The Visual Holds The Key

Body Parts, Primitive Mental States, and October 7th

This blog post first appeared at nancyharteveltkobrin.substack. It was posted before "We Need This Blood". It is the first piece of a series. AI translations in Hebrew, Portuguese and French can be found at substack.

A recent conversation with a colleague about the barbarism of October 7th prompted me to return to something I published nearly two decades ago — a forensic analysis connecting the imagery of jihadi attack sites to what psychoanalysts call “part object representation.” That 2007 paper, published in Anil Aggrawal’s Internet Journal of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, analyzed the Djerba Synagogue bombing in Tunisia in 2002. Its core argument has only become more urgent since October 7th.

The barbarism didn’t surprise me. That is not indifference — it is the result of twenty years of research into what the visual evidence of jihadi attacks tells us about the minds that produced them.

The Image Before the Word

Ninety percent of what we communicate about our emotions is communicated nonverbally — through imagery, through the body, through the senses. We live in a culture that privileges words, argument, and ideology. But the jihadi attack site speaks a different language — one that precedes words entirely.

This is the core insight: the visual holds the key to the primitive mental states driving jihadi violence. The ideology is packaging. The imagery — the attack site as crime scene — is the message.

Every attack site communicates an unconscious message. Law enforcement is trained to read a crime scene. Psychoanalysts are trained to read imagery and behavior. What I have been arguing for over twenty years is that these two disciplines must converge if we are to understand what we are looking at when we look at a jihadi attack.

Part Objects and the Early Mother

When a baby is first born, it does not perceive the mother as a whole, separate person. Instead, the baby experiences the mother in parts — the breast, the face, the voice, the smell. These are what psychoanalysts, following Melanie Klein, call “part objects.” In healthy development, the child gradually integrates these part-object experiences into a coherent, whole-object perception of the mother as a separate human being with her own inner life. This is the foundation of empathy — the capacity to see the other as a full person.

But when development is arrested — when the environment is abusive, chaotic, and violating — this integration fails. The person remains stuck in part-object relating —splitting the world into absolute good and absolute evil, unable to perceive the full humanity of the other, unable to tolerate ambiguity. The mother remains a collection of terrifying and idealized fragments, never integrated into a whole.

This is what serial killers share with jihadi operatives. In studying serial killers, psychoanalyst B.M. Biven identified that the body parts left at a serial killing crime scene are expressions of the killer’s unintegrated representation of the early mother’s body — the bad mother parts “translocated into the object world.” The organized or chaotic arrangement of body parts at the crime scene reflects the degree of psychosis in the killer’s mind.

I applied this framework to jihadi suicide attacks. The body parts strewn at an attack site are not simply the physical result of an explosion. They are the materialization of the perpetrators’ internal object world — the part-object representation of the despised and idealized mother’s body, externalized and enacted at scale.

The Attack Site as Crime Scene

Every attack site is a crime scene. Every crime scene is a communication.

The suicide bomber is what I have called a “political serial killer by proxy” — a proxy for the handler and the group, enacting a collective psychotic fantasy. The handler, the chief perpetrator, would never carry out the attack himself. He directs the proxy, who is, in the deepest sense, already psychologically dead before the detonation.

The tableau left behind — the body parts, the chaos, the searing imagery — reflects the contents of the perpetrators’ minds as surely as any written document. It tells us how they experience the world: in fragments, without whole-object perception, without empathy, in the grip of a paranoid-schizoid splitting that divides all of existence into the pure and the contaminated, the sacred and the infidel.

The Bond That Cannot Be Severed

Central to all of this is the mother — specifically, the maternal bond that cannot be broken.

In Arab Muslim culture, as I have argued across six books, there exists an unconscious cultural taboo against psychological separation from the mother — from Ummi. The word for mother, Ummi, shares its root with Ummah, the communal body of Islam. The communal self-perception is thus directly linked to the maternal.

The child who is never permitted to separate psychologically from the mother — who never goes through what Margaret Mahler called separation-individuation — does not develop a stable, independent self. He remains fused, undifferentiated, unable to stand alone, unable to tolerate the existence of the other who does not confirm his fragile identity. This is the developmental root of the paranoid-schizoid functioning I described in my previous essay on this Substack.

