Extracts from: Violent Brutality of Growing Up in A Shame Honor Culture/The Destruction of the Maternal Bond. Nancy Kobrin. 

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(1) The underlying template of the Islamic suicide attack is a death fusion. This is an extension of the maternal symbiosis or maternal fusion, The death fusion is a concrete representation of the unconscious maternal symbiosis. The person who suicides in such a situation enacts a fantasy of reuniting (re-fusing) with the mother in death. The suicide bomber literally bonds violently to the victim and in so doing fuses in death with his or her victims, even to the point of mixing blood and body parts.

(2) Shame culture and the group self: In Arab Muslim and non-Arab Muslim shame/honor cultures, the psychological need to separate, on the one hand, and not to separate, on the other, means that children tend not to go through an individuation-separation stage as child psychologists in the West take as the sine qua non of each individual’s achievement of maturity and independence. 

(3) Lack of separation-individuation in shame culture: If the bond is unseverable, there is no individuation-separation. Western fairy tales teach children that they will go out into the world leaving their mothers behind and encounter obstacles along the way but will overcome these obstacles and return home competent and safe. However, in Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist organizations’ children’s tales (as recounted in mosques, schools and television shows), the narrative the children learn is that you go out into the world and you blow yourself up. You become a martyr. This is how you psychologically separate from your mother under political guise of the ideologies of martyrdom.

(4) Physical violence hooks into our maternal communicative circuit of terrors: The terror of violence is experienced early. Everyone has an “internal terrorist” into which the real jihadi hooks. Terror is also theater as it is sending a message. Contrary to common understanding, the message isn’t in the first instance political or ideological. It is psychological. Unconscious early childhood terrors of the viewing public and the victims who are assaulted has been overlooked.

Just as physical punishment is a way of attaching or bonding for the perpetrator to its prey, all too often the child victim, its psychological terror becomes projected. The majority of the physical, chronic daily abuse of shame honor cultures occurs behind closed doors. Statistics are not kept because those outside the group are not welcomed. It is a hermetically sealed cult-like group which Pryce-Jones describes as “the closed circle.”

(5) What happens when shame is felt—it can’t be heard or smelled or tasted? Generally, the eldest brother is tasked by the authoritative figure in the family with redeeming family honor through the honor killing. This is a vague set of words, but what it means is hidden because it involves things that are not real: they are felt in the blood and guts and sexual organs. Female honor, i.e., the vagina or ‘ird (Ar.) once contaminated, i.e., sexually touched or imagined to have been polluted by even the most subtle of innuendos in rumor-- it can never be redeemed or washed away, only destroyed.

The female must be killed off. Family honor, known as sharaf, can only be cleansed by willfully spilling blood. If not, the whole family is ruined: no one will marry into such a family or go into business with it. It is a crushing burden, too much to bear. The whole world seems to be collapsing. In shame honor cultures one is always under surveillance.

In the Middle East, this is culturally concretized by the hamsa, the symbol for the “evil eye”. The eye is focused on the female and her sexuality. The little female is under constant surveillance from the moment of birth. It is the accusatory eye of the mother. What must never be seen or touched is the cynosure, the center of all fascinated attention. She is constantly manipulated.

If her reputation is ruined, she is worthless. There is no freedom of movement for her. These restraints are underestimated in the psychological impact it causes on her emotional development. She essentially lives her life under a death threat, a psychological. The principal impact is on the first-born son who is used as a narcissistic object in extremis because the bond between mother and son is inseverable even more so than that of mother and daughter, since the son brings the mother her first taste of honor, translating into power and status. They need one another intensely but they cannot bond properly. The situation is impossible. The impasse is unbridgeable. The only way out, an explosion of violence.