The Father Two penises The Tree of Life (The Placenta)
HATRED FOR WOMEN AND ISLAMIC
TERROR
February 2002.
During the last three years, we have been witnesses to
the atrocities perpetrated in Afghanistan by the Taliban regime on their
own women.
Women hatred is nothing new, however, the extent of the
abuse and its ferocity has no precedent in the history of mankind.
It is in act a genocide which, since it is being committed
on their own women, must be interpreted also as an act of collective suicide.
The Talibans do not limit themselves to controlling and
humiliating their women, which is quite common in many primitive societies,
but their aim seems to be the actual destruction of the other sex.
Women in Afghanistan are not only excluded from public
life and deprived from every civil and human right. They are even prevented
from receiving basic medical care.
Preventing women from going to school and
from having an education points to the intention of holding
them in a state of submission and humiliation, but preventing from them
even medical care, points to the intention of extermination.
Phenomenologically speaking, the drive of destroying the
object of lust, is peculiar to the oral sadistic stage of evolution, and
we must understand what happened in Islamic society, and particularly in
Afghanistan, that induced such a self destructing regression in an entire
people.
Hatred for women is so absolute that the Talibans don't
want any contact with them, and their society became a basically
homosexual one.
Men live only among themselves, and their common endeavor
and cement is Jihad, the Holy War, which, as a Taliban cleric expressed
himself, became not only an aim, but a way of life.
As he said: "it will never end". Jihad is filling the
void left by their own renunciation to women, and so there will always
be some infidels left, in order to fill that void.
They seem a re-enactment of the primal Freudian
Horde of the Brothers, who wandered outside the main camp,
hindered by the tyrannical father from the female body.
Now they are imposing on themselves this inhibition,
and the tyrannical castrating father has become their own Super-Ego, to
whom they blindly obey.
According to deMause's theory, hatred for women is the
consequence of the abuse suffered during childhood by the hand of mothers.
As he says, quoting St. Augustine: "give me other mothers and I shall give
you another world" (Lloyd deMause, "Foundations of Psychohistory", Creative
Roots, New York 1982, p.2).
According to this theory it is a question of simple
and natural retaliation: the sons do to women what their mothers
had done to them. As the French say: "Chérchez la femme",
the culprit is there.
However, even if we admit that in primitive societies
children are routinely abused, there is no reason to believe that
Moslem women abuse their own sons more than Japanese, Indian, Balkan, Slavs
or German women.
German women severely abused their children, and doing
so they raised generations of anal sadists who eventually masterminded
concentration camps, but they have never been targeted themselves by such
a ferocious and exclusive hatred, neither had they been imposed veils,
chadors and other sexual austerity measures, nor had they been secluded
and excluded from society to the point of oblivion.
In my opinion, in order to understand the real
reason for such ferocious hatred for women and such extreme zeal
in repressing every sexual connotation, we must compare Islamic society
to other groups, and find the peculiarity that causes such particularity.
In what Moslem society is different from others
?
Child abuse is not peculiar to Moslems. Even if we pinpoint
to a trait that may be considered peculiar, like clitorectomy, this unfortunate
custom is acted out by women on their own daughters. Circumcision
is a male affair. Men do it to their sons. Mothers have no part in it.
So, are Muslim mothers more abusive than others towards
their own sons, to the point of triggering such a resentment?
We don't think so.
What can therefore be the peculiar reason for this peculiar
hatred ?
If we check attentively, the main difference between
Moslem society and others is the structure of the family. Only Moslems
are actively and structurally polygamist, while all the others are monogamist,
or bigamist, at most, and in quite rare cases.
Now that we have found these two peculiarities: ferocious
hatred for women and for sexuality on one hand, and polygamy on the other
hand, we must also find the correlation between those two phenomena.
In the monogamist family there is one wife and a limited
number of children. Fathers are there, and are usually in control. They
are a presence.
In Hitler's family abuse was perpetrated by both parents,
so the little Adolph became an anal sadist and went out to act on
others what he had suffered by the hand of his parents.
Let's take the instance of Stalin's family. The father
was a drunk, and we should probably never define him as a "strong
" person. But he was there, abused his child and wife, and the little
Joseph Stalin for sure perceived him as a strong presence.
We must understand how the little child perceives his
father. He cannot gauge him with the same parameters as we do.
The little Joseph identified with him, and became
an abusing person and a drunk himself.
However, Hitler's and Stalin's hatred for mankind never
translated int sexual abstinence, hatred for women in particular, and into
deep horror for sexuality. Distorted as could be, nevertheless their sexuality
was there. German and Russian women had never been imposed veils and chadors.
In a polygamist society, in contrast, there is not a
centralized family nucleus. There are many children. Every group of children
rotates not around the father but around the mother.
When an Arab man takes another woman, she doesn't live
with the former wife and her husband, but in another house, or tent,
and there she raises her children. The husband may go there once a week
or once a month. If she is not the preferred one, her children will never
meet or play with their father. As in the monogamist society the even abusive
father is a presence, and sometime the more he is abusive, the more
he is perceived as present by the child, so in the polygamist society the
father is perceived as an absence
Now, take Bin Laden, one of fifteen children by one of
ten wives, and another 35 siblings from his father's other wives: he probably
never met his father, or only occasionally. He never had the occasion of
even being abused by him. Instead of a father figure, he has a void.
Joan Lachkar kindly sent me the following
citation from the NY Post
Ben Ladin's Background
In,B. "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America"
is said that his mother was the 10th wife and the least liked or should
we say, the most hated, and that he had 15 siblings.
NY Post 10/2/01, p. 1:
"Terror overlord Osama bin Laden called his adoptive mother
two days
before the Sept. 11 attacks against America to tell her
he was going
underground...While bin Laden's family has publicly disowned
him,
step-mom Al-Kalifa bin Laden has reportedly remained
in close contact
with him [she] raised Osama after his birth mother died
[and] keeps
an apartment in Paris..."
As Joan Lachkar pointed out in her article: "Folie
a deux in Marital and Political Relationships" (The Journal of Psychohistory
22 (2) Fall 1994), many Moslem leaders were orphans or abandoned children
themselves: Saddam Hussein, Khoumani, Arafat, and I shall add:
abandoned by their fathers. Even those children who had not been
physically abandoned by their fathers, feel that way, because, in
a polygamist society, they perceive their father as absent.
All the Muslim saga is that of the child abandoned by
his father, from Ishmael to the Prophet Muhammad himself.
A Talibani leader, two days ago (November 2001) had a
very interesting slip of the tongue. Speaking of Muhammed he said: "Even
the Prophet was an orphan". And this was in direct association with their
acts of terror. Why "Even" ? Who else is an orphan if not the Talibans
themselves ?!
Interestingly enough, Muhammed himself was very fond
and respectful of his wife Hadija, but she was an elder widowed woman,
who probably did not arise his sexuality very much. And, as we have seen,
Bin Laden, two days before the attack, called his step-mom, to whom he
is very attached. Being she a step-mom, he is able to disassociate
her from his own lust and sexuality.
As we see, we have no reason to believe that Muslims
hate women because they had been abused by their mothers, and wherever
(very rare cases) they can dissociate between a woman and sexuality they
may be even dedicated step-sons and husbands.
My conclusion is that they do not hate women per se,
but they hate them as symbols of their own lust and repressed sexuality.
Now, how can we find a correlation between a perceived
absent father, a condition of orphan, and this extreme horror
for women and sexuality.
Why the former drives to the latter?
In the last decades, particularly in America, Freud's
work has been misunderstood, disregarded and, even worse, outright repressed.
The founder of psychoanalysis has already told us what
happens to a child, who reaches the Oedipal level, at the age
of three to five, while he is overflooded by genital energies, and
he is abused: he feels guilty. And he interprets the abuse
as a punishment for his own genital arousement and sexuality. He
will regress to a previous stage of erotic evolution. He has no other choice.
A four year old child is not a philosopher, and he cannot understand
that what happens to him, by the hand of his caretakers, is independent
of what is happening inside his own body. Even if, at the same time,
there is a major calamity, an earthquake or a death in the family, he will
interpret those events as dependent on what he is feeling inside his body.
So, if we speak of abuse, as the major cause for psychogenic regression,
we must understand this definition in a much broader sense than just spanking
and beating. Parents who are not mentally and affectively present are,
in an unintended way, inflicting the worst form of abuse of all, even if
they have never spanked their child, nor abused him in any other way.
Let's take a four year child, who feels all his energies
channeled in his little genitals and directed towards his mother. This
child needs first of all a father to identify with. Whoever has raised
a child could not not to have noticed how, particularly at this age, the
male imitates his father in the most pathetic ways: the same
expressions, the same gestures. And how he speaks of him: "My father is
stronger than yours, my father will win yours....and so on".
His father's identity is his own, his father's virility
is his own. If he has no father to identify with, he will have a
void, instead of an identity.
And he will interpret this void as a consequence of
his own sexual arousement.
Lacan, who was a French, understood very well that the
name of the game is the Name of the Father, the Ego, the Identity.
He underlined this point even more than Freud, who had discovered that
without identification with the idea of the Father there is no society,
no moral standards, no Super-Ego, but only drives and wild instincts.
If an Oedipal child is abused or rejected by his mother,
he will unconsciously hate women too, but this hatred will find expression
in a premature ejaculation, or other forms of sexual incompetence,
in order to self-punish and get even with his mother, at the same time.
If he regresses to the anal stage he will find
gratification only controlling women, may be even beating them, but
the suffered abuse will never translate into the extreme form of horror
and hatred for every form of sexuality, as we are actually seeing happening
in the Islamic world.
The moral stance against sexuality must have its source
in the psychic instance where every morality and ethical value are created,
meaning in the Super -Ego and in the presence of the father.
Only a child who had no father and no identity, at the
critical Oedipal stage, will cast the blame for this most important
form of abuse on his own sexual arousment and on the target of his lust:
the woman. Even the most loving and dedicated mother will not be
able to compensate for this void, and she will be unconsciously hated in
the most extreme form because, by punishing her, the man will
punish his own sexuality, which he had interpreted as the cause for the
abandonement by his so needed father.
Now the equation: sexual arousment -
woman - punishment, becomes clear.
Blaming women for the sin is nothing new. As is written:
"...The woman whom thou didst give me, she gave me of the tree, and
I did eat" (Gen. 3:12).
In a healthy family the Oedipal sense of
guilt is mediated by the presence of the father through the process of
identification. A sediment may well remain, but a compromise is eventualy
reached. But if there is no father, there can be no compromise too. The
missing father will translate into an hallucinated one, and therefore also
the Super Ego will be hallucinated in an uncompromising and and threatening
imago, whose demands are impossible to fulfill.
It is not casual that both St.Augustine and Lloyd
deMause put the major blame on women.
Christianity exacerbated the senseof guilt for
man's own sexuality, which was almost non-existent in the ancient
world.
DeMause's Psychohistory is the byproduct of American
society where, on one hand they have relaxed standards, complete sexual
freedom and equality, to the point that they are moving in the direction
of an unisex society, which, by itself, to some may well be a blessed phenomenon,
but, on the other hand, has very detrimental consequences too. They
have diminished the central figure of the father as a reference point of
identification. The result is a malaise as for their own roots and identity.
This malaise is producing a disturbing unconscious guilt, which is been
cast, as usual, on women. In a very subtle way, the message is the same:
women are guilty.
