Play Therapy Hamas Style

Booby-rigged Crying Dolls

By

Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.

War Blog #31

Understanding Hamas's Projective Play and Obsessions

Consider this: 94% est. of thinking is unconscious & 95% est. of communication is nonverbal, thus symbols and fantasy are at the core of the problem of political violence. Form follows function; function follows fantasy.

And this: All behavior is potentially meaningful.

When I began working in the field of counter terrorism, after having completed my doctorate in Islamic literature and then training as a psychoanalyst I treated patients suffering from PTSD. However, I maintained my interest in the Middle East having studied the languages. When the suicide truck bombs went off in Lebanon in the early 1980s I began thinking about the mind of the perpetrator, the aggressor, the suicide bomber and what was the unconscious meaning of such behavior? What were they trying to tell us in a kind of pantomime about their life experience? From where was this rage that exceeds murder itself coming?

Then one day the “asimon nafal” (lit. the coin in the pay telephone fell) which is how we say in Hebrew that suddenly one has an insight, or "the light bulb went on." I realized that I had to look at the picture functionally. I needed to see how the perpetrator jihadi like Hamas “bonds” with its victim i.e. Israelis. Borderline psychopathic behavior bonds to its victims. In the case of political terrorism in the Middle East and other Islamic shame honor cultures where there is no democracy, they fuse to their target which is their obsession in a concrete way.

This led me to the idea of importing the psychological method of understanding nonverbal behavior of children and imposing it on the jihadi’s behavior. I imported the idea of Play Therapy. They have an obsession with babies and children because they are developmentally arrested at that early age as we will see below.

Let us look at the entry of play therapy in my The Jihadi Dictionary. We begin with the definition of projective play:

Ψ Projective play is a “form of play therapy utilizing dolls and other types of toys. Children are allowed to use the toys to express their feelings. The therapy is useful for diagnosing mental disturbances in children.”

We learn from these two sentences that dolls play a special role in projective play.

How then does this translate into Hamas’s psychotic behavior?

X (The crossed swords of jihad) Because they are raised in a shame‒honor culture and religion, the jihadis are never permitted to experience play as do children in the West. Another means of verifying this is their abuse of children, constituting a perversion rooted in primitive mental states. However, one may find the concept of projective play helpful in theorizing about the unconscious meaning of jihadi behavior revealed through their acting as if they are toddlers or younger and are playing. While we can only speculate on the trauma that they are reenacting with their projective play, the maternal attachment they experienced was disrupted and chaotic and should be heavily considered as the root of the trauma.

Hamas is not consciously aware of what they are communicating when they rig a “crying doll” with a bomb. They are signaling in pantomime that they never got to play, to separate out fantasy of murdering with a rage that exceeds murder itself and reality. They must enact it concretely under the guise of political violence.

The choice of the doll like the teddy bear that had no heart, only a sniper rifle (cf. War Blog #27 reveals their psychotic rage from early childhood. The prologue to violence is almost always early childhood. The esteemed Egyptian sociologist Halim Barakat wrote that if there is violence in the family, the society will be violent. Growing up under the death threat of the honor killing has destroyed the fabric of Gazan culture.

By way of conclusion I reference the idea of an obsession and its psychological meaning in terrorism as the rigged “crying doll” reveals Hamas's obsession:

An obsession is part of the lack of object constancy. It attempts to stabilize and anchor the fragile personality of the jihadi through splitting and projection, the two main defense mechanisms to ward off shame and to rid the self of painful, toxic emotions.” “Terrorism becomes the celebration of death. Terrorists communicate their obsession with death to their children through peculiar rituals. Think of Hamas and Hizbollah and their death parades, dressing children in suicide bomber uniforms. Or selling little doll suicide bombers as toys, making the bizarre practice of killing off one’s own acceptable. Or consider the thousands of plastic keys that the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered from Taiwan to be placed around the necks of Iranian children who went to their death as human mine sweepers during the Iran–Iraq War. The “nice” Ayatollah slaughtered these innocents while telling them and their impotent, terrorized parents that this plastic key guaranteed their entry into paradise. The terrors of the terrorist’s ‘inner child’ are literally and concretely projected into their own children. Terrorists feel dead and want others to feel what they feel. But they cannot put their feelings into words. In the world of terrorism everything is the opposite of what it should be.” From The Jihadi Dictionary

Hamas is highly dissociated from their early childhood experience growing up in an environment lacking empathy. This is the upshot of a shame honor culture wedded to an extreme interpretation of Islam. Violence is the only way they know how to purify their toxic self; they even have to misuse the idea of a doll. Tragic beyond words but we pay the price.

#Bringthemhomenow