ShrinkWrapped

A Child Suicide Bomber

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?

Peace will Come ...

Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us. -Golda Meir

A young Palestinian, whose age has variously been reported as anywhere between 16 and 18, succeeded in murdering 9 Israelis for the crime of being Israelis.   The Palestinians and their enablers never fail to remind us of what they believe and what they value.   This murderer is being hailed as a hero among his countrymen; his Mother Defends Her Son's Decision to Explode Himself.  The temptation for civilized people is to look away, to imagine he acted out of some deeply felt pain at his lot in life.  Sadly for our future, this boy was not psychiatrically disturbed; in fact he represented the greatest flowering of Palestinian manhood. 

Healthy self esteem depends, in large part, on how closely one is able to approximate one's ego ideal.  The ego ideal represents who a person wants to be; it includes the kind of person he aspires to, the kind of work, love relationships, hopes and dreams.   Most of us aspire to be the best teacher, doctor, policeman, athlete we can be; the best father, mother, or spouse we can be.  In a culture that defines the highest of all aspirations as that of the suicide murderer, many young people will take that as their ego ideal, and many will act on that desire. 

This story is from March 13, 2006:

Murderers awarded honorary Palestinian citizenship

The Palestinian Authority has announced that it was granting honorary citizenship to two Arab terrorists who killed Israelis: a Lebanese terrorist, Samir Quntar, and Jordanian terrorist, Sultan Al-Ajaluni. Both are serving life sentences in Israeli jails.

An Insane Defense

I have always had a major problem with Psychiatry's role in determining the degree of guilt or innocence in criminal cases.  The original McNaughton rule was established in 1843:

The "McNaughton rule" was a standard to be applied by the jury, after hearing medical testimony from prosecution and defense experts. The rule created a presumption of sanity, unless the defense proved "at the time of committing the act, the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong."

The McNaughton rule became the standard for insanity in the United States and the United Kingdom, and is still the standard for insanity in almost half of the states.

This offered a fairly clear standard that was rarely met.  Even the sickest of Schizophrenics almost always recognizes that certain behavior, especially murder, is wrong under any conditions. 

As is their wont, defense attorneys have always tried to stretch the law to fit their agenda of preventing their clients from being found guilty or facing the highest degree of punishment.  That is their job and when they do it very well, justice sometimes suffers.  In the 1950's, the McNaughton Rule was extended:

Citing leading psychiatrists and jurists of the day, the appellate judge stated that the McNaughton rule was based on "an entirely obsolete and misleading conception of the nature of insanity." He overturned Durham's conviction and established a new rule. The Durham rule states "that an accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect."

The ultimate flowering of such reasoning was the partially successful "Twinkie" defense  (1979) by which Dan White's guilt for the murder of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and gay Supervisor Harvey Milk was mitigated.  In reality, the contribution of junk food to the defense was minimal; nonetheless, White was found to have had diminished capacity because of his severe depression.   Although the Twinkie defense is at best an exaggeration, it has entered the lexicon because of the accurate perception that victimology has become a full time trade, including its application by defense attorneys.

"Hope" is not a Policy

In yesterday's post I used the Indian legend of the Blind Men and the Elephant to suggest that many of our disagreements stem from our limited vision of the situation in Iraq, including how the Iraq War might fit into a greater War on Islamofascism.  It is possible to look at some news reports and conclude that Iraq is in the middle of a civil war and will never be a stable democratic nation; it is equally possible to look at other news reports and conclude that the sectarian violence is much more directly political in nature than in the past and is a necessary part of forming a democratic government.  In any event, we will not and can not know for quite some time which view is the closer to reality.  My preference is to remain cautiously optimistic about Iraq.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to maintain any optimism, cautious or otherwise, about the other giant rogue elephant in the room, Iran.  The news from Iran is almost universally disturbing, yet the signs are already in place that taking action against Iran will be monumentally more difficult than the war in Iraq. 

