A Psychoanalytic Approach to bin Laden, Political Violence, and Islamic Suicidal Terrorism

The world has witnessed the most abusive “couple” ever: the unconscious pathological “love affair” between Osama bin Laden and the United States. Bin Laden and his Islamic suicide bomber entourage have engaged in a perverted dance of what I call political “domestic” violence. By “wedding” themselves to Christians and Jews through suicide and murder, they have reversed the usual order of domestic violence where the object of hatred and love is murdered first, prior to the suicide. I will argue that by proxy, as he sends out terrorists, bin Laden vicariously participates in suicidal terrorism from a distance, fanning the flames of rage while the suicide bombers seek a unique, symbolic maternal fusion in death. This violence is related to the high levels of child and wife abuse in Islamic societies. Regrettably, considerations of space, necessitate my providing most of the evidence for this argument in a study too lengthy to be presented here. In order to better understand the clinical and theoretical framework for my approach, I recommend that the reader read many of the studies in the selected bibliography I have compiled for this issue. [See pages 189-195.]

Where do violence and erotic love meet? Since domestic violence re-enacts “the seething cauldron of erotic, passionate, and murderous emotions within the family,” it lends itself well to a psychoanalytic inquiry about conjoint murder and suicide. (Harriet Kimble Wrye, “Projections of Domestic Violence and Erotic Terror on the Film Screen,” Psychoanalytic Review, 84, 1997, pp. 685-686) Acts of Islamic suicidal terrorism are a political mixture of hatred and unconscious love because domestic violence is paranoid group behavior in itself. When this happens, it follows that two different groups may symbolically wed just like a couple weds and, as such, suicide and murder may occur, expressing the groups’ fantasy of domestic violence. (Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred, 1997) The al-Qaeda terrorists feel that they need to see America as the evil partner responsible for all the world’s problems. (Vamik Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships, 1988)

Delusionally jealous of America, bin Laden felt betrayed by the U.S. when Saudi Arabia called on it to rescue Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1990-1991. From his perspective, he was entitled and obligated to be the savior of his Saudi Arabian homeland, leading the mujahideen he fought with in Afghanistan. Osama responded to this rejection with lethal fear and rage. However, Amrika, as Osama calls her by her Arabic female name, has a life of her own and chooses not to be submissive to his will. Osama and his entourage feel mocked by America and, therefore, they must destroy her. They envision her as the exciting, seductive, enviable, threatening, and dangerous object of their envy, fear, and hatred, which intrudes upon and disrupts Arab unity. Osama has submitted his “holy self” to Allah, yet his other self maintains a lustful, unconscious attachment to America and the values she represents. America is reminiscent of his first girlfriend, Rita, a Christian in cosmopolitan Beirut during his days of binge drinking. (Adam Robinson, Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist, 2002, p. 65) This is not a far cry from couples traumatically bonded in marital conflict.

Both domestic violence and political domestic violence involve a “wedding” of violence between partners who rage at one another. Yet, this mutual need to hate masks a defining of one’s identity in terms of and against the other, and a mutual unconscious, primitive love for the other. Through the process of the unconscious defense mechanism of projective identification, the split-off bad unwanted parts of the self are projected into the hated evil “other” in a reciprocal way, recycling unending hatred and violence with moments of perverse pleasure—the glue of traumatic bonding. The dynamic harkens back to the early archaic maternal fusion of Eros and violence, merger and separation. (Joan Lachkar, Many Faces of Abuse, 1999)

Instead of healthy dependency needs forming in the first relationship, this fusion transforms not only into a reciprocal hatred between mother and son but, additionally, to a mutual sadistic attacking. This gives rise to a perfect fit for a masochistic victimized mother who can identify her aggression only through her grandiose sadistic son. (Joan Lachkar, “The Psychological Make-up of the Suicide Bomber,” Journal of Psychohistory, spring 2002 at press, and personal communication with the author)