If fathers are non-present, the culprit is the
woman.
We may very well enlist our Platonic logic, and tell
to ourselves that women are equal to men (indeed they are), and that fathers
and mothers must have the same importance in the family, but the human
psyche, particularly that of a four years child, doesn't work with Platonic
logic. If a child at the critical stage does not perceive his father as
THE must important, he will find difficult to overcome the Oedipal
threshold, and will be tempted into evolutional regression.
As the say goes: opposites do touch at the extremities.
Paradoxically, the Islamic terrorists have targeted America
because of their sexual freedom. They hate free people because they hate
their own sexuality. America is the perfect alter ego to the Islamic
culture of repression. If they punish America they will punish their own
sinful drives.
However, there are some hints that they also unconsciously
perceive America's Achilles heel .
It is as they were saying: "You see, we, like you, are
also lacking a Father and an identity, but we are punishing
the cause of our loss, our sinful drives. You, on the contrary, are indulging
in your sins, and therefore you are deserving your punishment manifolds".
As the Talibans' slip of the tongue disclosed: "The Prophet
was an orphan too", meaning: like me and you. If this was not his intention,
why to tell this sentence in American media. He was explaining to Americans
why they deserve to be punished.
Bin Laden father not only was necessarily
absent, having 10th wives and 15 sons from Bin Laden mother alone,
but he also died in a plane crash outside of San Antonio.
He had no father - his father died in a plan crash-
he has masterminded 4 planes full of people crashing
into the TWC and other targets.
My guess is that he identifies with his own
victims, who crashed in the planes. Identify not in the sense that
he empathizes, but in the sense that he introjected the lost
object (the father), who died in a plan crash, and now he is
himself the passengers of the planes = his father.
He is hallucinating to die in the same way in order to
reunite with the hallucinated father. In the meantime he is sending others
to the same death and he identifies with them. There is here an interesting
condensation:
1) He himself is dying through his victims, and
in this way he recovers the lost object
2) He is punishing his father for not having been there,
restaging the scene of his death. It is as if he is killing him again.
So, he is hallucinating a father (Allah). He cannot
identify with him in the Oedipal sense, but only through the introjection
of the hallucinated lost object.
Haven't you seen how the Arabs pray
?
The Muezzin closes with his left hand his
left ear. He brings the right hand to his mouth, as a megaphone,
and shouts loudly into the sky: "Allaaaah".
He is shouting for the absent father. He is calling him
to come down from his hiding place.
Now, compare with the Jews.
They sit or stand, toss with their head and
body, speaking among themselves. They talk with their Father, they
converse, they discuss with him. They ask him questions, and respond by
themselves. A real Jew never rotates his eyes into the sky, because his
Father is there with him.
A real Synagogue looks like a market, and
everybody tosses in another direction, murmuring between themselves, and
sometimes uttering some sentences loudly, as if they had been asked
a question and now they are responding.
If Judaism, as Freud stated, is the religion
of the Father, it is the religion of the present father, as
in Jewish families.
Islam, in contrast, is the religion of the absent
father, as in Islamic families.
The worst riots in the Moslem world happen
when they exit the Mosque, at the end of Friday's prayer.
Even the leaders of Islamic states, like Mubarak,
king Hassan of Jordan and Musharraf, are very afraid of this moment.
They are erotically aroused by the hallucination of the
lost object, the Father, and they are in a collective
trance. They are eager to re-unite with him in the Paradise of the Martyrs.
This is the Placenta. In the Placenta
they will be reunited, not with the Mother, but with the Father.
Like Pinocchio who re-unites with his father in the belly of the whale.
The Prophet Jonah too, ends into the belly of the whale
because he was regressing from the presence of the Father (escaping from
him). What the tale of Pinocchio and the Biblical story tell us is that
a regression from the Oedipal level, because of a refusal of the paternal
presence, leads all the way back into the placenta.
I have sustained, so far, that every regression into
a borderline condition is caused by the absence of the father, real or
just perceived, or, even only in relative terms, versus the
mother.
Being a condition of total withdrawal from the
Ego, it may or may not cause paranoid hallucinations, as it seems to be
at the moment the situation in the Islamic world.
They exploded two jets into the WTC, but they feel completely
justified because they are the persecuted ones. THEY demand empathy and
sympathy.
They are threatening America with retaliation, if she
does anything.
Who did what to whom is being completely disregarded.
To the best of my understanding, retaliation is something
that the offended side does, not the offending perpetrator. So, no
matter what they do, they feel the victims: the abused ones. As it happens
in every paranoia
An Iranian Ayatollah has even said on television
that it is all a Zionist plot.
It is in act here a complete withdrawal from the Reality
Principle, like in psychotic hallucinations.
Moreover, I have sustained that every ulterior pathology
in a Borderline personality is only a defense against the primary
cause.
In order to better understand this point I'll give
an example.
Let's assume that a baby, who at the oral stage
has all his erotic energies concentrated in the need to suck, will
be deprived at this stage of the so much needed breast.
He will hallucinate a breast.
Depriving a baby of this vital erotic need is a
very serious form of abuse.
Then, at the next stage, he will be gravely abused
while he is sitting on the pot. Spanking, violence, enemas, and so on,
like in 19th century German society.
At the genital stage, rejected by his mother, not
loved, insulted, and soon and so on.
At the Oedipal level he has no father to identify with.
Then there will be a regression through all this
stages into the oral sadistic stage, and may be even straight into
the placenta.
However, having been abused all his
way up, he will bring with him, on his way down,
various symptoms from the conflicts he had been exposed to.
Let's assume that he settles at the sadistic oral
stage.
Now, if he goes into psychoanalysis,
for many years nothing will emerge of the primary cause
which is responsible for his fall.
For many years, on the couch, will emerge only contents
associated with the level, the stage, where he actually is now.
Only after many years he will be penetrated by the consciousness,
not of what happened and why, but of his actual condition.
If he is an oral sadist, he will be induced into
thinking that the cause of all his troubles is that he had
been abused as a baby, and deprived of the much needed breast. This
may well be true, but it has nothing to do with the causes of his regression
into that stage.
The same as for an anal personality, and so on.
This is what Lloyd is saying in his
book: after seven years of personal psychoanalysis he concluded
that he is in the placenta ("Foundations of Psychohistory", p.99).
So, he could so well describe what the conditions are in that place.
There, he stopped his analysis, and therefore he still
is in the placenta, he thinks that everybody else is there too, and
never occurred to him that his condition is a consequence of a regression
from the Oedipal stage, through all the other stages, because his lack
of an identity = a father figure.
When I mentioned the Father and the primal murder, he
reacted with a paranoid hallucination, very similar to Bin Laden, and accused
me of intriguing for his assassination.
Now he identifies with all the fetuses of the world,
because fetuses have no father and no identity.
But what is he doing?
He describes all the possible abuses suffered by children,
as a defense against the real cause of his fall, which is the
same in every borderline.
I want to emphasize that I would never enter personal
details, had it not been for the simple reason that he himself rendered
them public through his book.
If anybody publics personal details, he should
also expect others to relate to them, to the best of their understanding.
He suggested himself as a model, and this is the point which is totally
unacceptable.
When de Mause says that childhood abuse is the real cause
of wars, aggressiveness and all the evils that happen to us, he is
right, of course. But only because child abuse induces a regression into
previous stages of evolution and into anal, oral, or placental sadism,
with the endogenous aggressiveness peculiar to those stages.
It is not by denying endogenous aggressiveness
that truth is well served, but by understanding that childhood abuse
triggers in children a sense of guilt, and doing so it induces them into
evolutional regression, and re-enacts a natural aggressiveness
that, in normal conditions, would have been overcome, channeled,
and sublimated into social constructive endeavors.
Let's assume that a child has been severely abused, while
he was a fetus, by particularly hard conditions, and
even during the first two year of life, and
then, by some miracle, he changed parents, and the new ones
are very considering, loving and understanding, particularly in
his Oedipal stage.
This child will never suffer a regression
into placental or oral sadistic contents.
He will never need to. His archaic suffering will
be successfully repressed and removed. After all, the human
being is the king of all creatures, and he became such
because of his extraordinary resilience. It doesn't matter
if birth took place in the best or the worst of conditions.
Philo, Maimonides, Spinoza, Freud, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Yitzhak Stern,
Rubinstein, Leonard Bernstein on one hand, and Torquemada, Hitler, Stalin,
Bin Laden, Arafat and Saddam Hussein probably had the same placental conditions.
The first group has been even circumcised, which, according to deMause,
it is one of the worst formsof abuse.
The difference is that the first group had caring
families and present father figures. So, they
could successfully repress forms of very early abuse. The second
group, in contrast, had been abused along all the stages of
their development. And, as we have seen as for the Moslems, the worst form
of abuse was the absence of the father at the Oedipal stage.
And it is not casual, if the Oedipal stage is the
pivotal one. In the first five years of life the human being is repeating
in a concentrated way millions of years of evolution.
The Oedipal stage is the climax of this evolution. As
Freud exposited, the ambivalence of hatred and love at this stage,
the guilt, the compromise and the identification, are the point were
the first humans diverged from the pack of wolves
and the horde of primates, and became homo politicus.
Animals don't organize themselves in articulated societies. They
have no guilt and no conscience, and therefore also no society, and
not mental illness either.
So, every mental illness must have as its
primary cause the relationship with the father.
Of course, mothers are very important, but
other mammals have mothers too.
They don't have fathers. After a very short span, of
days at best, the father is not there anymore. To a seal and a calf it
is irrelevant who its father is.
Therefore they have no society, no morality, no
Ego and not Super-Ego.
Every mental illness is the consequence of an internal
conflict between the Id (the natural drives) and the
Ego and Super-Ego, the conscience, the moral instance,
represented by the father.
Only humans have mental illness, because only humans
need fathers to guide and to educate them. And if they don 't have them
they become perverts, the likes of Bin Laden, or
sick people.
All this intensive dealing, in America, with placental
conditions and early abuse, and therefore with the "responsibility"
of mothers, is ridiculous, at best.
It is the direct consequenceof the repression of
the IDEA of the father, and therefore of the anchor and
the identity, that makes human society so unique.
A man who had a caring and loving mother will
always feel secure and successful, on one condition: that he had a strong
father presence to identify with. Otherwise he will be a borderline floating
creature, with no self identity and strong self, no matter
how much a good mother he had.
Now we can understand also why Freud's teachings are
so disregarded and misunderstood in modern Western society.
If a therapist encounter borderlines who have suffered
many kind of injuries, on their way up into
the Oedipal bottleneck, he may well be induced to believe that those injuries
are real, and perhaps they are, but they are not the cause, they are the
rationalization for their condition.
Those injuries, suffered on the way up, are for
sure making their situation worse on their way down.
A borderline, who has suffered an injury at the
Oedipal stage, from his mother, will hate women too, and not only
men. If he had been abused at the anal stage, he will may also
suffer from a very serious compulsive obsessive neurosis. And
if he had been deprived of the breast, now, on his analyst's couch,
he will hallucinate biting breasts.
However, all this will be enlisted as a defense against
the primary cause, which will become clear in his analysis only after many
years, if he can climb back all his way up into the top of the hill,
the Oedipal threshold, and beyond.
If he is a borderline, it will never happen
because, having lost the Reality Principle, and having withdrawn from the
Ego, he has no more lever to colonize and to submit the Id.
