Putin’s Maternal Drama Act V Putin as Norman Bates of Psycho

Wikicommons

World leaders have been outraged and rightfully so with the bombing of the Mariupol Maternity Hospital and now the tragedy of the bombing of the cancer hospital in southern city of Mykolaiv. The carnage, loss of life, the twisted and concrete physical remains drive home the intensity of total destruction and annihilation that Putin is seeking. It is reminiscent of Guernica where the term “weapons of mass destruction” was first used.

The first use of the term ‘weapon of mass destruction’ on record is by Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1937 in reference to the aerial bombardment of Guernica, Spain: ‘Who can think at this present time without a sickening of the heart of the appalling slaughter, the suffering, the manifold misery brought by war to Spain . . . quoted in The Jihadi Dictionary, p. 264.

Why should we bother delving deeper into Putin’s psyche to understand the depths of his depravity? Yet to side-step this unconscious terrain is to play into his hands. Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death published in 1973 provides a point of departure for Becker reminds us that while we see and engage in the physical world in which we live, generally we avoid tackling its symbolic world – the world where meaning is made in the unconscious in order to avoid death. 95% of our thinking is unconscious as well as Putin’s.

So, what is Putin really thinking? The majority of the pundits have said that Putin wants to recreate the Russian Empire, that he has an identification with Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Stalin. Does this explanation suffice? I think not because it fails to account for Putin’s drive for immortality which is in fact his denial of death, his inability to understand death though he has no difficulty creating it and committing mass murder precisely because he cannot really believe that life ends with death. It's obsessive compulsive concrete behavior.

While writing the preceding Acts of Putin’s Maternal Drama, it struck me that as a replacement child he was tasked with keeping his mother Maria Ivanovna Putin’s fantasy alive that her two sons Albert and Victor were not dead. Putin internalized through his mother’s projections the roles of these dead brothers. When did this occur? It took place very early on during the time that Putin was an infant. It involved how his mother related to him in a kind of unconscious “motherese,” the special language in which she spoke to him verbally and nonverbally. My colleague and former classmate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Paul Holinger M.D. wrote What Babies Say Before They Can Talk. When thinking about political leaders like Putin, we generally don’t take the time to contemplate what was the nature, what might have been the nature of this dyadic relationship between mother and son. Quite literally from womb to tomb which soviet culture had re-cast in terms of from cradle to grave the embedded symbiotic maternal relationship existed and lives on. The strike on the maternity hospital of Mariupol represents the cradle turned into the grave.

While Vladimir Putin has been living out the roles of his Brothers Putin – Albert and Victor, the primary underlying role of becoming his mother himself can be discerned and now stands out. My former doctoral student Dr. David Van Dyke who has a long-standing interest in psychoanalytic thinking made a startling comment when I posted “Putin’s Maternal Drama*: Act IV The Mariupol Maternity Hospital.”. Btw, he also was the one to come up with the title for my third book on the Chechens – The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadis. Dr. Van Dyke wrote:

“It’s [the Mariupol Maternity Hospital attack] just like Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. Putin has kept his mother alive in fantasy – and has started to embody her in his own life. Just like Norman Bates, he has to destroy what is beautiful outside of himself in order to allow his perverse mother attachment to spread and expand without challenge.” Facebook comment March 11, 2022.” [emphasis added]

Here we have the reason why the current situation to de-escalate is so complicated. Putin must be able to not only save face in his shame honor world but more importantly he is propelled to keep his mother Maria alive in his fantasy, in his unconscious script. Thus, those engaging him in negotiations need to understand that anything which threatens to burst his maternal bubble, could very well trigger a nuclear bomb or a chemical attack* which he has been repeatedly threatening because “nuclear” here signifies his nuclear family i.e. the Brothers Putin and mother Maria. Putin’s mind is concrete and transparent. For him fantasy = reality.

We have seen this before with the jihadis’ rage, a rage too that exceeds murder itself which invokes the threat of the nuclear – dirty bombs as well as chemical weapons.

The “concrete” attachment of jihadis to nuclear fusion, and all other kinds of fusion, expresses their failed attempt to master splitting, which facilitates the dichotomy between fusion and fission. Rather than being metaphors for comparison, terms such as “nuclear” take on a psychotically physical essence: the jihadi obsession with dirty bombs, etc. The dichotomy maintains fragmented, represented by their unconscious primitive mental states. They have not been able to metabolize their experiences in a nondestructive way, which would lead to bridging the cognitive deficit as expressed by their delusions, obsessions, etc. The Jihadi Dictionary, p. 98

And here:

The paranoia of the jihadi is writ large with weapons of mass destruction, which also harkens back to the concept of nuclear and its fusion and fission. M. Dechesne notes the dramatic escalation in technologies and capabilities used and deployed. The jihadis tell you what they want to do, and they will do it. The image of the mushrooming (escalating) technology harkens back to the nuclear and reinforces the jihadis’ psychotic omnipotence. The Jihadi Dictionary, p. 265

Putin uses the same threat and seeks annihilation.

Natan Sharansky, the famous Refusenik born in the Ukraine and former member of the Israeli Knesset, was just interviewed about Vladimir Putin. Sharansky knows the cultures and its actors well.

“He [Putin] will go as far as the world lets him. “It is a real fight against good and evil. The challenge is so much bigger, and, of course, the world as [the Russian president] wants to change is not the world in which Jews and Israel want to live,” said Natan Sharansky.”

https://www.jns.org/natan-sharansky-on-vladimir-putin-he-will-go-as-far-as-the-world-lets-him/?utm_source=The+Daily+Syndicate&utm_campaign=2672042be4-Daily+Syndicate+03-06-22+%28new%29_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8583953730-2672042be4-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&ct=t%28Daily+Syndicate+03-06-22+%28new%29_COPY_01%29

Indeed, this is the world in reverse which I have previously discussed: What is good for Putin is bad for us and what is bad for Putin is good for us. It is the world in which the paranoid live. Will Putin go as far as the world lets him? Absolutely, because it is his desperate quest to keep his mother Maria alive to the point that he has had to become her himself. Just as Norman Bates, the serial killer, in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho became Norma Bates, his mother - all that is beautiful has to be destroyed.

*https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/russian-troops-said-bringing-chem-bio-suits-to-ukraine-amid-attack-warnings/