Quest for Rebirth: Psychohistorical Perspectives on the Islamic State’s Sacrificial War

The idea of a group engaging in ritual violence and war where innocent people are killed, raped, beheaded, and crucified for the fulfillment of a moral imperative strikes a counterintuitive note in observers who view humans as rational beings. One example of this phenomenon is the American media’s lack of clarity and depth in its assessment of the motives behind the carnage engendered by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or ISIS) in the Middle East.

In October 2014, the New York Times editorial board articulated its shared bewilderment at the ISIS fighters’ brutality. According to the board’s commentary, “The mind rebels at the reports of cruelty by the Islamic State…Comparisons are meaningless at this level of evil, as are attempts to explain the horror by delving into the psychology or rationale of the perpetrators” (“The Funda-

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mental Horror of ISIS,” October 2, 2014). The editorial board also referenced columnist Roger Cohen’s New York Times article, “Here There Is No Why: For ISIS, Slaughter Is an End in Itself,” in which he wrote, “there is no why to the barbarism of ISIS.”

However, scholars who have studied psychological dimensions of religious extremism cite numerous key theories as illuminating the roots of the Islamic State group’s violence and its vision of a new Middle East. Psychohistorical perspectives on war and social violence are among the key theories we must consider in understanding the current strain of extremism. Viewed through the lenses of psychohistorical models, the ISIS project to carve out land where literal interpretations of the Qur’an infuse all spheres of a fundamentalist monoculture is symptomatic of collective regression to early attachment needs—that is, to restore the idealized parent-child unity via purifying rebirth.

Although we must avoid reductive arguments, ignoring birth and childhood traumas communicated through the Islamic State’s horrific violence will hinder nuanced views of this unfolding event. American media inadvertently promulgate an understanding that the Islamic State group’s formation was caused not only by complex historical currents, sectarian conflicts, and a multiplicity of individual and adult group grievances, but also by deeper emotional dynamics. For example, Thomas Friedman, in a September 2014 op-ed for the New York Times, used a birth and pregnancy metaphor in characterizing the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East: “This is a civilization in distress, and unless it faces the pathologies that have given birth to an ISIS monster [in] its belly – any victory we achieve from the air or ground will be temporary” (“ISIS Crisis,” September 24, 2014). The unconscious reference to the Middle East theater of conflict as being a birth mother of ISIS is clearly communicated. What is more, Friedman metaphorically likened the extremist group itself to both a monstrous neonate and a pregnant woman.

Friedman is not alone in framing the formation of the Islamic State in birth metaphors. CIA analyst Graham Fuller also expressed figuratively the causal factors that gave rise to ISIS: “The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS, but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the war in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS” (Noam Chomsky, The Long Shameful History of American Terrorism, InTheseTimes.com, November 2014).

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Significance of Birth and Maternal Imagery

Metaphors relating to pregnancy, birth, and infancy are used frequently by political figures, journalists, social activists, and others during crises or discoveries that are perceived to be threats to human survival (Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, 1982). Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, as one example, drew an analogy between planet earth and a sick baby when raising awareness of climate change. Speaking on Good Morning America on June 13, 2006, he said, “The earth has a fever and just like when your child has a fever, maybe that’s a warning of something seriously wrong.”

The arrival of the atomic bomb also was heralded by American elites through parental and birth imagery. For example, prior to the test explosion of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, physicist Ernest Lawrence cabled a message to a colleague in which he referred to the team of scientists that built the atomic bomb as “parents.” After the atomic bomb named “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, U.S. Lieutenant General Leslie Groves cabled President Harry Truman with the news: “The baby was born” (deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, 2002).

From psychohistorian Lloyd deMause’s perspective, birth traumas that are projected in popular culture (e.g. crucifixion imagery, political cartoons that depict womb-like settings and fetal/placental motifs such as flags, chains, and tunnels) are indications of a nation’s regressions to early death equivalent experiences. War and social violence, according to deMause, are not caused by adult groups’ humiliations and needs for revenge in isolation from preexisting psychic injuries suffered in utero and in childhood. The American wars in Iraq and interventionist policies in the Middle East, from this viewpoint, are not the single causal events that engendered the formation of the Islamic State group.

According to psychohistorical theories, all violent mass movements and collective mobilizations for war have an underlying emotional dynamic or matrix that corresponds to separational individuation anxieties and fears of childhood. For example, it is the internalized fear of the engulfing mother of childhood that is at the base of later adult groups’ perceptions of enemies and macro level crises as posing existential threats. Thomas Friedman’s likening of ISIS to a monstrous baby and a pregnant woman is only one example of this phenomenon. To paraphrase deMause, the delegated enemy is projectively experienced as the bad-mother and bad-self.