Freud understood very well this point, and suggested
never to take into analysis psychotics.
In the same way you will never be able to treat borderlines.
They will tell you again and again of all their injuries, but they
have no motivation for changing their situation.
A borderline will complain about his suffering, but he
will really never do anything to cease it. Only lips service.
Psychologists are very fond of their borderlines patients,
because the latter are very skillful into manipulating them into believing
that they are doing a lot of progress. Don't forget that borderlines
are very manipulative, and will easily make lever on the narcissistic side
of the psychologist. A therapist feels in control, his anal-narcissistic
side has his best satisfaction treating borderlines. He will give
them a lot of sympathy and support and empathy, but it will remain
some sort of masturbation. They will be able to advise their patient on
every step he has or has not to do, they will receive a lot of gratefulness,
and even letters of thanks and appreciation, but after one hundred
years the patient will still be there, at square one. He will only manipulate
the therapist into thinking that he has made a lot of progress.
It is the same with the Palestinians: After years
of progress talking peace, after Israel almost total withdrawal from
every land inhabited by Palestinians (95%), after they have their own autonomy
and institutions, when offered full independence and statehood, they
blew it up, and now they are back at square one. They retreated into
the hallucination of being persecuted, and reacted with anger,
bloodshed, and suicide missions. However, they have manipulated the world
into thinking what they feel themselves, that they are the victims.
Actually, much worse than square one. I had never
seen such an hatred, until now. Suicide missions is a new affair. Until
a few years ago, we had never had such a thing.
Offered a real cure to their situation, they reacted
with panic.
Independence and democracy are the achievement of a mature
Ego, which, as we have seen, may only exist where there is a present
supportive father.
The deprivation of this essential presence has left them
only with the envy for their sibling, Yitzhak, who had a Father, and therefore
could do it. Therefore, their hatred for him.
Their aim is not to be independent, free, having open
borders and interaction with Israel, because Israeli society example
and closeness will trigger demands of sexual and political freedom
by their women and children. So, the only way, which
is open to them, is an ulterior internal repression by the gang of
assassins that is in power, and manipulating Israel into closing her borders.
The instrument is suicidal terror, and escalating violence everytime there
are talks of peace.
In the four years since they achieved autonomy, more
Palestinians have died, under torture, in Palestinian prisons than in thirty
years of Israeli occupation.
However, while the sporadic cases which occurred
in Israeli jails had been brought to Court and to public attention, because
Israel is a free society with free press and Courts of Law, what
is happening in the Palestinian Authority is concealed
under a veil of silence. No free speech, no Courts of
Law, no civil tribunals, no rights to anybody, no free elections:
only a struggle of power among the gangs that are trying to prevail
on each other.
Israel's biggest mistake has been assuming that
the Palestinians have her same agenda.
Israel wanted to put and end to the conflict, and therefore
wrongly assumed that this is the other side agenda , too.
However, the other side agenda, because of the
reasons we have exposited above, it is not peace, but repression
and a close society, where they could act out their regressive psychological
needs.
First Lloyd deMause:
Soraya Altorki, Somen in Saudi Arabia: Ideology
and Behavior Among the Elite. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986,
p. 30; Mazharul Haq Khari, Purdah and Polygamy: A Study in the Social Pathology
of the Muslim Society. Peshawar Cantt., Nashiran-e-Ilm-o-Taraqiyet, 1972,
p. 91.
I responded as follows:
Lloyd, in your article you have only proved my point:
that Moslem women are very abusive towards their daughters,
but they rejoice when a son is born.
As for your suggestion to enact a Marshal
program for Afghanistan, as America did
after WWII, I just remind you that the Americans,
then, first destroyed the Nazis, AND the Japanese (with
no less than an atomic bomb), and only afterwards
they enacted the Marshal program. Not the other way around.
May be it seems to you a small detail, but it is not.
With all the due respect
Then Robert Sharf intervened in the discussion:
Dear Iakov:
I think that much of what you say is in error.
Iakov (previous): Lloyd, in your article you have
only proved my point:
Bob: It does not follow from the fact that the birth of
boys is celebrated
Iakov (previous): Sons are abused by their fathers, not
by their mothers, so they
Bob: It seems here that your are admitting the premise:
men who are abused by
Iakov (previous): They developed into hard core psychotic
homosexuals.
Bob: Your thought here seems to be that boys who were
mistreated by their
Iakov (previous): What I said is not that
Moslem women are perfect mothers to sons.
Bob: Stevens sets forth a similar argument in his study
of the Oedipus
Iakov (previous): So, everything, including your
own article, is leading to an
Bob: This is extremely inaccurate. Of course, all of the
societies you
Iakov (previous): Your theory is very nice, but
it seems to me that it has more
Bob: I am wondering what it is, then, that you find so
"precious" about
Iakov (previous): As for your suggestion to enact
a Marshal program for
Bob: Lloyd is not talking about a literal Marshal plan,
but one which
I find it difficult to believe, Iakov, that you are contending
that Islamic
Best,
Bob
I responded:
Dear Bob,
>
Iakov:
>
Iakov:
Bob:
Iakov:
Ibidem
> Bob: Stevens sets forth a similar argument in his study
of the Oedipus
Iakov:
Premature ejaculation, incapability to reach an orgasm,
Narcissism, some
Bob:
Iakov:
Bob:
Iakov:
> Bob: This is extremely inaccurate. Of course, all of
the societies you
Iakov:
Still, the Talibanis do not organize orgies, as Russian
women do not wear
> Bob: I am wondering what it is, then, that you find
so "precious" about
In short: I have never denied maternal abuse, but this
is exactly NOT
It is very bad, my friends, very bad.
All the best
Iakov
Then Lloyd wrote an article
Lloyd wrote:
Watching on MSNBC last night a program featuring a number
of
I was again impressed how they confirmed over and over
again that
Not one mentioned any political event, anything any Israeli
or
All were certain "the moment your first blood spurts out,
all of your
All looked only to one thing: getting LOVE from Allah
(early
My reaction was as follows
The terrorist himself says: "Every time my father sees
my photo, he'll cry.".
Iakov Levi
Another member of a former Psychohistory list, Harrold
Forsythe, intervened in the discussion
I only reply because I have somehow been put on
the distribution list for
Harold
And then another member, Telmo Escobar, wrote:
On Wed, 24 Oct 2001, iakov levi wrote:
> Lloyd wrote:
> Iakov:
Hi, Iakov and all. Sorry that, of lately, I've been
often hurried and
I like your efforts to address facts from a different
perspective. About
Let us address the question you pose: who knows
better? The terrorist
Lloyd, surely. For any of us, our own motivations
are difficult to
So, my reasoning is that Lloyd surely knows better
not because Lloyd is
I bet this answer doesn't satisfy you. So, let us
pose the problem in a
My answer would be that the existence of such entities
(gods and the
So we have to address the ultimate question: why
"Allah" doesn't mean the
But I don't deny that Allah is the father. My idea
is that this answer
I'd like to say that one of the many revolutionary
ideas implied in
-Telmo-
From: Telmo Escobar <[email protected]>
I responded as follows:
Hi Harold,
You wrote:
Iakov:
You pointed to the real issue. If the analyst thought
a priori that Allah is
All the best to everybody
Iakov
BTW: The words of the terrorist: "We all appear
before God naked." are a
Again Telmo Escobar:
Hi, Iakov and all. Thanks for your very interesting ruminations.
>
It's true that one has to keep a mind as open as
possible. But also, I
>
You are addressing the issue that there isn't a
single "cause" for
Poverty, psychogenic backwardness, are both significant
factors. Yet they
>
Agreed.
> I found that only polygamy is peculiar to Moslems,
I mean in
The problem with this reasoning is, aren't there
counterexamples? I
> So, I began listening to what they themselves
are saying, reading of
Comment: your reasoning is quite convincing, but
in view of the
>
This is not what I said. What I implied is that,
I think, suicidal
>
Agreed. My view is that, saying it's the father,
may be superficial.
>
No! This is THE point. I didn't read what Harold
wrote, but the point
> This is the reason why I say that Lloyd's methodology
is wrong
This is also the reason why I feel he's right. In
short, we are
>
Your messages are always very valuable and insighful,
and I hope you'll
Telmo
I responded:
Telmo wrote:
The problem with this reasoning is, aren't there counterexamples?
I
Iakov:
I know so little about pre-revolution rural China,
that at the
Iakov
Then Robert Sharf intervened:
> Dear Iakov:
My response was as following:
Dear Bob,
All the best
Links:
The paper has been published, with comments from readers, by FreeRepublic.
Links:
Why Islamic Terror Now
The
Assassination of Rabin and its Consequences for the Israeli Palestinian
Conflict
The
Psychogenic Theory and the Perfect Society
Without Borders: the Borderline Case of the European Union
Pinocchio.
The Puberty Rite of a Puppet
Who Burns the Books?
In the aftermath of my paper, there have been the following
remarks by some psychohistorians and the correspondence reported below:
Iakov: Unfortunately, your attempt to label me a woman-hater
who gratuitously blames wonderful Islamic mothers is based upon a total
lack of research on your part into Islamic fundamentalist childrearing,
as you will see after reading the following article I have written.
Lloyd deMause
Lloyd deMause's article attached to the e-mail:
THE CHILDHOOD ORIGINS OF TERRORISM
In the massive media coverage of the terrorist attacks,
there has been no interest shown in why the terrorists felt they had to
kill Americans. They were "Evil," as the President told us, and that has
seemed to satisfy our curiosity as to their motives. But if we are going
to end this terrorism, it would be useful to understand what makes a terrorist,
what developmental life histories they share that can help us see why they
want to kill "American infidels" and themselves, so we can work to remove
the sources of their violence and really prevent future terrorist attacks.
The roots of terrorism lie, I believe, not in this or
that American political attitude but in the extremely abusive families
of the terrorists. Children who grow up to be Islamic terrorists are products
of an extremely misogynist fundamentalist system that strictly segregates
the family into two separate areas, the men's area, often on the first
floor, and the women's area, above the men, where the children are brought
up and which the father rarely visits. Even in countries like Saudi
Arabia today, women by law cannot mix with unrelated men, and public places
still have separate women's areas in restaurants and work places, because,
as one Muslim sociologist put it bluntly: "In our society there is no relationship
of friendship between a man and a woman."
Girls are routinely treated abominably in fundamentalist
families. When a boy is born, the family rejoices; when a girl is born,
the whole family mourns. The girl's sexuality is so hated that when
she is five or so the women grab her, pin her down, and chop off her clitoris
and often her labia with a razor blade or piece of glass, ignoring her
agony and screams for help, because, they say, her clitoris is "dirty,"
"ugly," "poisonous," "can cause a voracious appetite for promiscuous sex,"
and "might render men impotent." Her vagina is then usually sewed
up to prevent intercourse, leaving only tiny hole for urination. The genital
mutilation is excruciatingly painful. About a fifth die from infections,
mutilated women must "shuffle slowly and painfully" and usually are frigid.
Over 100 million genitally mutilated women are estimated to live
today in Islamic nations, from Somali and Sudan to Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan. Although some areas have mostly given up the practice,
in others-like Sudan and Uganda-the practice is increasing, with 90% of
the women surveyed saying they planned to circumcise all of their daughters.
The mutilation is not required by the Qu´an;
Mohammad, in fact, said girls should be treated even better than boys.
