Putin’s Maternal Drama Act IV: The Mariupol Maternity Hospital
Wikicommons Mariupol bombing
Video of Bombing from Times of Israel Website
Putin’s bombing of the Mariupol Maternity Hospital has struck to the core of unconscious terrorist behavior. Putin does not realize what he reveals about himself. It is a heinous senseless act of terror. It is not war. It is terror.
When I wrote my third book The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadi* it was the Budennovsk Maternity Hospital Hostage Taking Attack that brought home to me the point of just how very transparent terrorist behavior is – that one can actually read their unconscious enacted violent behavior thru its projection under the guise of political violence. This is the elephant in the room. 95% of thinking is unconscious all the more so for terrorists. I understood it to be a direct attack on the mother and “ferror” i.e. female terror of her life-giving body. I am excerpting here what I wrote back in 2014.
What happened during the hostage crisis and terrorist attack on the Budennovsk Maternity Hospital is applicable to the horrific bombing of the Mariupol Maternity Hospital, Ukraine. While the terrorists may change and be of different ethnicities, terrorists are all very similar be they Chechens, Russians, Pakistanis, etc. we have seen this before and unfortunately attacks on maternity hospitals will not end unless there is better understanding of the unconscious script of the maternal drama that is playing out. It is real and brutal. I have interpolated comments with regard to the Mariupol Maternity Attack. These comments are not italicized:
The Budennovsk Maternity Hospital Hostage Crisis: A Transparent Attack on the Mother
Terrorists' inability to mourn loss, show sadness, and deal with loss brings up the demeanor of the Chechen mother of a terrorist. She doesn't cry, or is not supposed to cry, and must not show any sign of remorse. In Chechen culture the mother is considered a "hero." According to Melanie Klein, this is what occurs in the paranoid-schizoid position, which is a very fragmented primitive state in which one does not have the capacity to mourn and is dominated by persecutory anxiety and other primitive defenses. . .
Budennovsk Hospital Hostage Crisis took place from 14 June to 19 June 1995, when a group of 80 to 200 Chechen separatists led by Shamil Basayev attacked the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk...some 70 miles (110 km) north of the border with the de facto independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. The incident resulted in a ceasefire between Russia and Chechen rebels, and peace talks (which later failed) between Russia and the Chechens. It caused a major political crisis in Russia. Shamil Basayev, the leader of the plot, had lost his mother and then launched the three attacks before he was finally killed. The loss of his mother and her unmourned death acted like a tripwire, precipitating his violence. We can surmise that Basayev became psychologically unglued.
[While Putin’s mother has been deceased for a long time, Putin may have kept her alive in fantasy. A psychotic refusal to accept the fact that she died. We can similarly conjecture that something in his private paranoid world became unglued recently and it has acted as a tripwire for the current war in the Ukraine. I have noted in the other blog posts that the death of Brother Victor during the Siege of Leningrad has undoubtedly loomed large in Putin’s psyche seeking revenge.]
His[ i.e. Basayev’s] fragile personality could not sustain such a loss. Even his assassination can be understood as a return to his mother. Through his anti-social behavior he sought out death, almost begging to be killed in order to return to his mother in fantasy. The loss is repeated rather than mourned.
Numerous terrorists attacked the hospital. Initially, the attack’s aim was Chechen independence from “Mother” Russia.
[Similarly we see Putin’s quest for a symbiosis with Ukraine and returning her to “Mother Russia.”]
It began as a hostage-taking crisis, which extended over a five-day period. Basayev could not let go of his “symbolic mother.” He wanted the impact of this hostage event to increase the momentum of his movement.He turned the hospital into a battlefield. In addition to his mother, two children, and a sister died during the Russian bombing of his uncle's home on June 3, 1995. His brother also was killed in another incident.
Since it is not permissible to mourn loss in the Western sense, in less than eleven days after his mother’s death, Basayev retaliated by taking the Budennovsk maternity hospital hostage. His mother was no longer alive to protect him, to maintain the fused state from which he derived limited stability.
