A Discussion on Violence or Dialogue? Some Psychoanalytic Insights from Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, and a Comparison between Masculinity and Femininity and How that Difference Effects Acts of Extreme Violence

From what is known about the psychology of men, male development, and men in society and culture, and tying that knowledge to a consideration of what was, and in its impact still is, a shocking world-shattering event, the bombing of the Twin Towers, “Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity” has a quality of invention to it. (1)

At a conference on terrorism, discussants noted that poverty and illiteracy while of themselves are undesirable, they are not root causes of terrorism in and of themselves. Most terrorists are of middle-class or privileged origin and well educated, and those who support them are likely to be more educated than their fellow citizens. Among the three factors most responsible, he suggests, the first is humiliation. “The word humiliation is very important to explaining why terrorists are so successful in recruiting large numbers of young men” (Kristof, 2002, p. A31) (1)

While the world, puzzled, continued to try to understand and address the horrors of terrorist violence, a private episode of violence had taken place in the United States in July 2000, when one angry father of a young hockey player pummeled and killed another father. After the (light) sentencing of the father, the New York Times Magazine in January 2002 published an article about youth sports and the problem of parental overinvestment. A “father of a peewee goalie” responded the following month:

Hockey is a passionate game that requires commitment and character. It requires toughness, both mental and physical. McGrath asks why, in an age of parental effort to reduce risks, we would let our kids play such a rough and aggressive game. I would remind him of the men of Delta Force, on the ground in Somalia and now in Afghanistan, who routinely wear tricked-out hockey helmets. I would remind him of the citizen-athletes in Pennsylvania who prevented even more casualties on Sept. 11 … I would remind him that life is a risk. (Castro, 2002, p. E4) (1)

Small boys, this father argues, need to play “rough and aggressive” games in order to develop the toughness, character, and commitment of the men of the Delta Force.

Traditional economic, political, and social explanations for terrorism and violence, then, are not enough. Emotions like hatred and humiliation are also central. Sociopolitical conditions certainly affect motivation, feelings, and action, and we can look, at motivation as if it is directly caused by abstract and generally described political or material conditions. We can label such behavior as anti-imperialist, nationalist, or borne of religious fervor. (1)

Of course, it is important to discuss that particular individuals engage in acts of extreme violence. Acts such as suicide missions, mass murder, torture, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. These individuals have conscious and unconscious wishes and fantasies, have, indeed, conscious reasons and rationalizations that make such behaviors feel acceptable and even laudable. We are looking at individuals who hate, commit violence and polarize the world into good us and evil them. (1)

All people individualize cultural and political belief systems according to their particular psychology and their particular developmental and interpersonal history. They infuse religious and political ideologies with the affects that justify and lead to their behavior, whether violent or pacifist, and they get personal gratification or a sense of coherence from participating in causes, connecting with certain people, and disconnecting from others. The question becomes, then, how and why these conditions and causes affect different people differently. Within a particular population of perpetrators, whether among contemporary Islamic fundamentalists or even in Germany during the Second World War, it is never the case that all members engage in extreme violence or even support it. (1)

“Most people who engage in extreme acts of brutality and violence are men.” (1)

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I’d like to tie psychoanalytic insights on theories of “weapons as self-objects” (2)(3) to how these objects in the object-relational world, both differ significantly to that of the female and male experiences. (4) I’d like to quote the following from Lucy Holmes’ The Internal Triangle: Theories in female development:

“If the fetus/infant can be seen as equivalent to the penis as a dynamic in psychic functioning, it is significant that women must give up the valued self-object in a way that men never have to. Castration fantasies are crucial to male development, but they remain fantasies; men are never required to relinquish their penises as women must lose the pregnancy and the fetus in childbirth. That is the symbolic separation from the child as self/object.” (4)

“The selfobject function of weapons, however, may have significance beyond individual psychopathology. Groups of individuals, societies, and even nations may utilize weapons to counter feelings of vulnerability and to diminish fragmentation of the group’s collective self. Their destructive potential may be unleashed in response to an intense narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage. The importance of weapons can thus be better understood by examining them within the context of self-psychology.” (3)

