Jihad's Concrete Fused States
War Blog Post #45
By Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.
Their Obsession With Death
The Projection of Unconscious Matricide
Shame of Being Fused/Bonded To Their Mothers - Traumatic Attachment
Inability to Stand Alone - Herd Mentality
Images of Fusion = Their Primitive Mental States = Two Entities Become Fused Into One
Life + Death = Fusion = Jihadi + Skull:
Sex = The Ultimate Life Fusion
Prenatal Mother = Mother + Fetus = Life Fusion
Postpartem Mother + Child = Maternal Cameo à Madonna and Child
Female Suicide Bomber +Child = Maternal Cameo
Death Fusion = Suicide Bomber + Victim:
The pig with lipstick = "You can put lipstick on a pig but it is still a pig" (Midwestern expression) i.e. you can call it martyrdom but it is still murder suicide
I have always conceptualized the islamic Suicide Bomber as the end "product" of a culture gone off its rails. A Culture which has become completely bankrupt and destroyed. Therefore the Islamic suicide bomber, while we haven't seen any during the current Gaza war at least yet, the concept remains key in understanding Hamas's perverse psychotic behavior set in the larger and longer history of "jihad".
In the first photograph captured on X, we see a jihadi while not Hamas but it doesn't really matter. It is the image that communicates the fusion with his foot on top of a skull. This is an imagery of fusion i.e. where two become one fused image – the jihadi and the skull. Obviously, it’s a sign of dominance but what is it telling us unconsciously? Why does the image carry such a punch?
The skull and death are obvious too but even more so it is the concrete nature of the image. We do not know who the dead person was. Nameless with someone inflicting dominance. Yet this fusional image resonates against the background of a history of important fundamental fusional images. I have listed some of them above.
In order to understand such imagery we return to The Jihadi Dictionary and the definition for Fusion.
A standard psychological definition for the concept of the Death Fusion which is essential for understanding jihad. In light of the atrocities committed on October 7th against Jews the death fusion unpacks and discloses jihadi rage. They are psycho and sociopathic borderlines who are emasculated because in the shame honor culture of Gaza and Hamas the social unconscious prohibition is that one can not separate from their mother and yet paradoxically their mother was once a devalued female:
Ψ Fusion occurs when two people become a psychological or physical unit, ending in death. Psychiatrist S. Orgel wrote on fusion and suicide and a wish to return to the mother. “Fusing in death with the mother in fantasy, in reality fusing with others through murder-suicide, mass murder-suicide.”
Two other aspects of death must be noted. One connects to religion and is pertinent here: “More specifically, many people turn to religion because of a fear of death. In terms of affect theory, death can trigger a variety of images ― loss, nothingness, missing, and so on. These, in turn, stimulate distress‒anguish. Winnicott wrote about ‘annihilation anxiety’ (1965), and those who have suffered traumatic losses or various types of abandonment may experience this. Even those who have had healthy upbringings may be shaken by the sense of death, missing, eternity, nothingness (Kernberg, 2010). In terms of affect theory, it appears that anticipating the absence of stimuli — i.e. the loss of the affect of interest as in death — can elicit fear. Those who envision a joyful afterlife may feel joy and excitement. Those who anticipate punishment and flames will experience distress, anger, and fear.” The second encompasses the notion of loss of stimulation that comes with death: “There is another aspect of death which creates distress and fear and which is little discussed. Death represents a loss of stimulation. [emphasis added]. It is of utmost importance to appreciate that the brain is a stimulus- seeking, information-processing organ. Death represents a taking away of stimulation; this is distressing and scary for human beings to contemplate.”
The Death Fusion Caused by the Islamic Suicide Bomber
X (Crossed swords of jihad) I conceived the term death fusion after reading Orgel’s articles on suicide and fusion, especially about Sylvia Plath. Orgel’s work helped me conceptualize the concrete nature, or concretization, of fusion and suicide‒murder as death fusion. For the jihadi, the quintessential concrete expression of the death fusion occurs in the suicide attack. It is a merger with an idealized other to fend off the fear and terror of one’s own sense of self as well as a denial on the part of the person seeking the merger as a defense against recognizing one’s own omnipotence and grandiosity. Merging, or fusion, has its own eros, and in its most concrete form, it finds expression in sex. The underlying fusion of the maternal cameo is buried within the imagery of death and destruction. Death concretizes the fusion.
“Shame–honor cultures, which are predicated on keeping the female devalued and submissive, spawn suicide attacks — e.g., the Tamil Tigers. In Japanese Kamikaze culture, pilots were instructed not to fear death because as they approached their targets the face of their mother would appear and they would return to her .... Hence, the collective shame–honor culture embraces the unconscious fantasy of fusion with the mother as rebirth. The jihadis are not psychologically individuated and cannot function alone. They must always seek out objects to fuse with in order to recreate the deprived maternal bond. They bond through violence.”
To conclude
The first image cited above propelled me to write a little about the concept of fusion. It is difficult for many to see what is really going on in the nonverbal communication. The jihadis tap into our own terrors. Each one of us has our own internal terrorist or jihadi which harkens back to a time in our lives where we were totally dependent upon our mothers. Yet we did not grow up at least many of us in a shame honor culture to their degree. We did not become neotenized, i.e. developmentally arrested. Yet the obsession with death is so powerful that it hooks into us. The red flag that they have such a severe problem in maternal attachment is the mutiliation of the bodies of the victims. This screams out the projection of matricide on to us BUT we are not their mothers.
