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Bonding relates how people form attachments with other people as well as with objects. A jihadi bonds to hard objects such as weapons. With regards to people, the jihadi demonstrates different kinds of attachments, often parasitic, symbiotic, terror driven. Jihadis have a problem with bonding and maternal attachment. They have never individuated and remain fused to the mother.
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The term “borderline” is apt for the jihadis if one considers that they literally are found attacking all geographic borders. They disregard all boundaries/borders because of their grandiosity, omnipotence, rage, and psychotic behavior, but especially because of the maternal fusion. They are symbiotically attached to their mothers, which obviates any border: What is ours is theirs. They co-opt and conquer everything in their path.
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Ummah: Arabic word meaning nation or community; distinguished from Sha’b, meaning nation with common ancestry or geography. Thus, it can be said to be a supra-national community with a common history. Ummah is a synonym for ummat al-Islamiyah, the Islamic Nation; commonly meaning the collective community of Islamic peoples. Its root is related to the Arabic word umm, mother, and ummi, mommy.
The Ummah or worldwide Muslim community, reinforces the concept of a fused group. The jihadi claims that if you hurt one Muslim, you have hurt the entire group, which must be remedied by revenge. At the eye of the clan’s storm is the devalued female. She underpins the group as the hated other and serves as a receptacle for the male rage and dependency on their mothers. Pryce Jones described Arab society as the closed circle.
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The clan is a closed, fused group, meaning that the group self is more important than the individual self. The individual lacks a sense of autonomy and freedom. The clan member never achieves independent critical thinking; rather he or she remains developmentally arrested in group think, having a herd mentality.
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There is a concept in psychoanalytic thinking called the oceanic feeling, “a term employed for a sense of expansion of the self beyond its customary temporal‒spatial limits, leading to a feeling of merger with the universe at large. The feeling is believed to recall very early infantile states of being where all experience of time and space is coextensive with the subject’s ego.
Hence, in adult life, the experience of oceanic feeling is considered a regressive phenomenon. Oneness of the self and its object world is regarded as a narcissistic illusion underneath which lurks split-off hostile destructiveness. Less comfortable to the Western mind is the possibility that recapturing the infantile bliss of oneness with the universe might be a positive and transcendental occurrence.”
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Cyberpsychology is a subdiscipline of psychology concerned with the psychological effects and implications of computer technologies such as the Internet and virtual reality. Included under this rubric is cyberbullying, cyberattacks, cyberterrorism. A good example of recent research concerning maternal attachment and smart phones, which are mini computers, notes that fixation on them is disruptive to the maternal attachment and that it increases and compounds a baby’s anxiety and depression.
The connection to the computer is a maternal one, bordering on an addiction. “Logging on” is really “plugging in” to the maternal. Think of Harlow’s monkeys and their attachment to metal grates as surrogate mothers. The computer is such a mother, and its oceanic feeling of space expands the omnipotence and grandiosity of the jihadi. This is quite autistic, as a computer is a hard object.
The electronic connection is as if the jihadi is being enlivened by the maternal connection, thus paving over maternal deprivation. The jihadis’ unconscious expands its omnipotence and grandiosity through consuming the entire Internet. Their goal is to deplete the mother of all her “goodies” and contents. This unconscious attack on the mother expresses the jihadis’ greed, interpolated and projected onto their innocent victims, those targeted for recruitment. Because the jihadis are involved in crime, theirs is a misuse of the computer as an object, which constitutes a perversion.
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Fusion. (see Maternal Fusion, Death Fusion, Life Fusion): The act or process of fusing, the state of being fused, that which is fused; in politics, a coalition of parties or factions. Also, nuclear fusion: a thermonuclear reaction in which nuclei of light atoms join to form nuclei of heavier atoms, as the combination of deuterium atoms to form helium atoms. 1550s. act of melting by heat, from Latin fusio: an outpouring, effusion. Meaning a union or blending of different things and the state of being united or blended by 1776; used in 19c. for politics, in early 20c. for psychology, atoms, and jazz; nuclear physics sense in 1947, musical sense 1972.
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Misogyny: describes a general hatred or contempt for women; hatred of the female masking terror of her due to dependency needs and the fear and terror of the female and her body, called ferror. According to Abdelwahab Bouhdiba in his Sexuality in Islam, the female is so utterly devalued in Islam that she is the target of rage. However, the real problem is the smothering bonding of the son by the mother because he is her first taste of honor, which covers over years of shame. He doesn’t suffer from an Oedipal (father) complex, as Freud thought in the West. Instead the Muslim son suffers from the Judār mother complex. It is so intensely perverse that the mother must be obliterated, annihilated in order for the son to be set free from his maternal symbiosis.
However, even by seeking to gain his independence, he is never allowed to separate and individuate. Thus, he remains perpetually trapped in a maternal fusion. Many critics have thought that the problem in the Arab world is attributable to the authoritarian father. However, the authoritarian father is merely a symptom of this underlying problem because he was once a little boy and hence is eternally trapped in his own maternal fusion.
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The jihadi group self is a collective group fantasy that embraces martyrdom as a defense mechanism in order to preserve the group identity. “The preservation of the collective group self [of the jihadi] becomes more pervasive than life itself.” This translates into embracing a theology of martyrdom as an excuse/rationalization (defense mechanism) to preserve the group by eliminating members who purge the group of its sadism and aggression moment by moment. It is an infinite purging function that entails killing off one of its own and murdering others at the same time.
This unconscious strategy allows the collectivity of the death cult to persist but at its own expense. It is like cannibalizing part of the group self. Individuals don’t exist; they are merely part objects to the group. This is a very difficult concept for Westerners to understand since freedom is linked to individuality.
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