Weapons as self-objects, whether they by the machinery of war, the self, or your own children, “they allow a fragile self to feel in control, and empty self to feel stimulated or excited, and a grandiose self to experience an exhilarating power. These “tools of war” can give a sense of cohesion and identity, not only to individuals but also to cultures. If a nation feels humiliated or defeated, such as Germany after World War One, national identity can be healed by a build-up of military strength. Group identity is fostered through an identification with weapons. Terrorists provide a contemporary example. They typically feel oppressed and powerless and achieve a sense of potency and control through the use of the weapons and bombs they use to carry out a terrorist attack (Feldmann and Johnson, 1992).” (5)

It becomes important to note that abusive males use their children and other people’s children as objects in their distorted, sick, psychopathic games because child abuse is tangential to spousal abuse. (6)

This psychoanalytical insight, in my opinion, connects significantly to reasons why men commit more acts of brutality and extreme violence than women. Normal female development requires most women to learn how to maturely and graciously work through loss, and too, also learn to recuperate constructively and creatively for that loss. Women, in this sense, learn early on in their psychic development, how to lose by becoming castrated victims who lack a penis. This happens when girls identify with their mothers. Even when they cannot successfully introject their internal lost phallus, many women develop non-lethal forms of sexual perversion like homosexuality to creatively problem-solve for that lack. Fetishes and perversions like homosexuality and bisexuality are not only creative solutions to a problem but benign and constructive ways in which females find avenues to express forms of male dominance through fantasy. (7)(8)(9)

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In the public media, men stood without comment for humanity, as American newspapers displayed photo upon photo picturing “Serbians,” “Taliban,” “rioters in Kashmir,” “Palestinian demonstrators,” “Saudis,” or “Jewish settlers,” without noting that these purported ethnically generic and universalizing photos were entirely of men. Gender dynamics in many cultures, including in many of those that portray them in the media), rendered women invisible. (1)

Terrorism, suicide bombing, the violence of nationalism and ethnic cleansing, all, it would seem, involve a desire to humiliate a common male enemy. This masculine desire to humiliate defeated men and to shore up male identity intersects further with misogyny, such that cases of ethnic cleansing often include the mass rape of women and girls, and the political torture usually includes, specifically, the sexual torture of both men and women, as if the perpetrators are enacting male dominance as well as political or ethnic dominance. (1)

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We can, therefore, draw and parallel conclusions about those individuals who engage in private episodes of violence like domestic violence to those who engage in large scale mass extinction and other acts of extreme brutality and violence such as terrorism and mass random shooting events.

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We need to ask, then, not only about the psychodynamics arising from hate and humiliation in general of extreme violence like terrorism, mass murder, suicide bombing, rape, or torture, but why it is largely men who engage in the vast majority of such violence, whether on an individual or mass scale. As ordinary soldiers, men make war, and as politicians and generals, they send younger men to war and lead the fighting. (warmongering) Historically and cross-culturally, the military in all societies has been, by definition, masculine (Israel may be an exception here), and military training often involves the invocation of ideologies of aggressive masculinity and explicit, often sexualized, deprecation of women (and, more recently, of gays) (Williams, 1989). Women, by contrast, tend not to be fighters, and historically women may have a special relationship to peace and pacifism (Ruddick, 1989). (1)

Men who engage in extreme acts of brutality and violence tend to be mainly the concentration camp guards, the SS, those who perpetrate genocide, mass ethnic rape, torture, and the wartime murder of children and old people. They find themselves and organize themselves into groups the goal of which is extreme violence, and perhaps — if we read, for example, some of the September 11 and Palestinian suicide bombers’ letters and notes (Stein, 2002) — these men get pleasure from envisioning this violence. (1)

Yet, Nancy J. Chodorow claims, we cannot contrast men’s universal aggression with women’s universal non-aggression. Aggression is found and develops in pathological and non-pathological ways in both sexes, and some women are violent. Even if we take for granted typical hormonal differences between women and men, hormones can take us only so far since most men are, in fact, not violent. … Many cultural constructions of masculinity clearly foster or enable male violence. (1)

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Nancy J. Chodorow is speaking in terms of understanding the psychoanalysis of “Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity” and how theory ties into furthering our knowledge of this phenomenon. In-depth biological, genetic, epistemological, and evolutionary theories are not considered in her paper. It has been theorized by some social scientists and criminologists that psychopathy actually benefits group cohesion. That, in fact, psychopathy serves a purpose in larger and smaller group populations because psychopaths tend to win more of the resources that benefit their less aggressive counterparts in regard to group survival. Resources like housing, food, clothing, and medical care, all very important resources for long-term survival.