Yet the women have inflicted upon their daughters for millennia the horrors
done to them, perhaps re-enacting the widespread misogyny of men toward
themselves as they mutilate their daughters while joyfully chanting songs
like:
"We used to be friends, but today I am the master, for
I am a man. Look-I have the knife in my handYour clitoris, I will cut
off and throw away for today I am a man."
As the girls grow up, they are usually treated as though
they were polluted beings, veiled, rarely educated, and sometimes gang-raped
when men outside the family wish to settle scores with the men in her family.
As the President of Pakistan's Commission on Women concluded, "The average
woman is born into near slavery, leads a life of drudgery, and dies invariably
in oblivion." Even marriage can be considered rape for most, since
the family chooses the partner and the girl is sometimes as young as eight.
Wife-beating is common and divorce by wives rare-in fact, Islamic women
have been known to have been killed by their families because they asked
for a divorce. It is no wonder that the Physicians for Human Rights
found 97 percent of women surveyed suffered from "severe depression."
It is not
surprising that these mutilated, battered women make less than ideal mothers,
repeating their own miseries upon their children. Visitors to families
throughout Muslim societies report on the "slapping, striking, whipping
and thrashing" of children, with constant shaming and humiliation as they
are told by their mothers that they are "cowards" if they don't hit others.
Physical abuse is continuous; as the Pakistani Conference on Child Abuse
reports:
A large number of children face some form of physical
abuse, from infanticide and abandonment of babies, to beating, shaking,
burning, cutting, poisoning, holding under water or giving drugs or alcohol,
or violent acts like punching, kicking, biting, choking, beating, shooting
or stabbing
Schools regularly practice corporal punishment-particularly
the religious schools from which Taliban volunteers come-chaining up their
students for days "in dark rooms with little food and hardly any sanitation."
Newborn infants are often swaddled "like a mummy." Sexual abuse-described
as including "fondling of genitals, coercing a child to fondle the abuser's
genitals, masturbation with the child as either participant or observer,
oral sex, anal or vaginal penetration by penis, finger or any other object
and [child] prostitution"-is extensive, though impossible to quantify.
In some areas, children are reported to have marks all over their bodies
from being burned by their parents with red-hot irons or pins as punishment
or to cure being possessed by demons. Children are taught strict
obedience to all parental commands, stand when their parents enter the
room, kiss their hands, don't laugh "excessively," fear them immensely,
and learn that giving in to any of their own needs or desires is sinful.
The ascetic
results of such punitive upbringings are predictable. When these abused
children grow up, they feel that every time they try to self-activate,
every time they do something independently for themselves, they will lose
the approval of the parents in their heads-mainly their mothers and the
others in the women's quarters. When their cities became flooded with oil
money and Western popular culture in recent decades, they were attracted
to the new freedoms and pleasures, but would soon retreat, feeling they
would lose their mommy's approval and be "bad boys." Westerners come to
represent their own "Bad Boy" self in projection, and had to be killed
off. As one Islamist put it, "America is Godless. Western influence here
is not a good thing, our people can see CNN, MTV, kissing" As one
terrorist put it, "We will destroy American cities piece by piece because
your life style is so objectionable to us, your pornographic movies and
TV." Osama bin Laden himself "while in college frequented flashy
nightclubs, casinos and bars [and] was a drinker and womanizer," but soon
felt extreme guilt for his sins, and joined the extreme fundamentalist
movement and preached killing Westerners for their freedoms and their sinful
enticements of Muslims. Most of the Taliban, in fact, are wealthy,
like bin Laden, have had contact with the West, and were shocked by "the
personal freedoms and affluence of the average citizen, by the promiscuity,
and by the alcohol and drug use of Western youth only an absolute and
unconditional return to the fold of conservative Islamism could protect
the Muslim world from the inherent dangers and sins of the West."
Bin Laden lives with his four wives and fifteen children in a small cave
with no running water, waging a holy war against all those who enjoy sinful
pleasures and freedom that he cannot allow himself without losing his mommy's
approval.
From childhood,
then, Islamist terrorists have been taught to kill the part of themselves-and
others-that is selfish and wants personal pleasures and freedoms. It is
in the homes-not just later in the terrorist camps-that they learn to be
martyrs and want to "die for Allah." When terrorist suicidal bombers who
were prevented from carrying out their acts were interviewed on TV they
said they felt "ecstatic" as they pushed the button. They denied
being motivated by the virgins supposedly awaiting them in Paradise. Instead,
they said they wanted to die to "join Allah," and had written letters to
their mothers before going off to die "so she would know I was a martyr
and she wouldn't be sad I died."
Since childhood
is the key to eliminating all political violence, rather than pursuing
a lengthy holy war against terrorists it might be better for the U.S. to
back a new U.N.-sponsored Marshall Plan for them that includes Community
Parenting Centers, in order to give their families the chance to
evolve beyond the abusive family system that is producing the terrorism,
just as we did for Germany after WWII for the families that produced
Nazism.
Mona AlMunajjed, Women in Saudi Arabia Today.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, p. 45.
Jan Goodwin, Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift
the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994,
p. 43.
Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, Prisoners of Ritual: An
Odyssey Into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa. New York: Harrington
Park Pres, 1989, pp. 9, 38, 39.
Ibid, p. 81.
Cathy Joseph, "Compassionate Accountability: An
Embodied Consideration of Female Genital Mutilation." The Journal of Psychohistory
24(1996): 5. Lindy Williams and Teresa Sobieszczyk, "Attitudes Surrounding
the Continuation of Female Circumcision in the Sudan: Passing the Tradition
to the Next Generation." Journal of Marriage and the Family 59(1997): 996;
Jean P. Sasson, Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi
Arabia. New York: Morrow, 1992, p. 137; http://www.path.org/Files/FGM-The-Facts.htm.
Mona AlMunajjed, Women in Saudi Arabia Today,
p. 14.
Ibid, p. 13.
Eleanor Abdella Doumato, Getting God's Ear: Women,
Islam and Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000, pp. 23, 85; Peter Parkes, "Kalasha Domestic Society." In Hastings
Donnan and Frits Selier, Eds., Family and Gender in Pakiston: Domestic
Organization in a Muslim Society. New Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corp.,
1997, p. 46; Jan Goodwin, ,Price of Honor, p. 52.
Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia and Safa Tamish, "The Rates
of Child Sexual Abuse and Its Psychological Consequences as Revealed by
a Study Among Palestinian University Students." Child Abuse and Neglect
25(2001): 1303-1327, the results of which must be compared to comparable
written responses for other areas, with allowance given for the extreme
reluctance to reveal abuse that may put their lives "inreal, serious danger.
(p. 1305); for problems of interpretation, see Lloyd deMause, "The Universality
of Incest." The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991): 123-165.
Deborah Ellis, Women of the Afghan War. London:
Praeger, 2000, p. 141.
S. Tamish, Misconceptions About Sexuality and
Sexual Behavior in Palestinian Society. Ramallah: The Tamer Institute for
Community Education, 1996.
"Women's Woes," The Economist August 14, 1999,
p. 32.
MSNBC, October 4, 2001.
Mazharul Haq Khari, Purdah and Polygamy, p. 107.
Samra Fayyazuddin, Anees Jillani, Zarina Jillani,
The State of Pakistan's Children 1997. Islamabad Pakiston: Sparc, 1998,
p. 46.
Ibid, p. 47.
Samra Fayyazuddin et al, The State of Pakistan's
Children 1997, p. 51.
Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia and Safa Tamish, "The Rates
of Child Sexual Abuse," p. 1320; Fatna A. Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim
Unconscious. New York: Pergamon Press, 1984, p. 28.
Samuel M. Zwemer, Childhood in the Moslem World,
p. 104; Hilma Natalia Granqvist, Child Problems Among the Arabs: Studies
in a Muhammadan Village in Palestine. Helsingfors: Soderstrom, 1950, pp.
102-107.
Soraya Altorki, Women in Saudi Arabia: Ideology
and Behavior Among the Elite. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986,
pp. 72-76.
Lloyd deMause, "The Evolution of Childrearing."
The Journal of Psychohistory 28(2001): 362-451.
Jan Goodwin, Price of Honor, p. 64.
MSNBC October 1, 2001.
Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared
War on America. Rocklin: Forum, 1999, p. 3.
Ibid, p. 4.
"60 Minutes," September 23, 2001.
Robert B. McFarland and John Fanton, "Moving Towards
Utopia: Prevention of Child Abuse." The Journal of Psychohistory 24(1997):
320-331.
Lloyd deMause, "War as Righteous Rape and Purification."
The Journal of Psychohistory 27(2000): 407-438.
So, it is daughters who are supposed to retaliate
towards their mothers, not sons, who are so welcome.
Sons are abused by their fathers, not by their
mothers, so they should be expected to be women lovers
and men haters.
They are exactly the contrary.
They developed into hard core psychotic homosexuals.
What I said is not that Moslem women are perfect mothers
to sons. I said that the source of mysogyny is not in what mothers
do to their sons, but in what they represent to them. In this case
they represent their own lust and sexuality.
The problem is that, due to the absence of the father,
who is the inhibiting instance, the child is overstimulated
by the presence of the mother. The more a loving mother
she is, the worst will be the burden on the poor child
that have no father to inhibit his sexual drives. He
will be compelled to be his own Super-Ego, which,
at 3 to 5 years of age, it is impossible.
So, everything, including your own article,
is leading to an opposite conclusion to your own.
Moreover, youself have proved in a very convincing
way, in your extensive precious work, how much German women had abused
their sons, and how much Japanese women were and are terrible mothers,
and Russians, and Balkan, that you have convinced me.
So, I desperately tried to find
German, Japanese and Russian women wearing veils and Chadors,
and deprived of medical care, and secluded in their home, awaiting
to be beaten to death....but I did not find them.
On the contrary, I found that the Nazis organized
orgies, that the Japanese had "comfort women", that the Soviets
enhanced women rights, while they were sending
everybody else into Gulags.
So, paradoxically, it seems that the more
a woman has abused her sons, the more she is appreciated
as object of lust, and, in the case of the Russians, even of
respect.
Your theory is very nice, but it seems
to me that it has more holes than a sieve.
Moreover, in real life, if you enact a Marshal plan,
before destroying the terrorists, you will have
only more terror, this time paid with your own money.
Fortunately, nobody in the State Department is listening
to you, because, otherwise, the next ones to wear veils and chadors will
be American women.
Iakov Levi
I shall address some items:
that Moslem women are very abusive
towards their daughters, but they
rejoice when a son is born.
So, it is daughters who are supposed to retaliate
towards their mothers,
not sons, who are so welcome.
that the boys are "welcome," that is, not subjected to
abuse.
On just a very common sense level, you must see that
adjusted people would
value all children equally regardless of gender and a
preference for sons
cannot portend anything good. This special status surely
betrays the
intention to use the child for the parent's needs and
not an attitude of
nurturing towards the child.
Most societies have had higher rates of infanticide for
girls and thus have,
in a manner of speaking, "preferred" boys. Yet we cannot
expect that mothers
who are killing their female children are going to be
nurturing towards their
male children. The abuse may take different forms, but
it cannot really be
that parents detest some of their children and nurture
others. Of course,
children may be treated differently and some may be more
abused than others,
but parents who are abusive are using their children
for their own parental
issues, including the children they "prefer."
You might also wish to consider that this show of welcoming
male children may
be a reaction formation, as I think Eric was suggesting.
should be expected to be women lovers
and men haters.
