In puberty rites of savages (5), there is a stage, in which the novices are segregated in a hut, a cavern, or another place symbolizing the maternal womb. There they are menaced and tortured. Eventually, they are symbolically born again from their fathers, invaliding their biological birth from the mother, which is unconsciously perceived as incestuous. Through the denial of their incestuous link to the mother, and the acceptance of the Law of the Father, which has been imposed on them through castration threats and torture, they acquire a sexual identity, and they are accepted into the adults congregation. The rite is successfully completed when the novices full identify with their fathers and among themselves.

Therefore, there is a stage in which the father substitutes the mother as giver of birth. We can easily find mnemonic traces of archaic puberty rites in myths and in tales, in which, before the acting out of the glorious deed, the hero, namely the novice, during his wandering, immerses into the water of rivers or the sea (Aeneas), enters a cavern or descends into the underworld (Odysseus), or is swallowed by a big fish from which he is vomited (Jonah - Jason). Pinocchio falls into the sea, enters the belly of the frightening Dog - fish, there he re - unites with his Father, and both are vomited forth, namely born again, together. As Reik stated: "The condition of heroship seems rather to be that the birth of the hero from the mother is nullified" (6) .

The hero definitely separates from the mother and from his incestuous drives, and then he receives the sexual license. Meaning, he identifies with the Father at the genital level. Through identification, he acquires his sexual identity. The return to the father has been a device in order to be able to desire women at the genital level, distilling the incestuous connotation from heterosexual intercourse. At the same time, Oedipal aggressiveness toward the Father is blunted by love and sympathy, as it occurs in the process of identification. In the compromise reached, the homosexual pre - Oedipal component of the libido strengthens, without nevertheless hindering the main libidinal flow into the heterosexual target. The novices - heroes receive the sexual license from the Father, committing never to repeat incest and patricide.

As Reik has shown in his work, a certain amount of misogyny is the byproduct of a successfully completed puberty rite. The new cohesion between the generations, and the perception that the previous enmity had been instigated by the woman (see Freud's words supra: "who had been the prize of battle and the temptation to murder, was probably turned into the active seducer and instigator to the crime"), engender a suspicious and hostile attitude towards women, as we can see in guilds, fraternities, clubs and other closed societies from which women are excluded. Pubertal boys often adopt the same despising attitude. Once in a while, we are also reported of pubertal gangs and even soccer players, which collectively rape a woman.

Too oppressive, narcissists, and tyrannical fathers are the main culprit of obsessive neurosis, because they do not leave place for the compromise between the generations to be worked out. They are perceived as omnipresent. The libidinal heterosexual flow is inhibited. A regression into pre - Oedipal homosexuality, usually accompanied by anal sadistic aggressiveness (as it occurs in a regression from the genital level), and eventually repressed, trigger neurosis. If homosexuality and anal aggressiveness are not repressed by a strong Super Ego, the outcome is not neurosis but perversion. The presence of the Father, necessary ingredient for the compromise to be worked out, and a sexual identity reached, administrated in excessive doses, it becomes the trigger for regression and neurosis. The trigger is a genital drive, inhibited by paternal oppression and the subsequent sense of guilt. The neurotic is a hero who could not successfully complete his puberty rite, and could not reach full identification with the Father at the genital level.

Different from the hero, the martyr does not descend into the womb, in order to re - unite with the Father, and be born again through identification at the genital level. His aim is to re - unite with the Father in the womb, through Communio, namely, symbiosis, becoming one in the Father. The aim is not acquiring an identity, but is nullifying every identity. The father becomes the erotic object, not at the pre - Oedipal homosexual level, as it occurs during puberty rites, but at a much more regressive level. Through a regression to the oral sadistic stage, the paternal imago is internalized. The martyr does not aspire to be like the father, but to be one in the father.  The internalization is worked out through a regression to the oral sadistic level. At that psycho sexual stage, the baby is still not able to relate to the outside world, but he is one with object of his lust.