“There is an alternative perspective that certain aspects of psychopathy are evolutionarily adaptive, and confer an advantage at both the individual and group level. The research demonstrates that psychopathy provides an adaptive psychobiological template for success.” (10) And, …

“Early descriptions of psychopaths highlight their exploitive nature (e.g., Cleckley 1941), and Hare (2001) stated that “Psychopaths view any social exchange as a ‘feeding opportunity,’ a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner. Their motives are to manipulate and take ruthlessly, and without remorse” (p. 145). The association to hunting for food in the animal kingdom is essential in understanding that all predators will attempt to identify and separate the vulnerable from the herd, whether on the African savannahs or the streets of Los Angeles. Empirical research supports this assertion, in that psychopaths do tend to exploit and manipulate others (Jonason and Webster 2012) and use deception across numerous social contexts (Jonason et al. 2014). In addition to being deceptive and manipulative, psychopaths are impulsive and aggressive (Cima and Raine 2009), using such strategies to get what they want from others. Despite attenuated fear and empathy (Hare 2003), people with psychopathic traits seem able to successfully manipulate and charm others (Cleckley 1941; Hare 2003), implying that they are able to use socially relevant information to manipulate the people around them. Supporting this idea, people with psychopathic traits do appear to have insight into the intentions, emotions, and motivations of other people (Richell et al. 2003).”(10)

Freud argued that pathology illuminates normality. This is because in the psychoanalytic literature gender is figured as female. The disorders and dynamics found predominantly in women are usually seen as female. But when Freud and others study a behavior found predominantly in men, violence, and aggression, this behavior is seen not as masculine but as a human problem. However, we do need to acknowledge that gender is also male, and that violence seems predominantly a pathology of masculinity. Our question, then, becomes: What, in the psychic organization of ordinary masculinity, leads a not-negligible number of men to develop hatred and to react to humiliation with violence and aggression in a way that most women do not? As I have pointed out, the very organization of the Oedipal triangle sets-up a person’s Object relationship.That is, how he or she relates to the Objects in the Oedipus Complex. How he or she identifies with the father and the mother, whether a castrated, masochistic, castrated victim or the phallic dominant pinnacle of power and, too, the ways in which individuals creatively problem-solve through non-violent, benign, constructive forms of fantasy (female homosexuality and bodybuilding) and violent, catastrophic, destructive forms of fantasies and how these individuals are taught culturally and socially as to what is acceptable modes of self-expression. Many psychoanalysts have pointed out (for early statements, see Horney, 1932; Mead, 1935), men in most modern societies and throughout history have been powerful and dominant, but their power and dominion seem a fragile and vulnerable business, constantly threatened, and consequently, constantly threatening. (1)

Nancy J. Chodorow’s inquiry into political and religious terrorist violence, perpetrated by men against regimes seen as dominated by men, gives us further insight into the pathologies of masculinity beyond that gained by a focus on violence against women. We know that approximately one-third of women killed in the United States are killed by current or estranged male partners, and we are now aware that tribal Pakistani courts routinely punish male sexual infringers by ordering the gang rape of these men’s female relatives. We are horrified as we learn of the restrictions and punishments of women under the Taliban and those reported from Saudi Arabia. (1)

Nancy J. Chodorow elaborates two clinical complexes especially useful in thinking about terrorism and other acts of extreme violence: first, paranoid-schizoid splitting and projective identification and, second, narcissism and humiliation. In the paranoid-schizoid position, as elaborated by Klein (1946), hatred and aggression/badness are thought to reside in the other, or the object, and the self retains all the good, leading to anxieties about persecutory retaliation and thereby to further splitting. As for splitting, increases, the self is threatened also by fragmentation and disintegration. If it can, the self manages the bad object in fantasy by reintegrating it so that it can be controlled (bisexuality is an example of personalities that have introjected or integrated the Object in such a way, as through sexual fantasy, so as to control it without the projective violence of killing it). Eventually, it is hoped, it seems that bad and good are found in both self and other, and splitting decreases. It is the hoped-for outcome that successful integration of the Object, both it’s bad and good parts, will occur. However, this is not a guarantee. The age of development, this period that is marked by is the rapprochement phase of early childhood development, the terrible twos phase, which is painful and difficult for both parent and child alike. (1)