They are exactly the contrary.
their mothers will hate (fear) women. So the fact that
these people hate
women is evidence that they have been abused by their
mothers.
fathers would hate men, but homosexuality is the love
of men. Of course, this
is way off the mark. Boys who are nurtured by their fathers
do not,
therefore, "love men" and so grow up to be homosexuals.
Boys who are nurtured by their fathers (and mothers)
have more respect for
women. The etiology of homosexual behavior is generally
thought to be in the
mother-child diad.
You seem to be coming from a position of drive theory
in which their is a
classical oedipal situation. In this case, if the mother
is "loving," but the
father figure is absent, this will create problems and
possibly homosexuality.
I'll say more on this below.
I said that the source of misogyny is not
in what mothers do to their
sons, but in what they represent to
them. In this case they represent
their own lust and sexuality.
The problem is that, due to the
absence of the father, who is the
inhibiting instance, the child is overstimulated
by the presence of the
mother. The more a loving mother
she is, the worst will be the burden on
the poor child that have no father
to inhibit his sexual drives. He
will be compelled to be his own
Super-Ego, which, at 3 to 5 years of
age, he cannot possibly be.
Complex. In order to do so, he must engage in the same
reversal. He overlooks
maternal abuse or posits that it is a product of the
child's "seduction" of
the mother.
The kind of evidence Lloyd is giving is of actual maternal
abuse, not "loving
care."
I would like to put a question to you. What do you imagine
WOULD BE the
result of actual maternal abuse? Do you concede that
such is possible?
Wouldn't it be the very fear and hatred of women (and
also idealizing) we are
talking about? A society in which mothers were abusive
would look very much
like a society in which mothers are "loving" but father
figures are absent.
Does this not suggest that the oedipal schema is just
a way of covering up
maternal abuse?
opposite conclusion to your own.
Moreover, yourself have proved in a
very convincing way, in your
extensive precious work, how much German
women had abused their sons,
and how much Japanese women were and are
terrible mothers, and Russians,
and Balkan, that you have convinced me.
So, I desperately tried to find
German, Japanese and Russian women
wearing veils and Chadors, and deprived of
medical care, and secluded in
their home, awaiting to be beaten to
death....but I did not find them.
On the contrary, I found that the Nazis organized
orgies, that the
Japanese had "comfort women", that the Soviets
enhanced women rights,
while they were sending everybody else into
Gulags.
So, paradoxically, it seems that the more
a woman has abused her sons,
the more she is appreciated as object of
lust, and, in the case of
the Russians, even of respect.
mention had abusive mothering and all were misogynistic.
Have you not seen the studies of the fantasies of German
men. They are full
of rape, bondage, and homoeroticism. Nazi Germany was
hardly a bastion of
women's rights. Orgies are indicative neither of an adjusted
sexuality nor a
value and respect for women.
Japanese women are similarly not respected or valued.
They have been forced
into traditional roles and only know have a nascent women's
movement.
The fantasies of Japanese men are also full of rape and
homoeroticism, as Ken
Adams has documented. Japanese pornography is full of
images of bondage and
rape and schoolgirls. The Japanese invented a special
pornographic genre
(called bukkake) in which scores of men congregate around
a woman (often
dressed as a schoolgirl) and masturbate themselves and
ejaculate on the
woman's face. The Japanese have "comfort women," mistresses,
and prostitutes
and quasi-prostitutes because the wife (mother figure)
has not been a love
object. Indeed, very often the "prostitutes" are idealized
and are not
employed for sexual purposes.
The soviet revolution resulted in a brief period of sexual
revolution and of
advances for women. However, there was a terrible backlash
against this,
which is part of the reason for the gulags. By the time
of Stalin, the sexual
revolution was over as was the period of women's rights.
Indeed, it was one
of the great failings of the revolution that it did so
little for women's
rights. Under Stalin there were even purity crusades
and the USSR became very
puritanical--outlawing even soft core pornography--just
as many Islamic
peoples do.
All of these people had abusive mothering which resulted
in misogyny and a
maladjusted sexuality full of rape fantasies and other
aggression where
sexual thoughts could be expressed, or else where sexual
expression was
severely proscribed. The Islamic countries certainly
fit this pattern.
holes than a sieve.
Lloyd's work?
Afghanistan, as America did after
WWII, I just remind you that the
Americans, then, first destroyed the
Nazis, AND the Japanese (with no
less than an atomic bomb), and only
afterwards they enacted the Marshal
program. Not the other way around.
May be it seems to you a small detail,
but it is not.
Moreover, in real life, if you enact a Marshal
plan, before destroying the
terrorists, you will have only more
terror, this time paid by your
own money.
Fortunately, nobody in the State Department is listening
to you, because,
otherwise, the next ones to wear veils
and chadors will be American
women.
stresses childrearing. Lloyd added this idea in response
to some objections
(by myself and others) to his article. I did not want
to keep harping on the
article so I did not say anything at the time. However,
I think this addition
did not help the article but only makes it appear paternalistic
and I would
advise Lloyd to remove it.
abuses of women are a product of a society in which mothers
are too loving.
One thing that is interesting about this is that the
drive theorist is quite
willing to look at parental behaviors as an important
etiological influence.
To wit, mothers may be too loving and fathers may be
absent or abusive. These
can have a negative effect on the development of the
child. Why not just look
at the evidence for abusive mothering and recognize that
this is where
misogyny is rooted?
From: <[email protected]>
you wrote:
> Bob: It seems here that your are admitting the premise:
men who are abused
by
> their mothers will hate (fear) women. So the fact that
these people hate
> women is evidence that they have been abused by their
mothers.
My premise was that every man who is shot in the head
dies, but that no
everybody who dies is shot in the head.
I.e: men who had been abused by their mother will hate
women, but not every
man who hates women it is because he had been abused
by his mother.
Hating women does not necessarily point to mother-abuse,
and I
explained what it is the main cause of misogyny.
A man can be a misogynist even if he had a loving mother.
Besides, I don't understand what kind of evidence
is this, that you declare
guilty a person, man or woman, on the grounds that
others hate him.
Moreover, psychoanalytic experience points
to the fact that men who had
been abused by their mothers will express their
hatred in other forms than
sexual Puritanism. They will take their revenge mainly
underperforming in
bed. For sure not covering women with veils and chadors.
> Iakov (previous): They developed into
hard core psychotic homosexuals.
>
> Bob: Your thought here seems to be that boys who were
mistreated by their
> fathers would hate men, but homosexuality is the love
of men.
I underlined in my previous posts that I am speaking
of lost object
homosexuality, which is the nucleus of every paranoia,
and not of
pre-Oedipal polyformous homosexuality, which is indeed
love for men.
Lost-object homosexuality is an ambivalent condition
of love for the lost
object and hatred for the same object because of the
abandonment. This
kind of homosexuality, which is always latent, and never
acted out in
actual sexual relationships, it is very dangerous because
the element of
hatred, and I should add, of ferocious hatred, is the
one which is
split, projected into others and acted out.
Bin Laden is this kind of person. He loved his father
but he also hated
him because he was not there.This is not the normal aggressiveness
of the
child for the father at the Oedipal stage, which can
be mediated and
managed, but the hatred for something extremely needed
and lacking. He
split: the love became Faith in Allah, the hatred became
hatred for the
Infidels. This is hard core psychotic homosexuality,
because the outcome
is paranoia and hallucinations. He is hallucinating
the lost object, the
Father, and he is in a paranoid condition towards those
that he elected as
his enemies.
Of course, this
> is way off the mark. Boys who are nurtured by their
fathers do not,
> therefore, "love men" and so grow up to be homosexuals.
> Boys who are nurtured by their fathers (and mothers)
have more respect for
> women. The etiology of homosexual behavior is generally
thought to be in
the
> mother-child diad.
> You seem to be coming from a position of drive theory
in which their is a
> classical oedipal situation. In this case, if the mother
is "loving," but
the
> father figure is absent, this will create problems
and possibly
homosexuality.
> I'll say more on this below.
> Complex. In order to do so, he must engage in the same
reversal. He
overlooks
> maternal abuse or posits that it is a product of the
child's "seduction"
of
> the mother.
> The kind of evidence Lloyd is giving is of actual maternal
abuse, not
"loving
> care."
> I would like to put a question to you. What do you
imagine WOULD BE the
> result of actual maternal abuse?
regression into anal sadism. For sure not sexual Puritanism
Do you concede that such is possible?
Of course, but the outcome would be more like the one
in Nazi Germany:
Narcissism and anal sadism are the consequences of maternal
abuse.
Those people, out there, the Bin Ladens the Sadam Husseins,
the Arafats
and their gangs are not Narcissists nor true anal sadists.
They are oral
sadists and borderline. This is a consequence of the
lack of the Reality
Principle, which is represented by the father.
They have indeed regressed into a placental condition
of amorphous
hatred. Because of the absent father, not because of
the present mother.
Even Pinocchio descended into the belly of the whale
(the placenta) because
he missed his father. There he met him.
So, I have never denied the obvious existence of maternal
abuse, but to
shout "Mothers, Mothers !!!" every time there is
an act of brutality, a
war, or an abuse, it is simplistic, unprofessional, and
untrue.
> Wouldn't it be the very fear and hatred of women (and
also idealizing) we
are
> talking about? A society in which mothers were abusive
would look very
much
> like a society in which mothers are "loving" but father
figures are
absent.
> Does this not suggest that the oedipal schema is just
a way of covering up
> maternal abuse?
Untrue.
It is not the oedipal schema which is a cover up for
maternal abuse,
but it is the maternal abuse theory that is an instrument
for repressing
the regression from the Oedipal bottleneck as the
primary cause of every
pathology. Earlier abuse becomes relevant only if there
is a
regression due to an obstruction of the Oedipal channel.
An obstruction of
the normal evolution may be because of maternal
abuse, at the Oedipal
level, and then we shall have Nazis, Narcissists
and anal sadists, or
because of the absence of the father,
and then we shall have oral
sadists, borderlines and re-enactment of the fetal
trauma. The regression
due to the absence of the father will be
to a much deeper level,
because there is no more Reality Principle to anchor
the personality.
> mention had abusive mothering and all were misogynistic.
> Have you not seen the studies of the fantasies of German
men. They are
full
> of rape, bondage, and homoeroticism. Nazi Germany was
hardly a bastion of
> women's rights. Orgies are indicative neither of an
adjusted sexuality nor
a
> value and respect for women.
> Japanese women are similarly not respected or valued.
They have been
forced
> into traditional roles and only know have a nascent
women's movement.
> The fantasies of Japanese men are also full of rape
and homoeroticism, as
Ken
> Adams has documented. Japanese pornography is full
of images of bondage
and
> rape and schoolgirls. The Japanese invented a special
pornographic genre
> (called bukkake) in which scores of men congregate
around a woman (often
> dressed as a schoolgirl) and masturbate themselves
and ejaculate on the
> woman's face. The Japanese have "comfort women," mistresses,
and
prostitutes
> and quasi-prostitutes because the wife (mother figure)
has not been a love
> object. Indeed, very often the "prostitutes" are idealized
and are not
> employed for sexual purposes.
> The soviet revolution resulted in a brief period of
sexual revolution and
of
> advances for women. However, there was a terrible backlash
against this,
> which is part of the reason for the gulags. By the
time of Stalin, the
sexual
> revolution was over as was the period of women's rights.