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An example of this can be found in bin Laden’s projecting his rage outward against “bad mother” Amrika as he fought against his derisive nickname, “son of the slave,” given to him by the extensive family of his father, Mohammed bin Laden. His mother, Hamida was called “slave” by other wives because she complained about her status as the fourth wife, one who was legally discarded—but financially supported and controlled—as Mohammed’s attention turned elsewhere. (The 53 or 54 children the billionaire father had, were the product of more than the four wives allowed to a Muslim.) Hence, Osama has been his mother’s champion, fighting her battles as he splits off his hatred of the “bad mother” and projects it onto Amrika. (Bin Laden, pp. 49-51)

Islamic suicidal terrorism perceives America and Israel as nation-states having group selves identified with Christianity and Judaism but they, too, are part of the extended monotheistic family descended from Biblical father Abraham. In 1998, bin Laden formed an alliance declaring a “global jihad” against the Crusaders and the Jews, showing the group’s need to have enemies, and perhaps some religious “sibling rivalry.” The decree (fatwa) is important for several reasons. Its language reveals a grandiose group self stuck in a narcissistic medieval time warp using modern technology and organization. “Crusader” is an explicit reference to the military expulsion of the Muslim Moors from al-Andalus in southern Spain, which was Islam’s westernmost caliphate. Losing the crown jewel, exposed the group to its own impotence. Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the so-called “brains” behind al-Qaeda, talk about reconquering al-Andalus, demonstrating their group inability to mourn loss. (Susan Sachs, “The Videotape: Bin Laden Images Mesmerize Muslims,” The New York Times, October 9, 2001, p. B6) Like the charismatic leader who refracts political reality through the traumatic lens of his early childhood experience, bin Laden has revealed his maternal fusion without knowing it. Avner Falk, the Israeli psychohistorian, predicted something close to this, which Akbar Ahmed named “the Andalus Syndrome.” (Avner Falk, “Unconscious Aspects of the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Psychoanalytic Study of Society, Vol. 17, 1992, pp. 213-247; Akbar S. Ahmed, Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society, 1988, pp. 2-3)

Marriage, martyrdom, and blood are intimately linked together for the terrorist group. Like two sides of a coin, the terrorist group has a true and a false self. The true group self is oriented toward the private Islamic community (ummah). It calls the suicide bomber a “martyr” (shaheed); his act the “martyr’s marriage” (al-Shahadah); and his nuptial smile bassamat al-Farah. In Lebanese Shiite communities there are even female martyrs, named the “brides of blood” (arous dam). The false group self defends against its most violent fantasies, covering up the underlying profound shame and humiliation anxieties. By proxy, the group leader acts vicariously through the suicide bomber, who is scapegoated, thereby also purging the group’s mounting aggression and rage before it implodes. (Martin Wangh, “The ‘Evocation of a Proxy’: A Psychological Maneuver, Its Use As a Defense, Its Purposes and Genesis,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Vol. 17, 1962, pp. 451-472, 468; Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, 1936, pp. 132-146; and private communication with Avner Falk and Joan Lachkar) The group false self provokes the family of humankind but specifically targets the Crusader and Jewish cousin-brides.

Since suicide is self-murder, murder and suicide occurring together are best conceptualized as an extended self-murder, fusing the victim to the murderer. Death concretizes the fusion. While murder was perceived to be the desire to kill the sadistic oedipal father, Falk has shown that this is not so. (Avner Falk, “Political Assassination and Personality Disorder: The Cases of Lee Harvey Oswald and Yigal Amir,” Mind and Human Interaction, spring 2002 at press) Rather, the assassin wishes to kill the sadistic early (pre-oedipal) mother. His emotional turmoil is that of the terrified infant at the whim of his mother. The inability to mourn the loss of the fusion leaves the adult terrorized at the deepest level, having internalized his early mother as terrorist. The suicide bomber displays a graphic road map of these psychodynamics.

