The Gazan Teddy Bear That Didn’t Have a Heart
Instead It Had a Sniper Rifle
Screenshot from The Jerusalem Post
By Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.
War Blog #27
You can’t make this stuff up. In a previous War Blog I wrote about the teddy bear. However, due to this recent discovery by the IDF in Gaza, it’s worth pointing out the early developmental problems of Hamas. They never got to play and hence missed the developmental step of separating out fantasy from reality. They lacked learning to use transitional objects.
My Jihadi Dictionary entry on that subject might be helpful to revisit:
The Psychological Definition of a Transitional Object:
A transitional object is a something used by a child to ease the anxiety of separating from its first external object, the mother [emphasis added] until the child has a safe interior object, a cognitive symbol of her, to supply a sense of safety and comfort; a person or thing that supplies comfort, safety, and emotional health.
X (the cross swords of jihad or how the above definition of transitional object translates into jihadi behavior) The impoverished thinking of the jihadis is readily observed in their body language and their choice and use of objects. They are developmentally arrested. Play was not part of their upbringing and culture. Play involves transitional objects and allows children to work through emotions and thoughts, separating out fantasy from the real world. This separation also involves individuating, separating from the mother. The jihadis did not have transitional objects to comfort them in order to separate from their mothers. Instead, because they feel infantilized, they misuse objects like commercial airplanes and pressure cookers and turn them into destructive weapons. “Dr. Kobrin offers a great example of the misuse of transitional objects in the Muslim world by reminding us of the English school teacher who was in the Sudan. She got persecuted and received death threats because she permitted the kids to name a teddy bear Muhammad.” They would not tolerate permitting a child a transitional object that would emulate the Prophet Muhammad but viewed it as a threat because of they are lacking a sense of humor and are unable to tolerate otherness. They felt threatened by a soft object that embodied and expressed the needs of a child to separate. Even though many boys are given the name Muhammad in Islam, the idea that a toy could have the name was considered blasphemous.
In this specific instance – the case of the sniper rifle embedded in a teddy bear, one sees how a hard object is necessary to stabilize an inherently weak personality structure where the child had not gone through an individuation-separation stage. The sniper rifle reminds me of the Jordanian government official who said he could not go to sleep without his pistol under his pillow. The image is one of fusion with the head (literally where thoughts and fantasy reside) with the hard object.
The Jihadi Dictionary also provides the entry on understanding "Gun Culture" which explains further the symbolic meaning of the sniper rifle and its placement within the stuffed animal.
X (the crossed swords of jihad) “The Isis gun is a penis extension.” This is how the gun culture was explained, that it is all about inferiority, shame, and inability to compete without a weapon. The psychosexual dimension concerning jihad is severely underestimated by experts. The gun in a shame‒honor culture is as phallic as it can be. “Gammer [a scholar of Chechnya] relates that weapons signify Chechen manhood and freedom [emphasis added]. They would not disarm in 1925. We know what a weapon means psychoanalytically in Freudian terms — a phallus ‒ while in Kleinian terms [Object Relations Theory] it demonstrates an attachment to a hard object that symbolizes a replacement for the mother and the object owner’s ambivalent relationship with her. In another shame– honor culture, that of the Kingdom of Jordan, a similar anecdote was related when the Jordanian parliament attempted to pass a bill to disarm men and keep weapons such as a the pistol at home because of high rates of honor killings. The leader of the opposition party to King Abdullah, Dr. Ahmad Uwajdi al Abbadi, a prominent Bedouin, said that he could never surrender his handgun because he slept with it under his pillow at night. This is another image of maternal fusion, where literally a hard, autistic-type object lies at the center of the unconscious, indicating a cognitive deficit in interpersonal relations as well as a trauma in bonding. While children have their teddy bears, men in shame–honor cultures have their hard weapons, an expression of a maternal deficit in attachment.” [my emphasis]
For Hamas and the Hamasnik who came up with this tragic use of a teddy bear, we transparently see the problem as it reveals the unconscious choice of the fused group psychosis. Hamas is paranoid writ large; paranoia is a psychosis, which means that they are out of touch with reality. The unconscious projections emanating from the abuse of a teddy bear is an overt attack on children as well as us. Its paranoia is threatening, unsettling, communicating violence and chaos. It is their unconscious attempt to pull us into their crazy making world in order to validate their skewed sense of self.
We can easily see then that there is no moral equivalency in this war against Hamas. There is nothing “moral” nor “equivalent” comparing Israel to Hamas who takes a teddy bear and stuffs a rifle into it. This is not a level playing field. And lest we forget, there are 400,000 weapons lege hard objects like the sniper rifle or the pistol embedded in the Israeli Arab sector. This too will have to be dealt with at some point. By knowing, understanding and doing this deep dive into Hamas's psychotic mind we can break the identification with these aggressors who hold so many in their grasp through social media. In the end truth always prevails.