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The unconscious need of all violent groups is to kill the bad-self and bad-mother gestalt in the enemy and thereby restore the sense of merger of good-self and good-mother.

Rebirth Themes in the Islamic State Group’s Violence and War

The Islamic State group’s unconscious need for an apocalyptic rebirth that restores a sense of unity with omnipotent caretakers is manifested in three interrelated characteristics. These characteristics can be organized as follows:

belief in a punitive God,

need for total conversion of preexisting geopolitical boundaries and
multi-cultural milieu into an Islamic monoculture, and

suicidal behavioral patterns.

Freud is the most prominent figure of classic psychoanalytic thought who theorized that God is a projection of the father image. According to Freud, belief in God has a number of psychic survival functions for human organisms. Among these functions are alleviation of death anxieties and facilitation of group cohesion through emotional attachment to a shared idealized parental figure (Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921).

Otto Rank, one of Freud’s associates, broke with the Freudian orthodoxy by presenting evidence from ancient myths and pre-monotheistic cults that depict supreme deities with maternal characteristics (Rank, The Trauma of Birth, 1920). Rank advanced the argument that birth traumas and the mother are the original sources of death equivalent anxieties. Hence, Rank theorized that fears relating to the birth mother were displaced onto the Father-God, a product of later historical group belief systems.

From a psychohistorical perspective, symbolizations of God are unconsciously experienced by human beings as attachment objects (Daniel Hill’s chapter in The Fundamentalist Mindset, 2010). God representations serve the function of affect regulation (i.e. defense against abandonment, guilt, separation, and individuation anxieties mobilized during periods of rapid change). Although psychohistorians differ in their views of the neurobiological and childhood roots of belief in God, they agree that belief in a punitive God is an integral component of violent groups.

In keeping with Rank’s discovery of maternal imagery in pre-Abrahamic religions, it also should be noted that belief in a male gendered God has a particular function—that is, to neutralize

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maternal engulfment anxieties. For example, the belief in a vengeful and murderous form of Father-God or Allah, for violent fundamentalist groups such as ISIS, can be traced to irregular attachments to primary caretakers of childhood (Hill, The Fundamentalist Mindset, 2010). In theory, the Islamic State extremists’ need to submit to the will of Allah is an unconscious striving to merge with the father, thus defending the self from annihilation by the engulfing mother. Neutralization of anxieties and death wishes for the castrating father are also assuaged through the submission to an internalized representation of a supreme male deity.

The significance of Iraq and Syria as a place to establish a “caliphate,” a religious order, is also an unconscious communication of the Islamic State group’s need to merge with a good parent. In this case, it is the need to merge with the “good mother.” According to psychohistorical theory, the physical environment and the “in group” milieu is experienced as a maternal body. In fact, deMause theorizes that group members experience its vital attachments such as national boundaries and the group itself as a womb surrounding (deMause, Foundations, 1982). From this perspective, the Islamic State group’s need to establish a caliphate that embodies Allah’s authority on earth (Springer, Regens, and Edger, Islamic Radicalism and Global Jihad, 2009) is a reflection of an unconscious need to enter the prenatal mother, or womb.

The suicidal behavior of ISIS is another indication of its unconscious need to regain primal unity with idealized love objects. For example, news media around the world are replete with reports of suicides or “suicide bombings,” committed by individuals with ideological ties with the Islamic State. At a group level, the current war ISIS extremists are waging can also be considered as a collective suicide. For example, the Islamic State is waging war against an impressive array of enemies encompassing the Western World (i.e. U.S., Britain, France, and their allies) and the Muslim nations (i.e. Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and their allies). Put in other words, ISIS is waging a war that cannot be won by any rational calculations; it also is a war where massive casualties of group members are unavoidable.

From a psychohistorical viewpoint, individuals’ and groups’ need for martyrdom or death in war stems from an unconscious striving for immortality through the merger with loving parental powers. The Islamic State extremists’ quest to “die for a higher cause,” be it in the name of Islam or Allah, overlays the need to

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mask annihilation anxieties imprinted in childhood and regain maternal love (deMause, Emotional Life, 2002).

Conclusion

The formation of ISIS and its sacrificial war have complex causal roots. Most scholars would agree that the current battles waged by Islamic State extremists in Iraq and Syria are driven by a multiplicity of preexisting and emerging conflicts. Few would argue that American military debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and interventionist policy in the world are not among the causal factors of the formation of Islamic fundamentalist groups.

However, imperialistic overextension of American power is not the only catalyzing dynamic that has given rise to the Islamic State group. A substantial body of psychohistorical research shows that social violence and war are not caused by adult group victimizations, a sense of entitlement, and rage against the “secular Western World.” Rather, massive emotional regression of all involved warring nations to traumatic memories of birth and childhood is among the multiplicity of causal factors that are synergistically at play in the rise of these extremists.

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