Body Parts, Primitive Mental States, and October 7th

A recent conversation with a colleague about the barbarism of October 7th prompted me to return to something I published nearly two decades ago — a forensic analysis connecting the imagery of jihadi attack sites to what psychoanalysts call “part object representation.” That 2007 paper, published in Anil Aggrawal’s Internet Journal of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, analyzed the Djerba Synagogue bombing in Tunisia in 2002. Its core argument has only become more urgent since October 7th.

The barbarism didn’t surprise me. That is not indifference — it is the result of twenty years of research into what the visual evidence of jihadi attacks tells us about the minds that produced them.

The Image Before the Word

Ninety percent of what we communicate about our emotions is communicated nonverbally — through imagery, through the body, through the senses. We live in a culture that privileges words, argument, and ideology. But the jihadi attack site speaks a different language — one that precedes words entirely.

This is the core insight: the visual holds the key to the primitive mental states driving jihadi violence. The ideology is packaging. The imagery — the attack site as crime scene — is the message.

Every attack site communicates an unconscious message. Law enforcement is trained to read a crime scene. Psychoanalysts are trained to read imagery and behavior. What I have been arguing for over twenty years is that these two disciplines must converge if we are to understand what we are looking at when we look at a jihadi attack.

Part Objects and the Early Mother

When a baby is first born, it does not perceive the mother as a whole, separate person. Instead, the baby experiences the mother in parts — the breast, the face, the voice, the smell. These are what psychoanalysts, following Melanie Klein, call “part objects.” In healthy development, the child gradually integrates these part-object experiences into a coherent, whole-object perception of the mother as a separate human being with her own inner life. This is the foundation of empathy — the capacity to see the other as a full person.

But when development is arrested — when the environment is abusive, chaotic, and violating — this integration fails. The person remains stuck in part-object relating —splitting the world into absolute good and absolute evil, unable to perceive the full humanity of the other, unable to tolerate ambiguity. The mother remains a collection of terrifying and idealized fragments, never integrated into a whole.

This is what serial killers share with jihadi operatives. In studying serial killers, psychoanalyst B.M. Biven identified that the body parts left........

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