We have seen this before with other terrorists such as Zarqawi, who went on a beheading rampage in Iraq the day after he finished the requisite Islamic mourning period of forty days for his mother. Bouyeri, who butchered Theo Van Gogh to death in Amsterdam, nearly decapitating him, also acted out his rage after the death of his mother. His own sister pointed to maternal loss as a means to explain his violent behavior. I wrote about this in The Banality of Suicide Terrorism. Such violent behavior indicates that these terrorists are confused by the emotions they experience with the loss of their mother. Their feelings are contaminated regarding the body and its functions, including giving birth. This ties in directly to Basayev's choice of a maternity hospital as a target.
I have heard male experts declare that an attack on a maternity hospital shows the depravity of the terrorists.
[We have similarly heard others comment on Mariupol as such. https://www.timesofisrael.com/proof-of-genocide-zelensky-rages-at-russia-for-bombing-ukraine-maternity-hospital/]
Such an anecdotal comment is indicative of the uneasiness of experts who lack training in child development. By dismissing the unconscious aspect, they can temporarily alleviate their own anxieties. Budennovsk as a target raised the ante. It extended Chechen terrorism beyond an ethnic nationalist separatist movement as the Chechens began to capture the attention of the world. Since terrorists have never developed empathy, they lack the cognitive capacity to understand the relationship with their mother. Instead they lash out at the mother under the banner of political violence. The attack on the maternity hospital reveals the unconsciously motivated obsession not only with the prenatal and postpartum mother but with birth itself. This attack became emblazoned in the mind of the Russian public. It was a precursor of the ruthlessness with which the Chechen jihadis sought to terrorize the public because it was an unconscious attack on everyone's mother, including “Mother Russia.”
Shamil Basayev went on to pledge alliance to Osama bin Laden. We can speculate that Basayev’s disturbed omnipotence and grandiosity was on the same order of psychological magnitude as that of bin Laden—“twins” of violence.
[Other Attacks on maternity hospitals]
There has been only one other attack on a hospital maternity ward as of this writing. It occurred during the Mumbai attacks in November 27, 2008. Lashkar-e- Taiba, a Pakistan Islamist terrorist organization, launched a maritime attack against the Cama and Albless Hospital, a women's and children hospital, at times referred to as a maternity hospital. While it remains unclear if the Budennovsk Hospital attack served as a model for this segment of the Mumbai attack, the Chechen jihadis had established a precedence in cruelty, exceeding the bounds of human morality. We can further extract from this attack on maternity a transparent disregard for the sanctity of the female. It articulates the “ferror” [i.e. terror of the female body, a term coined by Galina Bleich and Lilia Chak*] of the terrorists.
Basayev also revealed the limited way in which he engaged the world. His was an autistic, insular world in the sense that he (as are all terrorists) was completely removed or disconnected from what it means to have a stable, nonviolent relationship. "Maternity hospital" became an unconscious metaphor. According to Basque cultural anthropologist Joseba Zulaika's research and writing on violence and metaphor, the terrorist does not have an elaborated sense of symbol and metaphor. The lack of empathy inhibits the development of such a sense. Instead the behavior and dependency upon the mother and the terror of the female are so great that they cannot be hidden from sight. The use of this nonverbal language is concrete and transparent, yet they themselves do not see this tragic irony.
I see this initial attack as a glaring example of the disconnected, volcanic iceberg brutality of Basayev's terror as related to the Lost Mother Syndrome. The attack on the maternity hospital allows us to see a fragment of the Chechen terrorist's psychotic, immature mind communicated through the unconscious choice of a place that embodies the essence of the mother-infant relationship—birth and life. (The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadi, p. 102-105)
* The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadi is a freedownload at www.freepsychotherapybooks.org The request and invitation to write the book came from the prominent publisher of psychology Jason Aronson who upon retirement decided to place in people’s hands quality digital psychology books free of charge globally. I was honored to be asked to write the book.
