Dear Colleague, 

Perhaps the single most important concept in psychology is that of symbiosis: the desire to fuse or become at one with human being, a group, or with a nation or culture.

Nancy Kobrin writes about pathological dimensions of this wish, which she calls fusion: the desire of two people to become a psychologic unity. Suicide may represent the fulfillment of a fusion fantasy: return to the mother.
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Please scroll down to read extracts from The Jihadi Dictionary as well as information on the book and how to purchase it.
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In Japanese Kamikaze culture, pilots were instructed not to fear death because as they approached their targets the face of their mother would appear and they would return to her. For the jihadi, the quintessential concrete expression of the death fusion occurs in the suicide attack. 

Just as the kamikaze pilots were told not to fear death when they were within meters of their target because the face of their mother would appear, the Islamikaze psychologically must kill off his mother and at the same time return to her in a moment of fusion through the act of killing the enemy.

"Individuation" and "relationships" are preferred states of being: easier said than done.

With regards,

Richard Koenigsberg

Extracts from: The Jihadi Dictionary by Nancy Kobrin (information on the book--and how to purchase it--is directly below).

Fusion: The act or process of fusing, the state of being fused; a coalition of parties or factions; a combination or mixture of things. Physics: a process in which the nuclei of atoms are joined. 

Fusion: 1550s, the act of melting by heat, from Latin fusionem: an outpouring, effusion; fundere: to pour, melt. Meaning union or blending; state of being united or blended 1776; used especially in 19c. of politics, in early 20c. of psychology, atoms, and jazz; nuclear physics sense.

Death Fusion: Fusion: act or process of fusing, the state of being fused; a coalition of particles or actions; a combination or mixture of things; physics: a process in which the nuclei of atoms are fused.

Fusion occurs when two people become a psychological or physical unit, ending in death. Psychiatrist S. Orgel wrote on fusion and suicide and a wish to return to the mother. “Fusing in death with the mother in fantasy, in reality fusing with others through murder-suicide, mass murder-suicide.”

I conceived the term death fusion after reading Orgel’s articles on suicide and fusion, especially about Sylvia Plath. His work helped me conceptualize the concrete nature, or concretization, of fusion and suicide‒murder as death fusion. For the jihadi, the quintessential concrete expression of the death fusion occurs in the suicide attack. It is a merger with an idealized other to fend off the fear and terror of one’s own sense of self.

Merging, or fusion, has its own eros, and in its most concrete form, it finds expression in sex. The underlying fusion of the maternal cameo is buried within the imagery of death and destruction. Death concretizes the fusion. “Shame–honor cultures, which are predicated on keeping the female devalued and submissive, spawn suicide attacks — e.g., the Tamil Tigers.

In Japanese Kamikaze culture, pilots were instructed not to fear death because as they approached their targets the face of their mother would appear and they would return to her. Hence, the collective shame–honor culture embraces the unconscious fantasy of fusion with the mother as rebirth. The jihadis are not psychologically individuated and cannot function alone. They must always seek out objects to fuse with in order to recreate the deprived maternal bond. They bond through violence.”

This is what Hassan Ali Mohamud, a Somali living in Islamikaze/suicide bomber: Just as the kamikaze pilots were told not to fear death when they were within meters of their target because the face of their mother would appear, the Islamikaze psychologically must kill off his mother and at the same time return to her in a moment of fusion through the act of killing the enemy.

The terror is linked back to the mother even though jihadis say that “Heaven lies under the feet of the mother.” A similar ideology surfaces within the Islamic State. A girl was told that if she martyred herself she would be reunited in death with her deceased mother

This articulates the death fusion and its concrete thinking, hence disclosing a primitive mental state out of touch suicide: deliberate killing of oneself, 1650s, from Latin sui: of oneself + cidium: a killing. Meaning person who kills himself deliberately 1728.

Mass suicide “is the group or mass deliberate ending of lives of all or the majority of a social group. An example of mass suicide (although contested it was truly suicide) was when nearly all the members of the People’s Temple, otherwise known as the Jonestown Mass Suicide, drank a poison and killed themselves.”

Maternal fusion is a “symbiotic relationship. In which...the mother fuses her identity with another’s, usually a child. The results are extremely detrimental to the functioning of all parties involved. This ego fusion usually occurs when the child is very small, earlier than age two, according to psychology textbooks on the subject, and leaves the child in a lifelong servitude of sorts.”