Much has been said on Melanie Klein’s discoveries on the schizoid – paranoid position, but the point, which sometimes is missed, is that that position is a consequence of a full fledged regression to the oral sadistic level of psycho sexual evolution. The same is true of the mechanism of projective identification. It is not a "position", in which the human being entrenches while at the breast, but a regression from a higher level to the breast. Namely, it is a solution to an unsustainable tension. As every regression, is triggered by the inability to sustain a higher level, due to the psychic stress associated to the higher level. I suggest that the level, which could not be sustained, is the Oedipal – genital stage and the identification with the Father as, according to Freud, occurred after the primal patricide.
Through martyrdom, the martyr’s identity is nullified. The maternal womb is not a passage, necessary ingredient to be born again with a new identity, as it occurs in puberty rites, but it is the final target. While in the womb, the fetus has no identity of his own. He is one with the placenta. As in the subsequent oral sadistic stage, subject and object are one. It is a full - fledged regression from the woman, at the Oedipal – genital stage, to the Father, who is no more the menacing Oedipal imago, but an oral sadistic and intrauterine imago, and therefore by maternal connotation. At this regressive stage, the return to the father is hallucinated as a return to the mother at the oral sadistic and intrauterine level.

At that level, the reconciliation takes also place through the total denial of the woman as an object of lust. Henceforth, we witness the ferocious attitude of Islamic terrorists towards women and sexuality. To them, women and femininity are concepts so dirty, that they would not even think of collectively raping a woman. As Ruth Stein has shown in her work, purity is essential. For a martyr of Allah to be accepted by his Father in heaven, he must present himself before Him totally sterilized of any sexual connotation. Since every identity firstly is a sexual identity, the martyr, in this way, renounces having one. Misogyny is not worked out at the previous levels (genital sadistic and anal sadistic), but at the oral sadistic level. Women are not just humiliated and controlled, as it happens in most primitive societies, but suppressed and annihilated. It is the psycho sexual equivalent of the Damnatio Memoriae that the ancients put in place towards anyone whose memory they wanted to erase.
 

A Primal Horde of orphans

As Freud has shown in Totem and Taboo, the sense of guilt for patricide had induced the primal horde into renouncing the fruit of their murderous deed, the women, and I should add, they renounced the genital level too, and instituted the first form of society: matriarchy. Without a father, they became a horde of orphans. Being a fatherless horde, they had no one to identify with. The genital level was not renounced only because of the sense of guilt, but also because they had no father to identify with. We know how a child acquires a sexual identity: identifying with his father.

At this point, the primal horde instituted matriarchy because they craved at the woman not at the genital level, through Oedipal identification with the father, but at the most regressive psycho sexual stage: the placenta. Fetuses and babies know nothing of sexual identity nor of fathers. Their world is limited to the placenta and to the breasts. So their new ruler was a placenta. In my opinion, that is the way Freudian matriarchy of the primal horde ought to be understood.

Furthermore, only at that psycho sexual level the Oedipal guilt, induced by the aggressiveness towards the Father, is repressed beyond reach. As an example, regression into pre -oedipal homosexuality will still leave sediments of guilt, because the genital energies are directed towards the Father (see the biblical verse: "Neither shalt thou go up by steps to my altar, that thy nakedness be not exposed on it" (Ex.20:23), a precept meant to prevent homosexuality directed at God the Father); possessing the woman at the sadistic anal stage (narcissistic), as controlling her, humiliating her, etc. will not completely erase the sense of guilt either, because, even at that level, only the Father is the only one entitled to possess her. Henceforth, only at the oral sadistic and intrauterine psycho sexual stage, the Father stops being a presence. Only at that stage, the sense of guilt, nostalgy, and the lack of an identity find a solution. The outcome is a senseless life. To that condition of malaise due to lack of a clear identity, lack of capacity to relate to the world as an external object, and confusion in subject - object relationships, we call today Borderline Personality Disorder. It is a modern euphemism for circumventing Freud's definition of oral sadistic stage, or, if you like, an even more regressive but nebulous: intrauterine stage. When there is also a total loss of the Reality Principle, the BPD risks of degenerating into full - fledged psychosis.

Freud adventured into describing in a very condensed way the primal events from which man and society evolved into being what they are to day. However, it seems to me that some points need further clarification:

One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually [...] Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed [...] the tumultuous mob of brothers were filled with the same contradictory feelings which we can see at work in the ambivalent father' complexes of our children and of our neurotic patients. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desire; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt, It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse felt by the while group (Totem and Taboo, IV:5)

Islam

Islam is an articulation of the mental condition of the primal horde of orphans. The cultural hero of Islam, to use an expression firstly used by Mircea Eliade, is the prophet Mahomet, who was an orphan of father. Almost all Islamic leaders are orphans too: the late Houmeini, Gheddafy, Saddam Houssein, and Yasser Arafat. The cultural hero of a people is the leader of the brotherhood horde, with whom the sons identify. If the sons chose as their leader an orphan, it means that they all feel like orphans.

