Rejecting mother - good mother

At last this bloody machine is working again and I can make some comments about what I've been hearing in the news. Mostly I've been listening to the hominin psyche talking; mostly people respond to such communication with some incomprehension arising from the belief that human beings are rational creatures. The actuality is that human beings are creatures capable of reason , as they are capable of singing, but most do not make use of this ability on a regular basis. So for example, the Iraqi woman displaying a protest banner reading "no equality" produced the response from her countrywoman being interviewed "no woman can want that", said in baffled incomprehension. But of course a woman can: it comes from the hominin psyche that has learned from experience that survival depends on not being equal. She has not been equal all her life and obviously has survived! Equally obviously some women who became more equal have died in Iraq.

(22nd August) This morning I heard a Muslim woman interviewee give voice to the reality that underlies so many modern problems, "women suffer so much anxiety and problems", or words to that effect, but she went on to say that husbands must do more to help in the family. (Of course if Homo sapiens had evolved because males were supporting, and provisioning, females with infants it would not be necessary for any modern woman to make such remarks!) The psychological reality is that all the stress and anxiety that women experience is inevitably funnelled into their baby. The issue under discussion this morning was as always these days the problem of preventing young Muslim men from being radicalised. The solutions proposed make no reference to the underlying templates created in their psyches in infancy by mothers under severe stress. I heard someone saying a few days ago that anyone could be a suicide bomber. Not true! It seems that one of the London suicide bombers had a wife and baby, and a job. Very few men in this situation, I think, would be inclined towards suicide bombing. It suggests to me a deeply schizoid condition with a rigid false self covering the vacuum at the core. The yearning to go back and start again which Melanie Klein called a "return to the womb" impulse and which can lead to "normal" suicide coupled with all the unconscious anger etc built up in the early relationship with rejecting mother, that is stressed mother, provides fertile ground for recruiters to work on. They can offer rigid structure in their belief system and in a hidden organisation, a sense of belonging, a powerful sense of purpose to counteract schizoid futility, "one way only" (a felt necessity and don't I know that!) and a sure-fire way to a new beginning.

How to deal with it? Long-term attention needs to be paid to the situation of women in immigrant communities. As for all women there is double stress, their own and that of their menfolk which is offloaded onto them one way or another. Take the issue of forced marriages for one example. Attention is at last being given to those women who resist but not to all those women and men who have submitted, many of whom of course may be in denial about, or split away from, their real feelings concerning their original acceptance of the union. Such a marriage might end up reasonably content, but this will not remove any damage that may have been done to the first child during the first years.

The government's sure- start program, as far as I know about it, may be useful to prevent the sort of problem I'm talking about, or could be adapted to be so; are all the women from ethnic minorities who might benefit making use of this type of program?

The discussion of what young Muslim men need now might be better focused by an understanding of the underlying schizoid needs for structure, belonging, and meaning/purpose; all of which could as well be provided in a positive way through their faith and local mosque. The talk is of a "sense of identity" but it can take several years of therapy to achieve that. Using a term like "British Asian" won't do it. It can form naturally if the above needs are met.

(24th August) Today yet another interviewee was talking of working with young Muslims, of the need to deal with isolation and identity, and of success in teaching a broader less fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran. But I fear that his type of effort will only reach those without the severe inner damage that produces the bomber. He did make me think however of the need to add the word attention to my list. It's what the baby needed from mother and did not get, or got the wrong type. It explains why the larger organised religions can take on a "rejecting mother" projection -- attention is controlling but impersonal -- while cult groups, house churches, or terrorist cells can become "good mother" containing, supporting, and affirming. They are of course more controlling, (really they are "smothering" mother, see below) but are felt as safe just as swaddling clothes were once used for babies.

(It takes so long to get anything onto this machine! There isn't time)

What I've been saying above applies just as well to the animal rights terrorists in the news this morning and to the Christian pro-life terrorists attacking abortion clinics. The animal rights people are fighting to defend their inner baby projected into animals (and so to keep repressed the pain in the inner baby that never leaves them however far it is projected); the pro-lifers fight for their projected inner foetus. They hurt and kill to avoid, unconsciously, being hurt or killed. To get more understanding of the whole process read about my work with client Rosita in Chapter 4 of Created in the Image. Remember that smothering mother is just another aspect of rejecting mother, in my work I always preferred the term negative mother.

(Sunday 28th August) Owing to "events, dear boy, events" I still haven't finished this topic. A few days ago I heard yet another "expert" comment on the joylessness observable in suicide bombers; loners, he suggested what they needed was to find a girl and take her to bed. As if it was that simple! The capacity to experience joy is acquired through the experience of being "enjoyed" as a baby, by a loving mother. Being physically well cared for by a stressed mother grieving for her father, with bombs falling all around, and a husband out on fire watch each night who might not come back in the morning, did not inculcate in me any such capacity and neither later experiences nor therapy can makeup the deficit. But a substitute for joy can be found in success against heavy odds in support of a deeply felt purpose. In my case this was my job; meaningful, even dangerous work, perhaps assisting reconstruction in Iraq (as opposed to assisting the destruction) might be a way to affect psychological healing (not a cure) for those most vulnerable to recruitment as suicide bombers. Could not mosques organise something in that line? Or even the government? The people who cared deeply about the suffering in Iraq are offered no immediately accessible way of acting nor do the media give any accurate idea of how much good is actually being done by American and British troops, so that no positive model is presented of how to help, to the counteract the message, which is of course an anti-libidinal message, that only further destruction will help.