Countertransference in an Anthropological Study of Extreme Violence in Pakistan

From 1993 to 1995, I lived in Karachi in a community of ethnic Mohajirs, the Indian Muslim migrants to Pakistan following Independence (1947). The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) party was formed in 1984 to represent Mohajir concerns. Since then, intense violence involving MQM, the state, and all political and ethnic groups has dominated Karachi; MQM has won all major elections in the city. I lived in Liaquatabad district, identified as a major “terrorist den” where the security forces raided houses, arrested, terrorized, and fought armed battles with residents.

Between 2001 to 2006, I conducted fieldwork in Liaquata-bad with men who became mercenaries in MQM. Whilst killing purportedly became normalized—“easy” in Karachi’s violent political culture—their cases raise difficult questions. Here I reflect on a single case, that of “Arshad,” who grew up in Liaquatabad, joined MQM at 16, and was in his mid-20s when I first met him in 1993. I query my use of psychoanalytic concepts as a political tool serving an anthropological ethics of engaged witnessing—emphasizing the structural and political violence underpinning young men’s own trajectories into violence. What are the moral limits to empathizing with the suffering of a killer? How can Arshad’s disclosure be analyzed, when in a gesture simultaneously intimate and detached, he cut bodies into pieces?

Academic accounts characterize the Mohajirs’ condition as deeply intertwined with their position in Muslim India, Pakistan’s bloody inception, and their marginalization from Pakistan’s social and political power structures. Previously, I incorporated neo-Marxist and anthropological analyses with Kleinian psychodynamic arguments to argue killing was a “sane,” albeit extreme, response to threats to individual and collective security, wellbeing, and ontological cohesion. I elaborated a moral-political position to counter the discrimination against Mohajirs’ in Pakistan’s political institutions, public-sector employment and the media, to defend their humanity and “tell” their plight.

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Now, I wonder if I was too protective of these men (my former neighbors) to consider questions of pathology and accountability, including my own complicity and fascination with their perversely enthralling tales of violence, even though they were racked with terror and torment. I highlight the concord between normality and madness and draw significance from the meaning and security Arshad found in a movement that fostered individual and political/cultural continuities between normative and pathological modes of dissociation and psychosis.

Classical psychiatry is less concerned with the symptomology of classifications than with the underlying logic of symptoms, which may take “normal” or pathological form. Many people may have “ordinary psychosis” and live perfectly normal lives: they are “mad” without going mad. They may fit well with society, show no intellectual impairment, and their underlying paranoia or delusional beliefs never erupt into dramatic symptomatology or disintegrate into breakdown. Psychosis is often triggered by revelatory moments involving the crystallization of a delusional idea. This provides the logic for the person’s conviction that something is wrong with the world (paranoiac) or themselves (melancholic). Psychosis, Karl Jaspers argued in 1913, concerns less the content of delusional idea, which may be quite reasonable, as the person’s belief it expresses an undiluted truth. Ronald Laing attributed psychosis with cathartic and transformative potential. He argued that psychosis and delusions are not constitutive of madness, but are people’s attempts to communicate their distress and recover their natural state.

Psychosis may originate in childhood trauma; traumatic events may also precipitate psychosis. Arshad’s clear realization, amidst deadly attacks on Mohajir areas, that killing would be necessary “because a war was happening” may have triggered an underlying paranoid psychosis, and it highlighted the repetitive homology of the conflict with earlier violences of his childhood. These include experiencing absolute terror during the bombings of Karachi in the 1971 Bangladeshi war, frequent hunger, and severe beatings by his father. The individual who experiences annihilation terrors in early life, the “murder” of his ability to feel safe, may later realize these fears through violent recreating traumatic shock in

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others. Elizabeth Howell suggests such individuals may “turn the tables”; visiting their past experience of terrorization on many victims, they recreate the “timeless” (never-ending) loss of their safety and imagination (The Dissociative Mind, 2005, p. 256).

Psychosis ubiquitously features the belief in one’s exceptionality. Arshad distorted events in many self-aggrandizing tales in which he was “chosen,” destined to be a martyr, savior of the community, and killed “more than 400.” These stories buffered him against a fragmenting reality and detached him from any “normal” sense of reality. Wernicke theorized in the 19th century that surviving psychosis entails creating a secret place to rationalize delusions of persecution. This allows the person to exist in yet also outside the world they inhabit. Being uniquely entrusted with “secret tasks” vitalized a fantasy space for Arshad within which real social power relations and a new self-image could be materialized. Killing became a way to distance from reality—and to feel safe.

