the individual.These are not random pathologies. They are not simply poverty, or culture, or politics, though all of those factors matter. They are, at a deeper level, symptoms of incomplete individuation — of selves that have not fully differentiated from the group, that discharge conflict rather than symbolize it, that cannot yet hold the tension between self and other without collapsing into domination or submission.We have been reading these symptoms wrong. We treat them as law enforcement problems, as economic problems, as political problems. They are all of those things. But underneath, they are developmental problems. And developmental problems require developmental solutions — beginning, necessarily, at the beginning.

IV. What the Enemy Understands

Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah are not conducting a war only against Israel’s military capacity or its institutions. They are conducting a war against its coherence — its capacity to hold together as a society capable of thinking, deliberating, and acting with shared purpose.And they are not targeting only the strong. They are probing for the places where individuation is weakest — where identity is most fused, most brittle, most easily inflamed. The unindividuated self is not only a personal vulnerability. It is a strategic entry point. It is where they recruit.Radicalization — whether religious, nationalist, or criminal — is always, at some level, a developmental story. It is the story of a self that has not been sufficiently held, sufficiently seen, sufficiently differentiated to resist the pull of a total identity. The group that offers absolute belonging, absolute certainty, and an absolute enemy is offering, in distorted form, exactly what the zero years failed to provide: a holding environment. A sense of being contained. A self that feels real because it is fused with something larger than itself.This is why the exploitation is so effective, and so underestimated. It does not require sophisticated propaganda. It requires only the recognition of a psychological hunger that was never fed — and the offer, however toxic, to feed it.

V. The Overlooked Front

Security policy in Israel — as in most democracies — is overwhelmingly focused on the external threat. Missiles, tunnels, cyber intrusions, regional alliances. These are real and require attention. But the internal developmental front — the quality of early childhood care, the presence of attuned parenting in high-stress communities, the investment in the conditions under which integrated, thinking, feeling selves can be grown — is treated as a social welfare matter, peripheral to the hard questions of national security.This is a category error of enormous consequence. The zero years are not peripheral to national security. They are foundational to it. A society that invests in the developmental conditions for individuation is building something that no enemy can hack, no missile can destroy, and no leak can weaponize.And a society that neglects those conditions — that allows whole communities to raise children in environments of violence, instability, and developmental deprivation — is leaving a door open. Not to a specific enemy. To the permanent, structural vulnerability of the unfinished self.The blood was visible. The cyber intrusion made headlines. But the zero years — the unseen, unremembered, foundational years — have been there all along, shaping everything, noticed by almost no one.That is the front that matters most. And it is the one we have barely begun to defend.