Indeed, it was
one
> of the great failings of the revolution that it did
so little for women's
> rights. Under Stalin there were even purity crusades
and the USSR became
very
> puritanical--outlawing even soft core pornography--just
as many Islamic
> peoples do.
> All of these people had abusive mothering which resulted
in misogyny and a
> maladjusted sexuality full of rape fantasies and other
aggression where
> sexual thoughts could be expressed, or else where sexual
expression was
> severely proscribed. The Islamic countries certainly
fit this pattern.
>
veils and chadors.
> Lloyd's work?
>
>
Iakov:
He described to us the conditions in the placenta. It
is like the
diary of an explorer, who is there and
therefore he can describe so
well the details of the place.
However, it does not mean that everybody
has to regress until the bottom
of the well . It happens when there is no Father
figure to prevent the
fall.
This is the reason for his rage and your uneasiness every
time I mention
The Murder of the Father and the Oedipus Complex.
Not to mention, of course, that he delisted me on the
grounds that I
was intriguing for his assassination, only because I
analyzed the group
fantasies of the list, and I reached the conclusion that,
in that context,
(IN THE CONTEXT OF GROUP FANTASIES), he represented the
primeval father,
who had been assassinated because of his abusing of the
horde.
He could accept or he could reject my exposition, but
the rage and the
paranoid hallucination were very interesting indeed.
the reason for misogyny, and I explained why, in my opinion,
it is so.
The reason for misogyny is in the sense of guilt of the
child for his
own erotic drives towards the mother. The more he is
abused or
abandoned, the more acute and exacerbated this sense
of guilt will be,
to the point of getting unmanageable and overwhelming.
The abandonment by the father is the primary cause for
which this sense
of guilt becomes unmanageable, because the father represents
the inhibitory
instance and the model for identification. Left alone
with his unmanageable drives the child will become
a misogynist.
In this way I can understand what is happening in the
Islamic society,
while, shouting indiscriminately "maternal abuse, maternal
abuse", it
does no explain all the differences between different
societies, nor the
difference between different pathologic symptoms.
Moslems are not Nazis, and Nazis are not Japanese, and
a neurosis is not
a psychosis, and a Narcissist is not a Borderline,
as an oral sadist
and a placental condition are not an anal sadist.
This story of maternal abuse has become some sort of
magic formula, that
explains everything: it doesn't.
It explains some things, but doesn't explain
others, even more.
severe. More than that: it has become an apotropaic amulet
against
Freudian theories, the Murder of the Father and
the Oedipal Complex.
And this is the gravest of all.
It is a New Testament, which came to displace
the Old one.
However, not everything new is better than what it came
to replace.
There is another point, just as dessert: this New Testament,
like the last
New Testament that we know, is centered around
the figure of the Child.
The Old Testament spoke of the Father
The new one spoke of the Son.
Freud spoke of the Murder of the Father and the
Oedipal complex.
DeMause's PH speaks of the Salvation that will come from
the Child and the
Son.
St.Paul said that he did not come to destroy the Law,
but it is exactly
what he has done.
PH claims that it is not against Freud's theory, but
the repression is
total.
This is the first time that Bob or any other psychohistorian
has come into
the open, and has said that the Oedipus complex is outdated,
not good
anymore. Even worse: it is a lie.
Now the "True Israel" is deMause PH, not the old Freudian
psychoanalysis.
The chosen people have migrated westwards, and America
is the new
Promised Land with its message of salvation through the
Son.
I don't know yet what exactly all that means, but
must be there some meaning.
Perhaps deMause PH is perceived as the answer to a New
Continent, which is
living through a condition of malaise and
uneasiness as for its roots
and its own identity.
And identity, as we already know, is the Name of the
Father.
It has something of the same malaise that brought Christianity
to the
ancient world, as an answer to the cultural crisis
of the Hellenized East
and West. Interestingly, even then the baricenter moved
westward.
The syncretism of the Roman world, which, like America
today, was a
pluralist multicultural environment, needed a new message,
and that too,
displaced the Father in favor of the Son.
So, there must be some linkage between a crisis
of identity and a new
message of Salvation, that will be brought by the
Child.
As we know, fetuses and little children have no
identity, because
identity is a consequence of a mature Ego, which is achieved
only at the
Oedipal level, through a compromise and an identification
with the father.
By putting the emphasis on fetuses and little children
it is like saying:
we refuse the identity of the father, we want to
be identified as
pre-Oedipal children.
However, this is a contradiction in terms. Fetuses
and little children have
drives, but not an identity. So, all this story it is
the saga of the
ideology of lack- of-identity.
And like the Christian saga, it must compensate
promising eternal life, in
PH case, promising a perfect world,
if only the Kingdom of the Child
will be secured. In both cases: Paradise and the perfect
world if we
behave ourselves.
The methodology too, is very similar. First the dogma,
and then the
findings to prove it. First of all: where there is violence
there must be
maternal abuse.
If I find a case where the violence is the product of
something else,
as the absence of the father, they assure me that
there is maternal
abuse too. May be. But why violence must be dependent
on the latter and not on the former? They don't go into the field and bring
back everything that they find.
They come back with only what they were searching
for in the
first place.
In the same way, I can state that violence
is because of the presence of
rats.
If I go out and search for rats, everywhere there
is violence, I'll come
home with a lot of rats. And I'll have a lot of
"evidence" that
violence is always the consequence of the presence of
rats.
In all this Islamic affair no psychohystorian has found
that Saddam
Hussein, Arafat, Bin Laden, Koumainy
where orphans of fathers (except
Joan Lachkar, who is always brushed aside
because she occasionally dares
mentioning the Oedipal complex), no one has
found that the Islamic
society is one where fathers are absent. Of course not:
they were not
searching for absent fathers, so they did not find them.
They are searching
only for abusing mothers, and of course,
they will always find them, as
I'll always find rats, if this is the only
thing that I am searching
for.
Freud has worked as an analyst for 60 years, and he changed
his mind many
times, because he had not a dogmatic, a priori, assumption
that he
wanted to prove. As his finding unfolded he changed his
mind and his
theory.
It is very interesting to follow every stage and how
he gathered evidence.
If I take PH, I find a list of a priori assumptions,
and I must say
"amen to that", otherwise I am not considered a
psychohystorian.
The outside reality is always bent to the theory and
not the other way
around.
Palestinian terrorists who had been unsuccessful in blowing
themselves up after they wrapped the bombs about them
and pushed the
button.
their suicidal terrorism was a result of their lifelong
search for
love.
American did, anything about getting virgins in heaven,
any of the
myriad of political complaints or rewards mentioned in
the media and
in academic studies.
sins are forgiven" -- surely a result of feeling they
were sinful in
childhood.
caretaker, whether mommy, grandmother, aunt, any of those
unloving
members of the gynarchy where they spent their early
years.) All
idealized them: "I'm going to meet the Lord of the universe."
All
betrayed the infantile origins of the fantasy: "We all
appear before
God naked." All imagined they would still be around to
watch their
parents be sorry they had killed themselves for them:
"Every time my
father sees my photo, he'll cry." And all were cries
for the love
they had missed all their lives.
Lloyd
Iakov:
He says: "getting LOVE from Allah", so, he got it right
at last, but immediately he explains: "(early caretaker, whether mommy,
grandmother, aunt, any of those unloving)", so Allah, who obviously
represents the figure of the father, becomes mommy, grandmother,
aunt.
Why Allah cannot stay Allah (a father figure),
but MUST be mommy, grandmother and aunt, it is a mystery.
So, the obvious becomes distorted in favor of his theory.
So, the terrorist himself says that this is a dialogue
with the father.
Why Lloyd does not believe him? Does he know better
than the terrorist himself?
this discussion.
Astounding! The interviewees say "Allah"
= father, but the analyst says
it is really mother, g-m, aunt, etc. The problem
is, of course, that
the analyst thought it was mother before the interviewees
spoke.
The analyst has always thought this. What evidence
then would
disprove/falsify the a priori notions of the analyst?
Anything?
Family structure is certainly important in human
history and it has
been improperly ignored by many historians. But
this discussion,
which has no doubt gone on for the 18-20 months since
I was
involved with it, continues in its sterile metaphysical
rut. Do
Muslim males from polygynous households, where presumably
the
mother has more isolated authority over the children,
tend more
often to become terrorists than those from monogamous
marriages? Does African (Islamic) polygynous family
structure
differ from that of Arabs, Azerbijanis, or Persians?
Did the
kamikaze pilots exhibit similar psychological profiles
to Palestinian
fighters and Taliban/Al Queda militants? Where
is the history?
From: Harold S. Forsythe <[email protected]>
>
> Watching on MSNBC last night a program featuring a
number of
> Palestinian terrorists
>
> they confirmed over and over again that their suicidal
terrorism was a
> result of their lifelong search for love.
>
> Not one mentioned any political event
>
> were certain "the moment your first blood spurts out,
all of your
> sins are forgiven"
>
> getting LOVE from Allah (early caretaker, whether mommy,
grandmother,
> aunt, any of those unloving members of the gynarchy
>
> "Every time my father sees my photo, he'll cry."
>
>
> Why Allah cannot stay Allah (a father figure)
>
> the obvious becomes distorted in favor
of his theory.
>
> the terrorist himself says that this is a dialogue
with the father.
> Why Lloyd does not believe him? Does he
know better than the
> terrorist himself?
>
short of time to reply.
the present discussion, I'm still not convinced.
himself, or Lloyd?
understand, maybe the harder thing in the world to understand.
Other
persons tend to perceive, about me, things I couldn't
possibly see. And, I
bet, suicidal terrorists must be a field more blind in
this respect.
Lloyd, but because the suicidal terrorist is a suicidal
terrorist.
more general form: why Allah cannot stay Allah?
like) is at least doubtful, so "Allah" is something that
demands
interpretation. True, I'm saying the obvious; yet, don't
forget, suicidal
terrorists presumably would say otherwise. I'm restating
that, in my view,
they don't know better.
father?
still is provisional, much like saying that Allah is
Allah. What is the
"father", after all? As you have emphasized, the father
-the real guy that
fathered the boy- has been an absent figure. This for
current suicidal
terrorists, and for almost everybody in any time.
Demause's work is that actually the "father" is secondary
elaboration. "Gods" are really godesses. Lacan could
have in mind
something similar, I guess, but I'm not sure because
French philosophy is
a bit extravagant and beyond my current ability to understand.
Good to hear from you after such a long time.
Astounding! The interviewees say "Allah" = father,
but the analyst says
> it is really mother, g-m, aunt, etc. The problem
is, of course, that
> the analyst thought it was mother before the interviewees
spoke.
> The analyst has always thought this. What evidence
then would
> disprove/falsify the a priori notions of the analyst?
Anything?
really mother, g-m, aunt, he cannot be an analyst.
The only way to analyse an issue, it is forgetting
what we think that we
know. Otherwise we shall find not what is there, but
what we have inside.
Until the 11th of September I did not know that
the source of Islamic
terrorism is in the polygamist structure of the family
and in the absence
of the father. I had never thought about that.
I was very surprised in making this discovery.
How I discovered it?
I began listening.
First the CNN. One pseudo socio-economic analyst said:
"of course, it is
poverty ! The gap between rich and poors, between
East and West." And
brought a lot of "evidence" for his theory.
So, I went to the poor, and I found one billion
Indians that do not
throw themselves into the WTC with two Boing 767 loaded
with gasoline, only to make a point of hatred.