What is it about the maternal symbiosis that stirs up such violence? The early mother is experienced as voluptuous: the baby feels excited, alive, and the warmth of Eros. When the baby feels abruptly abandoned, he experiences sheer terror. (Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psychoanalysis, 1921-1945, 1948; John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 1973) Fearful and anxiously attached, he clings to the maternal traumatic bond/fusion, something is better than nothing. Domestic violence expresses this infantile terror in the couple, mutually projecting and recycling endlessly the terror tinged with Eros. Feeling out of control, fearing

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the pull of regression to the early voluptuous mother, homicide-suicide erupts. (“Projections,” pp. 685-686; Melvin Lansky, Fathers Who Fail: Shame and Psychopathology in the Family System, 1992)

It is my contention that Osama bin Laden and his suicide bombers display the exact same fears. Shakespeare even captured the Islamic propensity toward traumatic bonding in Othello, about a 16th-century military Moor who suffers from delusional jealousy. The main ingredient for this delusion is predicated on the young son’s having no rival. In Islamic culture, the mother raises a young boy away from his father until age seven, kept solely in the company of women. The son believes irrationally that he owns his mother, like a piece of property and rules the world, just like Osama. (Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia, “Battered Brides in Israeli-Arab Society,” National Council of Jewish Women Journal, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2001, p. 27) The Muslim psychoanalyst Abdelwahab Bouhdiba adapted the Western Oedipus complex by creating its counterpart, the Jawder complex, which takes its name from a young man in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Delusional jealousy is intertwined with but more annihilating than envy in conjugal paranoia. Fueling Othello’s flames is Iago, who gets him to believe that his wife Desdemona has been unfaithful. Othello murders her and kills himself, leading to suicidal domestic violence sometimes referred to as the “Othello Syndrome.”

A difficulty with applying the paradigm of domestic violence to Osama and the suicide bombers is a paucity of information about their childhoods and little interest in psychology among Muslims. However, our general knowledge of Islamic childhood and family relations is increasing, as Muslim psychologists courageously step forward to document Islamic domestic violence. They are providing more information on how honor crimes, polygamy, and even sexual honor of female chastity are used as a method of subjugating women. Isolated from her family in an arranged marriage at a young age, the young Islamic female fits the profile of the woman at risk. Bin Laden and his male entourage control their many wives in a preoccupied, obsessive manner, sequestering them at home, targeting them for beatings and stalking them. Rather than negotiate with a wife, the Islamic fundamentalist simply takes another. The Taliban publicly displayed their terror of the exciting female body by forcing women to be covered from head to toe, exposing no flesh reminiscent of the voluptuous warm early mother. In the Islamic world, women are not the only subjugated group. Non-Muslims, such as Christians and Jews, are never considered equals; they are always “second-class citizens” holding a protectorate status (dhimmeh). The only submission, which the Muslim participates in for the group, is surrendering to Allah, which is what the word “Islam” means. Osama and the suicide bombers merely take this dynamic to the next level. They stalk their victims, concealing their crude weapons for surprise attacks such as those at the World Trade Center.

Yet, the time sequence, the mode of death, and the anonymous victim are unique. In political domestic violence, suicide occurs before the murder. By contrast, in domestic violence the loved one is killed prior to committing suicide or setting up a scenario of being killed by the police. The terrorist kills by controlling the appointed time of the wedding of death; he kills himself and by extension the other. In detonating the charge, be it a belt or a plane turned into a bomb, the suicide bomber embeds himself into his victims, mixing his blood and body parts with theirs. Reminiscent of the moments right before birth—it is as if he were restaging it—he weds himself to the victim, a stand-in for his early, exciting, voluptuous, terrifying mother. In his mind’s eye, blood is more valuable than breast milk as he forestalls birth through a death fusion. Perhaps the promised reward of 72 dark-eyed virgins really expresses the wish to re-emerge in a pure primordial fusion. The annihilation of self and cousin-brides also eliminates the problem of identity. Nietzsche called this nihilism.

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