In yesterday's post I looked at the evil of a society which glorifies the suicide-murderers of children and elevates them to the status of heroes. I linked to a post which described the mother of the most recent young Palestinian suicide bomber extolling the virtues of his "heroic" act. That led me to wonder what it must be like for a child to grow up with a parent or parents who thinks the highest goal to which he can obtain is to murder other people's children while committing suicide.
It doesn't take Psychoanalytic training to understand and recognize that a child develops their sense of themselves, indeed their entire personality, in a complex interplay between their constitutional endowments and their most significant personal relationships. I have seen parents refer to their 3 month old daughter, when the child was proving difficult to soothe and comfort, as a bitchy little girl. No one would be surprised to find this has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Children often identify with the qualities and images of themselves that their parents project onto them. In other words, if a parent, consciously or especially unconsciously, thinks that their child is a wonderful athlete, more often than not, that child will see himself as a wonderful athlete until, and unless, reality intervenes. In the same way, when a parent loves and likes their child, he will be more likely to grow up likable and lovable. Most often, it is the unconscious attitudes of the parent that are most definitive. In the example of the little girl, I can assure you that no 3 month old has enough agency of their own to be "bitchy" and that the parents thought they were being cute when they called her a bitch; as she grew, they attempted to spoil her with material goods, but could never overcome her feeling of being short-changed in life, and indeed, turned out to be a highly demanding, needy, and unpleasant adolescent.
To return to my question: what must a child experience who grows up in a milieu which values his murderous death more than his life?
I briefly talked about one of my first Child Psychoanalysis patients in a post on Bear Baiting several months ago. He was 5 years old when he came to me for help with his out-sized temper which was causing him terrible problems in school. He was unable to learn the simplest things, despite obvious intellectual gifts, and an IQ which the testing Psychologist assured me was in the very superior range. It took several months of very difficult work (often involving me physically restraining the child from punching, kicking, or biting me) before he was able to settle down enough to start to do the work of "play" within the treatment setting. At first, there was considerable pressure, from the school, and from his mother, (and occasionally from my own annoyed and helpless feelings) to medicate this boy. He clearly had attention difficulties, learning difficulties, and was very active to boot; a diagnosis of ADHD would have been easily defensible, yet I thought there was more going on than met the eye.
During my evaluation, I had met several times with his parents and determined that though they had a troubled marriage, and despite a fair amount of disappointment and anger at each other, they were determined to find help for their only son. He was the result of an unplanned pregnancy; his mother felt overwhelmed at his birth by the responsibility of having a child at her young age (she had married in part to escape her stultifying home life and was very conflicted in her feelings toward her husband.) The father never felt able to care for his family in the way he wanted, and was struggling with significant issues of depression himself. Nonetheless, to outward appearances they presented themselves as a rather conventional family.
Toward the end of the first year of our work together, a theme began to emerge in his play. Most of the time the play involved violent conflicts between "good guys" and "bad guys", rarely further characterized. (We used Lego characters which I kept in the office for just such play.) Typically I would be assigned the role of the "good guys" and he would be the "bad guys"; not a surprise since he clearly felt he was "bad" and that's why he had to see a "Talking Doctor." Always, the good guys ended up being slaughtered by the bad guys, frequently in giant explosions. His glee and rage when slaughtering my Lego "good guys" was dramatic.
I knew that his anger kept him from feeling weak and humiliated, feelings he constantly struggled with. For example, part of his learning disability was that whenever he didn't know something, it felt too humiliating to ask for help; when he made a public mistake, the humiliation was devastating, and to cover such terrible feelings, he would become enraged and attack the nearest available person (teachers, other children, me.) As we were better able to understand this reaction, he was better able to control his behavior, but the feelings of humiliation and the resultant necessity to kill and destroy (usually in the most violent, graphic manner possible) the "good guys" persisted.
In one of my regular meetings with the mother, I asked how things were progressing at home, with her, with her daughters, in her marriage. I should mention she was often fairly tense, usually ascribed to problems with managing her son's rage, and very contained. In this particular meeting, when she talked about her daughters, her face lit up. For the first time since I had begun to meet with my patient and his parents (and I would greet his mother on a daily basis in the waiting room) she exhibited real joy. She took delight in her daughters, a feeling she had never evinced toward her son. I asked if she had felt disappointed when her first child was born, that he was a boy. After a silence of deep concentration, in a tormented voice she said, "yes"; she didn't like boys and she never had.
From that point I was able to introduce into our play the missing element. I told my patient that the "bad guys" were so bad because their mothers didn't love them. When I made the interpretation, I could almost see the "wheels turning" in my patient's mind. With the most serious expression and tone, he told me if they didn't kill the "good guys" they would have to cry all the time.
[Please note, my interpretation was of my patient's experience, through the displaced vehicle of the toy figures; his mother was not an evil person and did try to love him as best she could. She was limited by her ambivalence toward men which impaired her ability to fully, emotionally connect to her infant son.]
A child growing up with parents who do not want him or value his life can never cope with such a painful awareness. The idea that they can gain their parent's love and acceptance by doing what the parent wants most for them to do is an overwhelmingly powerful motivator. A child who believes that he is worthless, that if only he sacrifices his life to kill others his mother will love him, is already a suicide-murderer well before they push the button.
Recent Comments