By contrast, in violent fantasy and action, the solution to persecutory or paranoid fears seems to be to destroy whatever or whoever has received the bad-object projection. Violence based on paranoid-schizoid splitting projects badness into the object, leading to persecutory anxiety and to seeing the self as all-good and as threatened. As Mitchell reformulates this (1993), aggression becomes a reaction to threats to psychological selfhood, which, through projective processes, are experienced as coming from another and intended by another. If someone’s internal world becomes centrally organized around these feelings of threat and danger, so that their unconscious fantasy life revolves around aggression and attack, they are likely to experience the world as attacking and threatening and to respond accordingly. (1)

Just as analysts would locate hate-filled violence on the paranoid-schizoid level, focusing on splitting, the projection of hatred and aggression, and basic threats to psychological selfhood, so, similarly, terrorists and other nationalists, religious, and ethnic violence is ideologically justified and split, projective terms. The group that is being attacked or eliminated is objectively evil, destructive, and bad; it may threaten basic existence and may not even be seen as human. Thus, for example, the existence of the United States threatens our Islamic existence as ethnicity, tribe, or nation, and we are thereby justified in our (from the point-of-view of the United States, terrorist) attacks. (1)

Ideological legitimation of national-religious-ethnic violence often seems to use the language of splitting: we are all good, they are all bad; they should be killed, exterminated, or tortured. It is as if ethnic commonality is identity on a social scale, the social equivalent of psychic selfhood, with the same deep roots and same centrality to a sense of being recognized and being whole. Such dynamics characterize the language and behavior of much extremist Islamic anti-Western hatred and Islamic fundamentalism in several nations, the horrific ethnic cleansing and mass rape in the former Yugoslavia, the continuing violent Indo-Pakistani conflict in Kashmir, and the endlessly escalating back-and-forth Israeli and Palestinian not backing down, needing to retaliate, meeting attack with attack. (1)

It was frightening to many Americans when, after having suffered the shock, and often the personal losses, that resulted from September 11, and having begun to learn about Islamic fundamentalism, we were reminded by our own government leaders of an American tradition of similar rhetoric. “America” (not the United States) was involved in a crusade against Evil, with God on the side of Good, who is we. We thus reciprocated ideologically with the same psychological splitting and denomination of the other that had justified the original attacks — a splitting and demonization that continued to characterize the Bush administration rhetoric, both domestically and internationally. (1)

American rhetoric explaining our post-9/11 actions in Afghanistan often implied that it was humiliation and national pride, rather than safety or national security, that required these acts. (1)

Two forms of reaction to challenges to the collective self. First, on a more organized and articulated level of unconscious fantasy, one that finds expression and reflection in conscious collective fantasies and ideologies, humiliation and shame are called upon to justify extreme violence. Defeat and the inability to achieve goals take different forms, depending on how these feelings of shame and humiliation are put into collective fantasy. A sense of humiliation or impotence linked to defeat leads to more narcissistic retaliatory rage, “defeat with honor,” to less. Second, on a less ideologically articulated level, social disintegration seems to generate fantasies that are similar to those we find in psychic disintegration. Primary fragmentation and disintegration, as in the case of suicide bombers who seem to somehow link their self-hatred with the fragmentation of self and others. A failure to hold psychosocial group identity together when subjects and communities do not see themselves as part of the whole. (1)