The attack site’s imagery enacts the impossible wish: to be reunited with the mother in death, and to destroy the mother who could never be left. Suicide bombing is, in this sense, the only separation available — the only way out of the unseverable bond as noted by Dr. Sami Timimi, an Iraqi child and adolescent psychiatrist in his book Pathological Child Psychiatry and the Medicalization of Childhood.

The Maternal Wifi: How Terror Is Translocated Into the Viewer

There is a dimension of jihadi psychological warfare that is rarely named for what it is: the translocation of terror into the viewer.

Terror is not the same as fear. Fear is conscious and cognitive — we can name its object and reason about it. Terror is pre-verbal. It comes into being during early childhood, in the body, before language exists to contain it. Terror that cannot be put into words holds us psychologically hostage. It does not reason. It paralyzes.

When the imagery of an attack reaches us — through social media, through news footage, through photographs — we are not merely witnessing political violence. We are being struck at the deepest level of our psychological life: our first relationship, our earliest terrors. Everybody has a mother. Everybody carries, somewhere in the body and the unconscious, the unresolved terrors of that first bond — however well or poorly it was established.

The jihadi attack site shatters what I think of as the maternal cameo — the primal image of mother and child, the Madonna and child in its universal form. This image is sacred not only in Christianity and Islam but in the deepest layers of human psychology, because it is the image of life’s beginning. When an attack destroys bodies and strews them across a site, it is shattering that primal image. The viewer feels this before he can think it.

This is what I call the maternal wifi. Social media and global news function as an instantaneous broadcast network for the imagery of the attack. The images move virally, reaching millions of viewers within hours. Each viewer, consciously or not, is hooked into the transmission — not because they understand jihadi ideology, but because they have a body, a nervous system, and a mother. The terror is translocated through projection: the jihadi externalizes his own unintegrated terror and rage onto the object world. The viewer absorbs it.

This is why jihadi imagery is so effective as psychological warfare. It does not require comprehension. It operates below ideology, below reason, at the level of pre-verbal terror that we all carry. The more graphic the imagery, the deeper the hook. The media’s compulsive return to such images — the irresistible pull of the footage — is not merely voyeurism. It is the activation of the deepest universal anxiety: the shattering of the earliest bond.

Understanding this is not merely a psychological observation. It has strategic implications. A population held in pre-verbal terror cannot think clearly. It cannot make sound policy. It is psychologically hostage — which is, of course, exactly what the jihadi intends.

October 7th: Nothing New Under the Sun

When October 7th happened — its sexual violence, its mutilation, its taking of bodies and body parts, its orchestrated barbarism — colleagues asked how I was processing it. My answer was the same then as it is now: I was not surprised. Horrified, yes. Grief-stricken, yes. Surprised, no.

The imagery of October 7th followed the same psychological grammar that I identified in the Djerba Synagogue bombing of 2002, in the Chechen jihadis I studied, in the suicide attacks I analyzed across twenty years of research. The sexual violence directed at women — the systematic assault on female bodies — expressed the operative’s annihilating rage toward the early mother, enacted on available female bodies as part-object substitutes. The mutilation expressed the same part-object fragmentation. The taking of hostages — the pulling of bodies across a border — is a concrete enactment of the abduction fantasy: stealing the good maternal object, possessing what was never controllable.

None of this was improvised psychologically. It was the acting out of a deep psychic structure, organized around failed separation-individuation, paranoid-schizoid splitting, and the inability to perceive the other as a full human being.

What the Image Tells Us

We spend enormous resources analyzing jihadi ideology — the theology, the political grievances, the recruitment pipelines. These matter. But they are the surface.

The image holds the key. The visual evidence — the attack site, the tableau of destruction, the choreography of barbarism — speaks a pre-verbal language that ideology only translates, badly, for public consumption. To truly know this enemy, we must learn to read that language.

Ninety percent of emotional communication is nonverbal. The jihadi tells us, in imagery, what he cannot put into words — because it happened before words, in the first years of life, in the space between mother and child where identity either forms or fractures.

We ignore that image at our peril.