Therefore it cannot be poverty.
Then I thought: "of course, the poor general psychogenic
status of
Moslems!". But I found that this is not a peculiarity
of Moslems. There
are and there were a lot of societies were the
general child rearing mode
is very poor, and still suicidal terrorism is not their
way of acting out
their emotional distress.
Maternal abuse ? Ibidem.
In India maternal abuse is not less than in the Moslem
world.
So, this peculiar way of catexis must have its source
in something that
is peculiar of Islamic society, Arab and
non Arab.
And then I found that only polygamy is peculiar to Moslems,
I mean in
such extensive way to be an outstanding peculiarity of
these societies.
I still did not know what may be the linkage between
polygamy and suicidal
attacks of terrorism.
Looking closely at the situation in the polygamist
family, I found that
the outstanding feature, which is peculiar there, and
not in other
abusing monogamist family, it is the absence of the father:
he just does
not live there.
So, the linkage must be that in families were the father
is absent,
there is a tendency to suicidal terrorist attacks.
So, I began listening to what they themselves are saying,
reading of
course between the lines, not taking at face value conscious
declarations
of intentions, that may well be only rationalizations.
They speak of Allah, not of aunts, the want to reunify
with Allah, not
with mommies. They want Allah to be satisfied of
them.
In their prayers they are hallucinating an absent
father, at difference
from Christians and Jews, who perceive their father as
present and not
as absent. Christians and Jews reached a compromise with
their Father,
each one in his peculiar way. The Moslems, as expressed
in their
religion, did not. The only solution to an absent father
is to be a
Shahid, a martyr, who dies in the holy war against the
infidels.
Then I went to what Joan Lachkar had written about the
Islamic saga, as
the saga of orphans, to the fact of the matter that all
their leaders
were orphans of fathers, and so on.
Only then, every thread began to lead in this
direction. The Taliban
cleric whose split of the tongue: "The Prophet
was an orphan too", and
many other splits of the tongue and their own unconscious
associations
confirmed what I had already found.
Now, Telmo says that Lloyd knows better, because he is
not a terrorist,
and we cannot believe a terrorist, because he will
never disclose his
real motivations.
True: we should never take at face values what anybody
says about his
real motivations. But we have a very good tool for penetrating
his real
intentions. Lloyd himself, and a very long time before
him, Freud, has
shown how we can decode unconscious intentions through
analysis of
associations. Chain of associations, to whom the subject
(the person we
are dealing with) is not conscious.
Paul Shirley has made a lot of analysis, on list, of
segments of speeches
and of declarations. Lawton has taught us how to do it,
too. Lloyd has
written about that, and so on.
This is classical Freudian methodology,
so that on this point, at
least, we agree, and there is nothing new under
the sun.
Now, if I take the chain of associations of the the interviewee
(the
terrorist), he says:
"LOVE from Allah..." "I'm going to meet the Lord
of the universe"..." We all
appear before God naked." ... "Every time my father sees
my photo, he'll
cry."
He is not conscious of the associative chain between
the all elements.
He consciously intended Allah, as a separate entity from
his father, but
to us, thanks to the associative chain, it becomes
obvious that he is
speaking of the same thing.
And since Lloyd knows very well what an associative chain
is, had he not
been fixated with maternal abuse, he would have found
it himself, in the
first place.
The problem is of course, as Harold says, that
the "analyst" had
always "known", that he was in search for a mother.
This is the reason why I say that Lloyd's methodology
is wrong, because he
knows very well what the tools are, but he uses them
only when they fit
his theory.
And we had many occasions, on the previous list, to see
how this is
acted out, to the point of scaring
away every person to whom his own
intellectual integrity is dear.
very interesting evidence of the latent homosexual contents
of this
Islamic terrorist saga.
He wants to be naked before his father, to be seen and
touched, because he
harbors strong latent homosexual feeling towards his
absent father.
> You pointed to the real issue. If the analyst thought
a priori that Allah is
> really mother, g-m, aunt, he cannot be an analyst.
> The only way to analyse an issue, it is forgetting
what we think that we
> know. Otherwise we shall find not what is there, but
what we have inside.
>
think, we have to cope with the fact that reality -whatever
it is- is one
thing and what we have inside -whatever it is- is another
one. The need to
accept this duality and live with it, learning from it,
is at the root of
Western culture, from the ancient Greek philosophers
on. For this
reason, I think your rules for analysts are too demanding.
More generally,
I think the only way to interpret/understand anything
(for therapists or
for any human being) is trying to compare what we believe
we are
perceiving, with some "a priori" knowledge/mythology
or how you call
it. Without a code, there is no interpretation.
> First the CNN. One pseudo socio-economic analyst said:
"of course, it is
> poverty !
>
> I went to the poor, and I found
one billion Indians that do not
> throw themselves into the WTC
>
> Then I thought: "of course, the poor general
psychogenic status of
> Moslems!". But I found that this is not a peculiarity
of Moslems.
>
> Maternal abuse ? Ibidem.
>
phenomena. Again, the impossibility of explaining anything
according to a
simple rule, is also a key element of Western philosophical
tradition.
can't be equally significant. If you are deprived of
all your pertenences,
due to war, natural catastrophe, gods' bad will, whatever
else, I bet you
will not start to sacrifice or sell your children, because
you're not
primitive psychoclass. Conversely, when a boxer -or to
a slightly lesser
extent a soccer player- gets enormously rich in a few
years due to his
sporting talents, it is quite common that he develops
an addiction to
drugs, alcohol or another self-destructive behavior,
a thing that
surprises the media to no end ("why, when he had all,
he had to destroy
his life this way?"); it's plain that person had to live
with
disfunctional people during childhood, and this fact
is with him his
entire life, no matter how many zeroes has his bank account.
> this peculiar way of catexis must have
its source in something that
> is peculiar of Islamic society, Arab
and non Arab.
>
> such extensive way to be an outstanding
peculiarity of these societies.
> I still did not know what may be the linkage
between polygamy and suicidal
> attacks of terrorism.
> Looking closely at the situation in the
polygamist family, I found that
> the outstanding feature, which is peculiar there,
and not in other
> abusing monogamist family, it is the absence
of the father: he just does
> not live there.
> So, the linkage must be that in
families were the father is absent,
> there is a tendency to suicidal
terrorist attacks.
>
think the father were equally absent in other polygamist
cultures,
including rural China a few years ago, yet suicidal terrorism
was alien
to those cultures.
> course between the lines, not taking at
face value conscious declarations
> of intentions, that may well be only rationalizations.
> They speak of Allah, not of aunts, the want to
reunify with Allah, not
> with mommies. They want Allah to be satisfied
of them.
> In their prayers they are hallucinating an absent
father, at difference
> from Christians and Jews, that perceive their
father as present and not
> as absent. Christians and Jews reached a compromise
with their Father,
> each one in his peculiar way. The Moslems,
as expressed in their
> religion, did not. The only solution
to an absent father is to be a
> Shahid, a martyr, who dies in the holy war against
the infidels.
> Then I went to what Joan Lachkar had written
about the Islamic saga, as
> the saga of orphans, to the fact of
the matter that all their leaders
> were orphans of fathers, and so on.
> Only then, every thread began to lead in
this direction. The Taliban
> cleric whose split of the tongue:
"The Prophet was an orphan too", and
> many other splits of the tongue and
their own unconscious associations
> confirmed what I had already found.
abovesaid, I think there has to be another factor here,
something we still
don't see. Otherwise we would have data on Chinese suicidal
terrorism.
But, I repeat, my impression is that you have found
something. By the
way, suicide, obsession with martyrdom, were also well
known tracts among
Christians one thousand years ago, when absent fathers
were the rule.
> Now, Telmo says that Lloyd knows better,
because he is not a terrorist,
> and we cannot believe a terrorist, because
he will never disclose his
> real motivations.
>
terrorists aren't aware of their real motivations. Also
I stated that this
blindness, to some extent, is present in any human being-
terrorist are
just a relativelly extreme instance.
> I take the chain of associations of the the interviewees
(the
> terrorist), he says:
> "LOVE from Allah..." "I'm going to meet the Lord
of the universe... "We all
> appear before God naked." ... "Every time my father
sees my photo, he'll
> cry."
> He is not conscious of the associative
chain between the all elements.
> He consciously intended Allah, as a separate entity
from his father, but
> to us, thanks to the associative chain, it becomes
obvious that he is
> speaking of the same thing.
> The problem is of course, as Harold says,
that the "analyst" had
> always "known", that he was in search for
a mother.
is that he -the suicidal terrorist- surely is NOT in
search for a
mother. On the contrary, he has to get freedom, he has
to become an
individual. By the way, I can't help thinking in those
terrible images of
the plane hitting the tower, and thinking that hitting
a building is a way
to hit and destroy the mother.
>
"reading" the terrorist syndrome according to different
codes.
> The words of the terrorist: "We all appear before God
naked." are a
> very interesting evidence of the latent homosexual
contents of this
> Islamic terrorist saga.
> He wants to be naked before his father, to be
seen and touched because he
> harbors strong latent homosexual feeling
towards his absent father.
>
continue this way. Best regards,
<[email protected]>
> think the father were equally absent in other polygamist
cultures,
> including rural China a few years ago, yet suicidal
terrorism was alien
> to those cultures.
beginning I felt that I cannot respond to your wondering.
Then, I suddenly remembered the name of a book, that
I read at least 40
years ago, when I was twelve or thirteen.
It is interesting, because I had never thought of this
book before.
The title is: "The Good Earth", by an American-Chineese
author, a woman,
named Pearl Buck. At that time it was a best-seller,
but it has never been
mentioned since then, and it fell into
oblivion.
If I remember correctly, the hero of the story,
a Chineese peasant, when
his economic situation improved, he took
another woman.
I don't remember whether she lived with the
rest of the family or not, but
I remember that the impression I had was that this decision
did not
represented a major change in the structure of the family,
and the father
did not cease of being present, only because he
toook another woman. It
was more like a married man, in America, who takes
to himself a lover. It was
more a bigamy than a real polygamy, like it happens,
in contrast, in the Islamic world.
Bin Laden's father had 10 wives. There
was no family structure at all.
The point is not whether the father has more than one
wife, but if he is
present or not. You mentioned early
Christianity, where the father was
absent, in your words, and there was a fixation
for martyrdom, even if the
family stayed monogamist.
When I saw the connection between poligamy and
Islamic terror, I checked
what it is peculiar of Islamic polygamy, and I
found that there the
father is absent. Polygamy does not cause suicidal terror
per se, but only
if its byproduct is the absence of the father.
If I remember correctly from the book, polygamy in rural
China was not a
widespread custom, and happened only sporadically.
In the ancient Middle East, there was polygamy among
non Arabs, who entered
the region only in the 7th century,
but it was not widespread. A man
took at most another one wife, and only very rich
men did.
Among settled down peoples the tendency is always towards
monogamy.
Polygamy is a custom of nomads.
The Islamic society remained polygamist, even
where they settled down,
because all their mental structure remained nomadic.
They are prohibited of drinking wine, because producing
wine implicated
planting vineyards, and therefore giving up the nomadic
way of life.
Even before Islam, the Arabs abstained from drinking
wine, because they
had horror for the cultivator and its ways of life.
The Jews theoretically remained polygamist until
the 11th century A.D, but
only Yemenite Jews, who lived among strongly
polygamist Arabs, practiced
this custom.