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This psychoanalytic theory also relates to anorexia and bulimia and other disorders related to hysteria, a term that is broad and has far-reaching consequences for both men and women alike. The theory I like to side with because it has the most meaning I can base in my own experiences is the theory the girl introjects and identifies with her “humiliator mother” and, in unconscious attacks, tries to self-annihilate because “like subjects” are our “love objects.” A bow to Jessica Benjamin and her work entitled “Like Subjects; Love Objects: Essays in recognition and sexual difference.” Except in this theory, we analyze a form of perversion, although not directly sexual, in which hate and cruelty is displaced onto the self through acts of withholding food to the point of starvation death (sadomasochistic-narcissist), the purging of “toxic mother’s milk” from pre-Oedipal (orality) known as bulimia, and other forms of behavior that can be understood as bizarre, cruel, or strange like the female suicide bomber. Therefore, there is a connection to the female internal triad where the psychoanalysis lies in the acceptance of self-harming behavior; the suicide bomber. That identification with the “bad breast” and the introjected understanding that, “I myself must too be bad.” It’s a war waged on an internal scale of the self that mimics real war played between two warring factions on larger social scales. This psychoanalytic theory is supported by the fact that females in these terrorist regions of the world are, for the most part, marginalized, oppressed, and made invisible. What better way to make yourself known than committing a grand act of destructive violence on the world stage.

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In addition to paranoid-schizoid splitting, a second dynamic arena that helps us to understand recent hate-filled violence is the complex of shame, humiliation, and narcissism. This complex is addressed by many psychoanalysts but in relation to terrorism perhaps most aptly by Rothstein (1984), who writes of “identification with the humiliator” (this is part of the theory behind psychoanalytic theories on anorexia and bulimia, when the young girl, for whatever reasons, is cast in the role of the “humiliator mother.” This has also been called “sado-narcissism.” (p. 98). Just as we find clinically that individuals who feel humiliated and shamed are likely to react with rage and grandiosity, the language justifying collective violence and terrorism often explains expansionism, ethnocide, and terrorism in terms of past humiliations and defeats. (1)

Subnote: A link that discusses not extreme acts of violence and terrorism in theaters of the mind but discusses forms of deviant sexual desires, fetishes which draw out attention as an onlooker to the psychoanalytic stage of perversion as hate and humiliation are masked by props and make-up. Theaters of the Mind: The Psychic Theater and the Psychoanalytic Stage (Part II) link follows: https://proclivitiesprinciplewisdom.wordpress.com/2019/09/26/theaters-of-the-mind-the-psychic-theater-and-the-psychoanalytic-stage-2/

Source References:

(1) Nancy J. Chodorow. (2012) Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice. New York. Routledge. p. 121–129, Chapter 9 “Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity.”

(2) Theodore B. Feldmann and Phillip W. Johnson. (1992) “The Selfobject Function of Weapons: A Self Psychology Examination.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 20(4), p. 561–576. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1291544

(3) Shapiro, E. (1999). “Trauma, Shame, and Group Psychotherapy: A Self Psychology Perspective.” Group, 23(2), p. 51–65. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41718906

(4) Lucy Holmes. (2008). The Internal Triangle: Theories in Female Development. New York. Jason Aronson. p. 29–38, Chapter 2 “The Object Within: Childbirth as a Developmental Milestone.

(5) Lucy Holmes. (2013). Wrestling with Destiny: The promise of psychoanalysis. New York. Routledge. p. 152, “Weapons as Self-Objects.”

(6) Evan Stark. (2007) Coercive Control: The entrapment of women in personal life. New York. Oxford University Press. p. 251, Chapter 8 “The Technology of Coercive Control.”

(7) Sigmund Freud. (1905) “Three Essays on the Theory of sexuality.” Retrieved online December 28, 2019. https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/Sexuality.pdf

(8) Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. (1984) Creativity and Perversion. London. Free Association Books. p. 35–43, Chapter 4 “A Re-reading of ‘Little Hans”.

(9) Michelle Boullous Walker. (1998) Philosophy of the Maternal Body: Reading Silence. New York. Routledge. p. 51–58, Chapter 3 “Reading Psychoanalysis: Psychotic texts/maternal pre-texts,” subheading “Psychosis: foreclosing the mother.”

(10) J. Reid Meloy, Angela Book, Ashley Hosker-Field, Tabitha Methot-Jones, and Jennifer Roters. “Social, Sexual, and Violent Predation: Is there evolutionary adaptation to support psychopathy?” Gender and Violence, Vol. 5, №3, Published online September 12, 2018. Retrieved online April 16, 2019.