Glenn Greenwald posts on Fighting all the Hitlers today and worries that the Bush administration is preparing the way for an attack on Iran by using the same arguments we used against Saddam Hussein:

To pro-Bush war supporters, the world is forever stuck in the 1930s. Every leader we don't like is Adolph Hitler, a crazed and irrational lunatic who wants to dominate the world. Every country opposed to our interests is Nazi Germany.

He attempts to deconstruct the Saddam = Hitler meme that was advanced as part of the preparation for the current war:

The Blind Men and the Elephant

I have been criticized, with some justification, for focusing too much on the Media and the Democrats, whose behavior so often seems to undermine our efforts in the War on Islamofascism, sometimes inadvertently and sometimes by design.  The counter arguments from the left, often stated with absolute conviction, is that the most important story is the incompetence and/or evil of the Bush administration.  All of which reminds me of the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant.

In John Godfrey Saxe's ( 1816-1887) version of the famous Indian legend, 6 blind men approach an elephant and try to describe it by touch alone.  One touches its flank and declares an elephant ifs like a wall; the second touches its tusk and declares an elephant is like a spear.  After all six proclaim their sense of what an elephant is, the poem concludes:

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Moral:

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

It seems to me that much of our Media commentary on the war in Iraq suffers from a form blindness that is akin to the blindness of the 6 Indian men.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week the winning Council post was by Dr. Sanity, whose post should be read if only to see someone quoted saying, " Reality is a mistake, we must rectify it."  Her post is NO RELATION TO REALITY, INDEED.  In second place was The death of 1,000 cuts, courtesy of The Glittering Eye, which documents the only winning strategy the Islamists have.

Among non-Council posts, a future history by Dan Simmons is a chilling but necessary read.  Too many who oppose the current war shy away from thoughts of what we would face if we didn't aggressively confront the danger from radical Islam; Dan helps out with his April 2006 Message from Dan.  For those who only read the MSM, they might be surprised to discover that Saddam Targeted American Assets For Terrorism: Case Closed (Bumped).  Luckily Captain Ed has been paying attention; this post is just one reason you should be reading Captain's Quarters everyday.

All the nominees can be found at The Watcher of Weasels and all will reward your effort to read them.

Holiday Reflections

[Update at the end]

Psychoanalysis is based on the idea that we are only minimally aware, if at all, of our unconscious mental processes, and that these unconscious thoughts, wishes, and feelings have significant control over our behavior.  We typically use our rational minds to explain our behavior and make sense of it after the fact.  There is a growing body of research evidence, based on fMRIs, PET Scans, and other technological advances, which support the contention that many actions, even very complex actions, are based on unconscious processes, with our conscious recognition of such action lagging behind.  I review this briefly because it is germane to one of the struggles that is ongoing in our culture and to the season we are celebrating.

I have suggested (Political Deification) that our psychology demands the existence of God or of an idea or set of ideas that serve the same function as God.  This in no way should be taken as an argument for or against the actual existence of God; that is not a scientific question but a question of faith.   Science has done and continues to do a  miraculous job of explaining the world and allowing us to manipulate matter and energy, however, science can not answer the ultimate questions; where science fails, faith is required.  The Atheist who fervently denies the existence of God is showing as much faith as the most fervent religious adherent.  In other words, you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God by using the scientific method.

At our Seder the other night, I remarked to a friend my continuing surprise at an observation I made quite some time ago.  I have found that many of the Bloggers that I find most eloquent, illuminating, and thought provoking have turned out to be religious Christians and Jews.  He remarked, as if it was obvious (which it was on reflection) that that is because they have such a strong moral compass and are therefore able to write clearly and consistently.

Yesterday I found more evidence for this idea.

20%: On Action and Passivity Revisited

Last year due to the vagaries of the Hebrew calendar, Passover took place on the 62nd anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.  In my reading about the events involved I was struck by a statistic that was cited in both the story of the Exodus from Egypt and in the Warsaw Ghetto; fully 80% of the Jews remained passive in the face of doom. 

