Nancy Hartveld Kobrin,
Penetrating the Terrorist Psyche. Multieducator.com , 2013. 246 pp.
Kobrin's latest book on the
psychological discovery and preparedness to confront terrorists takes the game
to a whole new dimension. She develops her thesis on the relationship between
the mind of the terrorist and the domestic politics of abusive child-rearing practices
along three lines that grow and develop around one another, making the book
both a narrative of her scientific discoveries and history of her freeing of
herself from a mad family and then an abusive husband. Growing up with a father who rejects his own
Judaism for Christian Science and a mother who seems to project her own
vulnerabilty and confusions on to the daughter, and haunted by the painful
memories of a brother who died before she was born but who is taken as the
child who ought to have lived, as well as the ordeal of another brother who
regularly rapes her and twists her attempts to report his actions at home and
school into an allegation of her manipulative and fantasizing personality,
Kobrin gradually comes to realize she herself lived in a virtual next of terrorism,
her bizarre family a version of Palestinian-Islamicist dysfunctions, and her
inability to disentangle herself from this mess—even her compounding of the
victimhood through a poor marriage choice, acceptance of academic and later professional
bullying—as the plight of modern society.
Yet in heroic terms, though much too late in her life for comfort, she
overcomes these problems, emerges with intelligence, strength of character, and
deep psychoanalytical insight into the means of profiling and treating terrorists
and terrorism, without, naturally, making the whole phenomenon disappear.
Using her own childhood experiences
with an abusive father and mother and analyzing her own struggle to overcome
the trauma, she not only sees terrorists as dysfunctional individuals who are
caught in a culture that exacerbates rather than ameliorates the pain and
provides an ideological cover for the public projection of their rage,
frustration and shame. As a psychohistorian, she discusses the organic
trajectory of incomplete and distorted personality development: frightened,
raging mother who seeks to draw from her male child the strength she does not
have but in the process aborts full nerve reticulation and hormonal
connectivities, leading to great deficits in the imagination, capacity to
articulate in words and rational thoughts what then can only be expressed
unconsciously in violent actions.
Like Freud himself who gained most of
his pertinent insights through self-analysis rather than only through the talking-cure
with his patients—and indeed that style of treatment with patients worked best when
he listened rather than talked down or at them—Kobrin’s confessional mode turns
her book into an epic of self-treatment.
Each turning point in her life and career is seen as a powerful
revealing mental image—such as her near-death accident in India; and her
parsing of such images as midrashic conceits to make them yield layer upon
layer of information about the ontology of mental illness and domestic breakdown,
social malfunction and political violence.
Each step along the way, too, is marked by those in authority or trust
who refuse to listen or understand, who deny and turn the charges against her—the
replacement child who does not fit the bill, the daughter who is not a son, the
Jew who is out of place in a mishmash Christian cult, the awkward and shy
student whose attempts to articulate important questions and perceptions are
brushed aside, the colleagues who turn into rivals and tormenters, the husband
who lacks empathy, the friends who walk away in times of crisis—only to find
eventually that she has beaten them all by her success.
Her argument is perceptive, vivid and
convincing. This is a remarkable and valuable achievement. It is a book I highly recommend to all lay and professional readers.
No comments:
Post a Comment