In HATRED FOR WOMEN AND ISLAMIC TERROR  (7), I pointed at the onto-genetic components of that orphan-hood: the Islamic society is the only one structurally polygamist. In a family situation in which children have very few occasions of being in close relationship with their fathers, they are not able to work out the Oedipal bottleneck successfully through the process of identification. A missing and missed father is hallucinated, and that paternal imago translates into a merciful, but at the same time cruel God. An Oedipal child, missing his needed father, is able of interpreting his emotional deprivation only by casting the blame on his own genital stimuli. Henceforth, blaming the woman, who had been the prize of battle and the temptation to murder, does not translates only into a general sediment of misogyny, as in other primitive societies, but into horror for women, as culprit for their own sexual excitement, and therefore for paternal abandonment.

The question whether the hen precedes the egg, or the other way around, is an old one. Some psychohistorians think that the way children are raised by their parents determines the form and the substance of a society. I suggest that the psycho sexual structure of a society determines the way children are raised. In a society, which is still structured at the oral sadistic and intrauterine level, as occurred after the regression at that level subsequent to primal patricide, children are abused into the same psycho sexual level of the group. I suggest that, in Islamic society, children are abused by deprivation of paternal presence, because that society is still structured in the primal psycho sexual condition of the orphaned primal horde. Henceforth, they conserved their polygamist structure, while most of other peoples emancipated from that condition.

Islam is engendered in the social structure of the Arabs who remained isolated in the Arabic peninsula until very late historical times. As reported by Robertson Smith, after the testimony of St. Nilus, at the end of the 4th century A.D. Arabs were still performing crude totemic rites (8). One such rite described by St. Nilus was the eating of a live camel bound to a stone altar. The identification with the slain father is worked out at the oral sadistic stage, as it occurred after the primal patricide induced sense of guilt caused a fixation at that level, regressing from the puberty rites, which had been the first trial of man to emancipate himself from the borderline position of the primal fatherless horde.
 

 Why terror?

The Father who was hated because with his oppressive presence was preventing the primal horde from reaching its genital target, now that he has been slain, is hated because of his absence. To quote a joke, it is like the patricide son who asks for the indulgence of the Court on the grounds that he is an orphan. It is not casual that one of the most outstanding features of the Islamic saga of hatred and terror is the terrorists' perception of being the victims. The others are the one to be blamed for the martyrs' compulsory need of killing. That is indeed the feeling of an orphan. His emotional deprivation, the source of which is in the paternal absence, can only be resolved in an orgy of destruction. Why are "others" blamed, and exactly for what?

The Father imago, internalized at the oral sadistic level, became one with the subject. Missed and adored, he is loved, but when absent, he is hated. The human mind cannot sustain such an ambivalence, and therefore the image is split. The loved missed father is Allah, and the hated - abandoning father, is their own split part. Since they are one with their abandoning father, they can take full revenge for the abandonment and the emotional deprivation only committing suicide. We can see how a sadistic Super Ego is not an active - present sadistic father, but an abandoning father. While a severe father induces his sons into neurosis, an abandoning father induces them into suicide.

However, they not only commit suicide, they also kill Infidels.
A child who is abandoned by his father blames his own genital stimuli for the abandonment. In the same way, the martyrs of Allah blame their own genital lust, projected into the woman. Henceforth, the close association between Islamic terror and ferocious misogyny. At this point, another splitting takes place. The martyrs are pure, sterilized from every contact with the polluting women, and the infidels represent their other self, the lusting part, which must be punished for having been the primary cause of the abandonment.

Why now?

When the Prophet Mahomet gave the Arabs a new hope that their missing Father would reappear again, showing his face from his hiding place, the first result was an outburst of newly acquired cohesion and successful achievements. Mahomet, the orphan, will deliver them from orphan-hood. The leader of the brotherhood - horde of orphans had to be an orphan himself for providing a vehicle of identification. As distinct from other Messianic movements, which wish for the coming of the Son, and his final victory on the Father (9) , Islam was conceived as a promise that the Father will never hide again. It was the promise that Arabs will never be again a fatherless borderline horde. With the passing of time, success, concomitant with a sensation of being as good as the Father, peculiar to the Oedipal - genital stage, could not been sustained. As Freud has shown, success contains the seeds of self - defeat, because of its connotation of defiance of the Father (Greek Hubris). The libido fixated in their condition of orphans translated into a compulsion to repeat. The Arab world fell into a depressive state, equivalent to Klenian depressive position. In Karl Abraham's terms, it is the oral sadistic level, Stage B. And so it stayed, until a decade ago, when a further regression took place into square one: the Klenian schizoid -  paranoid position, equivalent to Abraham’s oral - sadistic level, Stage A.