I am re-posting my April 30, 2005 post and will add some comments at the end, as well:

20%: On Action and Passivity

The Passover Holiday, celebrated by Jews around the world, has just ended.  This Holiday represents a central myth of the Jewish people, that "we were slaves in Egypt and God  brought us out" to freedom.  Furthermore, we are instructed:

In each and every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as though he actually left Egypt. As it says: "You shall tell your son on that day, 'It is because of this that God took me out of Egypt.'" (Exodus 13:8)

It is a powerful myth of a persecuted people being freed by the intercession of their God.  In my research into the meaning of Passover, how it might still be relevant today, and what gives it the emotional resonance it still has, I came across a comment I had never seen before.  This comes from Rabbi Stephen Baars, writing on Assimilation Then and Now:

The Talmud records that in actuality, only 20 percent of the Jewish people left Egypt. The other 80 percent did not identify strongly enough with the Jewish people's role and goal. They were too assimilated and immersed in Egyptian society. So they stayed behind.

Passover this year fell on the  62nd anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a doomed rebellion carried out by the 60,000 Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto who remained of the original 300,000.  For a painful, very human description of the day to day evolution of the uprising, take a look at "The Ghetto Fights," by Marek Edelman, published in a pamphlet called "The Warsaw Ghetto: The 45th Anniversary of the Uprising". (Hat tip to Horsefeathers).

I was struck by the same 20% occurring in the Exodus story and in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

The Prediction of Violence

[Update at the end}

Psychoanalysis, a science of the mind, and Neuroscience, the science of the brain, share a common failing:  neither has a reasonable and coherent theory of action.  In other words, we can often (partially) retrospectively explain why a person did what he did, but we do not have a decent theory that is able to accurately predict specific actions.  This becomes a major problem when the action we are trying to predict includes violence.

There are really only two ways that we know that have any predictive value of future violence.  A history of past violence suggests the risk of future violence is higher than in a person with no such history and verbal threats of violence also indicate an increased risk of violence.  Beyond those two factors, there is no way to predict future violence, and even when those risk factors are taken into account, there is no way to quantify the risk of violence. 

Yesterday, news broke that makes this determination of critical importance:

TEHRAN, April 11 — Iran announced Tuesday that its nuclear engineers had advanced to a new phase in the enrichment of uranium, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a series of the country's ruling clerics declared that the nation would now speed ahead, in defiance of a United Nations Security Council warning, to produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a speech that was broadcast live from the city of Mashad, said Iran is determined to develop production on an industrial scale.

Affect Storms

Early in my carer I treated a man who had significant issues with hyper-sensitivity.  He felt easily criticized and took offence easily.  At the same time he was extremely insensitive to the feelings of others and was typically completely unaware of how he hurt the people who cared about him.  After a couple of months of treatment, I thought our therapeutic alliance was strong enough to tolerate a more pointed interpretation.  In the middle of a session in which he was bitterly complaining about his current girlfriend, that she was mean to him because she kept complaining he was insensitive to her, I ventured the comment that perhaps there were something he had done that she misinterpreted as critical of her.  I thought this would be an opening for some self-reflection by my patient; I was wrong.  After a moments silence, he exploded at me.  How could I be so stupid as to think he was insensitive; if I agreed with her why did he even bother talking to me about it.  He was loud and insistent.  He barely took a breath and did not allow me to intervene.  I had nothing useful to say to him and nothing I said could have nay value.  He was enraged and distressed.

I realized that there was indeed nothing I could say that would calm the turbulence; all I could do was sit tight and wait for the storm to pass.  When a hurricane hits, you don't continue trying to renovate the house, you batten down the hatches and wait it out.  (Sorry for the mixed metaphors.)

As time went on we were able to understand what had triggered the "Affect Storm."  When I made my extremely mild critical comment, it threatened to take down the entire edifice of self-esteem that he had constructed to protect himself from deep-seated feelings of worthlessness and despair.  Criticism form people he didn't care about bounced off his fortifications, but he had let me inside the front door, inside his defenses, and a criticism from me shook the foundations.  He felt a moment of pure terror and then went on the counter-attack as if his life depended on it; in a way, at that time, his psychic integrity did depend on counter-attacking.  In retrospect, the episode proved to be quite educational to both of us; at the time it was quite harrowing and distressing.

I was reminded of "Affect Storms" by some of the responses to my post yesterday.