Posted on 01/26/2003 12:14:04 PM PST by robowombat
Iakov Levi
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 real 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 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..."
In "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.
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.
THE ABSENCE OF THE FATHER AS THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF BORDERLINE DISORDER
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.
The militant gay fellows also will not enjoy Dr. Levy's take.
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