The Other in psychosis is vital for survival, yet it is highly destructive. The person may identify with the Other in a magic way, assuming their “special powers” as their own, needing the (violent) Other to complete himself. MQM’s charismatic leader Altaf Hussain fulfils this role for Arshad, epitomizing a supra-human extraordinary ethical icon whose words “were like magic, they pierced my heart, I could cry, kill anyone for him.” This magical appeal of violence, its martyrdom and treacherous power, also bear on ways magic realism creates realities out of fiction, in which an unstable interplay of truth and illusion becomes a phantasmic social force. Magic realism’s use as a political-ideological tool of liberation may also be a powerful means of control—vitalizing phantasmatic cults of personality, death, and redemptive violence in ways politics is conducted in Karachi. Revered and feared, Altaf Hussain created terror and chaos at will. Amidst the ferocity of the violence instrumentalized, many miraculous stories circulated: his image has appeared on trees and buildings across the city and throngs of birds alighted on his saintly body. Despite their gruesome details, Arshad’s stories had an unreal quality—bearing on ways psychosis leads to dissociation, wherein one feels as if one is watching oneself in a film.

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Arshad’s dream ruptured. I have written about the traumatic breakdown that followed his decapitation of the pregnant wife of a police superintendent in her home (“Violence, Anti-Convention and Desires for Transformation amongst Pakistan’s Mohajirs in Karachi,” Cultural Dynamics, 22, 2010, p. 225). He de-scribed being ordered to “make it horrible,” so it might “come in the newspapers.” Afterwards, he continued; killing to forget about this killing. Howell observes that severe trauma may deprive a person of fantasy and illusion, writing: “when the terrible becomes true, not only are we unsafe, we lose the ability to imagine” (p. 256). This killing ruptured Arshad’s hiding place, forcing him to become the hero, with its evidence of a permanent dissociation, of any possibility of returning to “normal” life. The moment he desperately wanted to erase an irreversible act, story, the film-like quality of his life and reality became permanently joined. In sum, killing the woman was traumatic. It forced him into a reality condition and the realization he was, in his own words, “a criminal, not a revolutionary,” whilst at the same time “proving” his heroism. His fantasies had been vindicated. This produced for Arshad a painful and irresolvable dilemma.

Writing Arshad’s story was a relational enterprise. He wanted the shared fantasy; I, myself enthralled, reinforced a personal mythology in which he suffered, an innocent pawn in a deadly game. The story described a man who failed to get a government job, joined MQM, became a killer, and spun stories that made him feel extraordinary, proud to be named on “86” murder charges. His unprompted confession of killing the pregnant woman shocked me. It shows how far into “madness” a person can go before the mind unhooks from reality. It detached me too from reality—my head felt like it was spinning sometimes afterwards, appearing to fly from my body, like that woman’s. Was this his feeling when he cut into her body, half-living his story, half trying to absorb its finality? Was telling me an aggressive attempt to traumatize, inflict on me the death-in-life experience he lived through?

More than feelings of guilt, shame or anathema, Arshad suffered a deep narcissistic rupture to his self-image as a “good terrorist.” In Freud’s ideas of psychosis, disturbing ideas are not forgotten, but totally abolished. Erased from the psyche, the banished

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thought, “I am a bad person,” returns in the delusion of being persecuted—here, used and exploited by corrupt politicians. If trauma and psychosis held positive potential (Laing) for remorse or a new politics to emerge, it did not. Rather, Arshad stubbornly reattached himself to the dissociative thrall of the fantasy, the idea he would, if “necessary,” kill again: his story less grandiose, as an essential way to survive. Killing, after all, was the one time he felt truly alive.

Stories are seductive. They become the fabulations of very different realities. We must critique our collective enthrallment and collusion that detaches us from atrocities; the ease with which individuals and political leaders pursue mass murder; the phantasmagoric cultural enfolding of violence into subjectivity and experience. Arshad’s story propelled me toward a radical pacifism. For Arshad, this means I have betrayed him. His story is sad. As it engulfed him, and assumed a life of its own, it animated another truth: we are accountable for our stories.

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