What happened in the last half century to trigger the final regressive resolution? As we have seen, the primal horde blamed for the murder its own lust, projected into the woman. With the emotional deprivation consequent to the absence of the Father, the lust for the women was also blamed for their condition of orphan-hood.

For hundreds of years, and in concomitance with the regression to the depressive position, women were segregated and secluded with the aim of castigating men’s lust, and preventing it from emerging from the repression. It is no accident, that in periods of success, as in the first Omyad generations, there was also a relaxation in the Puritan relation to women and in iconoclastic fury, and Islam, at the beginning, had been a relatively tolerant religion. The more they were successful, as in Spain, the more they could relax. With failure, most of it self - induced, the sense of guilt for the lust became unbearable, and intolerance, misogyny, and iconoclastic fury escalated. Until the last half century, the Islamic world was a backward, isolated courtyard of the world, where westerners were personae non - gratae, on the suspicion that they would pollute Islamic Puritan ways. In Arabia, non - Muslims were not even allowed to enter.

Then, over the last forty years two things happened: 1) There was a sexual revolution in the West, and then 2) a huge advance in media’s technology, beginning with television and eventually the Internet, and these both brought an unlimited diffusion of images and ways of life. As we use to say: "the world became a small village".
From the late sixties on, mini skirts, bare female bodies, free sexual relations became familiar, and inundated the media of the western world. Today, one cannot even turn on a computer, without been assaulted by nude advertising.

At this point, covering Islamic women and preventing westerners from physically entering Arabia was not enough for maintaining in the repression the very ultimate cause of paternal abandonment and orphan-hood: their own lust. Confronted so directly and brutally with the very element they were trying so hardly to repress, the original archaic trauma was activated in full force. What had been dormant, under the mounting tension of a massive exposure to nude and promiscuous images, became urgent and compelling. The tension of a mounting exposure to their own repressed lust triggered the regression from the depressive position into the previous stage of psycho sexual evolution: the schizoid - paranoid oral sadistic stage. The split element in their own psyche, the hatred for the Father projected into the infidels, as it occurs in schizoid - paranoid position, became persecutory, and therefore it had to be destroyed. The infidels are accused of having caused, with their unrestrained lust, the abandonment by the Father. Henceforth, only by punishing them, the martyrs of Allah can punish their own lust, and regain again the favor of the beloved and missed Father.

As in every schizoid - paranoid position, subject and object are one. Through suicide, the introjected Father is definitely killed and appeased in the same condensation. Being one in the father, in the ultimate Communio of the maternal - paternal womb, definitely solves the unsolvable deprivation of paternal love.

1 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, (1921),  Postcript, Chap. XII B

2  Sigmund Freud, “Symbolism in Dreams”, 1915 – 1917, in The Standar Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Tran.  by James Strachey, The Hogart Press, London 1957, vol. XV, p. 163.

 3  Ruth Stein mentioned the point in Evil as Love and as Liberation ,  note 18, in Psyche Matters , http://psychematters.com/papers/stein.htm#18, [Entered November 25, 2001].

4  Evil as Love and as Liberation, Op.cit.

5  Theodor Reik has analyzed the stages of puberty rites in “The Puberty Rites of Savages”, in Ritual – Psychoanalytic Studies, Farrar &Straus, New York 1946.

6  Op.cit., p.148.

7  Published in Free Republic, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/830012/posts [Entered  01/26/2003]

8  Quoted by Freud in Totem and Taboo, IV:4

9  Apparently, in Judaism too, the Messiah will bring again the rule of the Father, but to a more attentive exam, it becomes clear that that is not the case. The Messiah is the son of David, and David has all the connotations of a Son – God, like the Christ. In Judaism, the defiant aspect of the Son – God, who will come and finally defeat the Father, has been repressed. We might say that Jewish monotheism, although it represents the religion and the rule of the Father, contains much more elements of defiance and rebellion against the Father than Islam. The latter is correctly perceived as the most pure monotheism, because only in Islam total submission of the sons to the Father is demanded and obtained. As we have afore pointed, the outcome is a total merge with the Father.

[End of the article]

The Problem