Why the Gazan Baby Crib?
Is the Hamas tunnel opening's placement just a conscious tactical choice?
By
Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.
War Blog #32
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. All behavior can be potentially understood.
This Baby Crib as "Entrance" into Hamas's Psychosis
The theme of the baby resurfaces in the news regarding the war against Hamas. I continue to present more material concerning their infantile behavior to document such aberrant behavior and to build out their unconscious language so that better interventions can be made.
We should not be misled to think that placing something under a crib is for solely tactical or strategic aims. To limit one’s thinking to this, will cause us to miss how the psychology of terrorism works and the unconscious terrifying punch it delivers. If it is only a question of tactics, you will not be able to grasp why such unconscious choice surrounding anything pertaining to the baby evokes deep appeal to many onlookers on social media who share in Hamas’s sadomasochism and antisemitism.
The Envy of the Baby
The envy of the baby runs deep in those who have primitive mental states such as Hamas. The baby represents all their unmet needs and accompanying affects from early childhood which have come to be "packaged" and then "marketed" by their genocidal ideologies. These early unmet needs are the source for their rage which exceeds murder itself. Happy well-adjusted, securely attached children grow into adults who do not have the need to hate or the need to have an enemy.
The baby crib reveals Hamas’s neotenization, that they have not grown up and that they have primitive mental states (PMS). They are developmentally impaired psychologically because they flagrantly display their obsession with babies. We do not have to look any farther than the tragedy that befell Kfar Aza where the Jewish babies were beheaded.
Indeed, the IDF stated that this tunnel entrance under the baby crib led to a place of strategic importance.
Elsewhere I blogged that whenever and whatever a tunnel happens to open into a maternity ward, it should be given extra significance precisely because the location and connection i.e. bonding involves the essence of the mother - life-giving, birth and babies. Hamas and all other jihadis hold to a fantasy to return to the womb, that prelapsarian time and environment; they are that regressed. This unconscious fantasy has been institutionalized by the 72 virgins and paradise where all needs will be fulfilled.
To conclude
The obsession is based in a psychotic fantasy. Not all psychotic fantasies are acted out. However, for Hamas the psychotic fantasies swirling around the mother and the infant are so potent in their mind’s eye that they are being acted out. To quote Richard Keonigsberg on the difference between psychopathy and psychosis – “a paranoid leader [such as Sinwar – my insertion] may be compelled to enact his fantasies. The psychotic ideas are so powerful within him that he cannot resist enacting them. He becomes a leader when he can persuade other human beings to share his psychotic fantasies.” From The Library of Social Science, email 17 December 2023.
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