The Patriarchs, who were semi-nomads, took more
than one wife, but this
custom almost stopped entirely after the Hebrews settled
down in
Palestine, in the 12th century B.C.
Even they were hardly polygamist: Abraham took
another wife only at a
very old age, and only because he was childless.
Isaac remained monogamist
all his life. Only Jacob took 4 wives,
but the Biblical story presents
to us a very present father. Moreover, I have good
reasons to believe that
his story is a condensation of
more than one "Jacob". Jacob being
synonymous of "Father of the
tribe". Probably every son of Jacob, who
represents one tribe, had his own Jacob,
as primeval father. It is a very
condensed story.
It seems to me that polygamy, as a way of
life, is a peculiarity of
Islam, which remained a culture of nomads, even where
they settled down.
However, I must admit that not everything on this
issue is clear to me.
For instance, I don't understand why the Persians,
who are not a culture
of nomads, became more Moslems than the Prophet
himself.
While the Arabs are mostly Sunnites, the Persians
are Shiites, which is a
branch of Islam that is much more fanatic and fundamentalist
than the
Sunna. Moreover, Persians and Arabs usually hate each
other, and the
Iraqi-Iranian war is an instance, but on this Islamic
wave of terror they
seem to be in perfect agreement and in
one mind.
If anybody can help on this issue,
it will be very welcome.
>
> The way you have pieced this together certainly demonstrates
a nimble
> investigative acumen which, along with your willingness
to keep an open
mind,
> is most laudable. I would ask you to continue to bring
these attributes to
> bear as we consider this issue further.
> We agree that there are certain forms of the family
which produce violent
and
> suicidal men. This is a form of the family in which
the women dominate the
> domestic front while the men are absent or virtually
absent. We (me, you,
and
> Lloyd) agree on this. We disagree on the source of
the etiology of these
> violent/suicidal impulses. Lloyd and I hold that these
are largely a
result
> of maternal abuse, since paternal abuse comes later
in the child's
> development. You hold that it is precisely the father's
absence which
> engenders this character due to the oedipal complications
fostered by the
> father's absence. Indeed, under these circumstances,
you argue, maternal
> abusiveness might be preferable to maternal nurturing--which
the boy
cannot
> properly process without a proper father figure. You
cite in support of
your
> argument that the terrorists in question believe in
a god which is, to all
> appearances, paternal and also that they imagine that
they are pleasing
their
> fathers. Further, these are things which seem to contradict
Lloyd's (and
my)
> psychogenic view.
> May I propose a test for these competing theories?
> Your theory predicts that where we find families of
this sort, we shall
find
> male gods (the idealized absent father), while the
psychogenic view
predicts
> that we shall find devouring goddesses (the abusive
mother/female
caretaker).
> This family structure may be rare today, but it has
been quite common
> throughout history and proto-history. Lloyd and I have
called this the
> gynarchy--domestic rule by women with segregation of
the adult males--the
> males being the androcracy. This arrangement was once
the rule for
humankind.
> What do we find in the proto-historical societies and
the ancient
societies
> which had this division? We find images of devouring
goddesses. Later, as
the
> androcracy begins to evolve and "patriarchy" begins
to strengthen, the
image
> of the devouring mother gets obscured. It is represented
by beasts and
later
> still by the gods of monotheism which take on more
and more "masculine"
> features.
> The kind of families we see among these terrorists
resemble the gynarchies
of
> old, but they have had thousands of years of additional
evolution and
> development of the androcracy, that is why the maternal
image is more
> concealed. It might be useful for you to see Lloyd's
writings and my own
> writings on the subject of the gynarchy and the androcracy.
You will also
> discover that Lloyd does not contend that "Allah" is
a maternal image
because
> of a prejudice, but because when this form of the family
was starkest and
> most unadulterated, the maternal imagery was quite
clear. Lloyd is guided
by
> vast historical precedence.
> It seems to me that your oedipal theory cannot account
for the fact that
this
> form of family has, historically and proto-historically,
been associated
with
> devouring maternal goddesses. Your theory predicts
that these societies
(were
> the segregation of men was at least as profound) should
have worshiped
> father-gods. But father-gods appear rather late, with
the decline of this
> form of family.
> I invite you to consider these facts.
>
> Best,
>
> Bob
From: <[email protected]>
There is a basic misunderstanding as for the source
of our disagreement.
We don't disagree that the first deity was female, as
we don't disagree that
the primary source of connection of the human
creature with the outside
world (outside himself) is the mother.
Freud have already wrote about that, back in 1913,
in Totem and Taboo.
I myself have written an essay in which I prove
that the Biblical Eve was,
at the beginning a fertility goddess, and
Adam, who also was a god, came
after her, and the Biblical story has been edited, and
the order of the
events inverted. When I wrote this essay some years ago
I knew nothing
about the placenta, but it perfectly fits.
I can call Eve: Fertility
Goddess AND Placenta, and nothing changes.
Iahve was at first a son-god, and only much later
he became a Father -god,
removing Mother Goddess and Son God, from
the scene.
As Theodor Reik said, when, being still a
child, his grand father told
him the story of Eve, being born out of Adam's
rib: "Tomer Verkehrt !!",
which in Yiddish means: "The other way around".
There is really nothing new in all
that.
Everybody who has basic knowledge of religion and mythology
knows that the
first deity was a goddess.
You and Lloyd had not to write anything
because it has all already been
written in the last 70 years.
Freud said that all began after the Murder of the
Primal Father by the
horde of the brothers. Until then there were
only apes, and no religion,
and therefore no gods at all. After the Murder,
that we can now call
"the Oedipal level", religion began, because, out
of the sense of guilt,
there was a regression into a previous erotic stage
of development, which
is exactly parallel to deMause's placenta.
The placenta, the nurturing
mother, became the first goddess. Matriarcate was
the first form of human
organization: a regression into placental emotional
contents. The only
thing that can be added to Freud's exposition
is that now we can call
her "placenta", while Freud did not explore
psychic life before birth,
and therefore he did not call her that way, but
only "Fertility Goddess".
This has been Lloyd's major contribution to the
understanding of psychic
life.
However, from here on, in my opinion,
it has been only a major distortion
of how psychic life works, and I shall
explain why.
Lloyd's theory sustains that, at the beginning,
we were all in the
placenta, and there we acquired all those psychical
imagos of nurturing
and
poisonous placenta, that he described in his book.
No disagreement so far.
Then there is birth and, at least in the
first three years of life, the
mother is not only the main and first caretaker,
but usually the only one.
No wonder that the first goddess was a female with
all the peculiarity of
the imago of the mother, as the child perceived
her from the fetal stage
upwards.
She indeed was his placenta, she was his
breast, and usually she took
care of him while, at the anal stage, he
was sitting on the pot.
No disagreement so far.
Mother's love, in these first three years at least,
is the only human
asset.
And so would have remained, if we had remained
apes.
But we did not.
After the third year of life begins a stage, in
human development, when
all the life energies, that until that moment
had been fixated first at
the oral stage, and then at the anal stage, are channeled
into the
genitals, and the little child is sexually aroused,
first by every living
creature, including pets, of which
he is particularly fond at this
stage, and then by his own mother, or by
the female that had taken care
of him so far.
At this point our development diverges from
that of apes and other
mammals.
The National Geographic channel has a lot of programs
with packs of
animals, from apes to seals, to other
mammal species, where the
strongest male keeps for himself all the
females, and kills the young
males who dare to challenge his authority.
In the same way the little Oedipal child
feels in conflict with the one,
who he perceives being the sole owner of his mother's
body.
The difference between us and other animals, is in
the outcome.
Apes and seals challenge the strongest male until
he or they are
killed, and the new strongest male becomes the
new "Father", and so
again and again.
The humans learned to work out a compromise: the
child learns, at this
stage, to identify with his father, learning
from him what will become
his social and ethical values, and the father
learns to take care of
his child, instead of killing
him.
If a father is a very abusing one, the compromise
will not work, and
the child will for ever harbor strong aggressive
sentiments for his
father.
The compromise is rendered compelling because, at difference
from animals,
where the poppies do not spend time with, and even
don't know their
fathers, humans, due to the relatively long
span of time that they live
in the family, DO love their father.
This ambivalence of love-hatred, which is peculiar
only to humans, is the
reason of the compromise, reached during hundred of
thousands of years of
evolution.
Without the love of children for their fathers, we still
would be apes.
So, AS FREUD SAID, it is the
father who is responsible for a happy
outcome of this conflict. Because, if he
abuses his son, instead of
being a positive model, there will
be no compromise, and the child
will become a neurotic or a sociopath.
So, there is no need of stating that the
true mythology is only the one
which tells us of killing and devouring
fathers (Cronos), and the
false one is that that tells us of castrating
sons, because one depends
on the other. Without an abusing father,
there is also no patricide.
For the females is slightly different, but this
is not the place to begin
an essay on that, too.
All this has been explained very well by
Freud, but I am compelled to
sum it up again, because Freud's teaching
has been so strongly repressed,
that everything came out completely distorted.
Now we can understand why the figure and the presence
of the father are so
important, at the Oedipal stage, for the
mental well being of the human
creature, even if, until then, the mother had been the
main caretaker of the
child.
If the child never had a loving mother, he
will never be a happy person,
he will harbor resentment and even hatred
for women, but I have already
said more than enough on this issue, and I explained
how this hatred will
be acted out.
If this pivotal Oedipal bottleneck is not
passed through, there will be,
as happened to Lloyd's Psychohistory, a regression
all the way down into
the placenta.
So, Bob, there is no point in repeating again and
again that the first,
most important deity was a female goddess, and
that she is the placenta,
because we know that. We agree. The
point is that, in a society who
successfully passed through the Oedipal bottleneck
of evolution, this
goddess is NO MORE the most important one, she
has been replaced by a
Father deity, and only in a condition of
regression, all the emotional
contents associated with this female deity
are re-enacted again.
If you say that behind Allah there
she is, the female primal deity, it
makes much sense, and confirms what I have
said, because the Islamic
society, being in a condition of regression, due to
the missing father,
is, at the same time, re-enacting the
female deity.
This is the way psychic life works: through condensations,
sometime of even
opposite concepts. And this is a very important point,
even if Platonic
logic may have some difficulty in grasping
it.
The young terrorist, first of all spoke
of his father, Allah and so on
and so on, because HE was the critical missing
and missed object at the
pivotal Oedipal stage.
Now, you can say that behind the central
figure of the father, pivotal
at the Oedipal level, there is also the archaic
female deity: This deity
will always be there, in the archaic levels of
the soul. It makes sense,
even if, from the words of the
interwiee, we have no evidence at
all. But it makes sense, because the
young terrorist, having regressed
from the Oedipal level, due to the absence of
the father, may well be
beginning fantasizing the ultimate form of regression,
which is the
placenta. The Paradise of the Martyr
is indeed the placenta, but THERE
he is craving to go, by his own words, because
he is missing his
father. There he wants to meet Allah.
As already said, like Pinocchio in the belly
of the whale.
There is no wonder if, before committing suicide,
in order to please his
missing father, he is fantasizing to return into
the place from which he
came, and Allah is also beginning to transfigure
into the craved female
features.
Iakov
Iakov Levi: [email protected]
The
Psychogenic Theory and the Perfect Society
Without
Borders: the Borderline Case of the European Union