Page - 173 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits 173 “the humble one”, but now characterizing Islamic pride. Through the internet, the character of the jihad has been transformed, becoming a global movement, a leaderless, decentralized network that opens the gates to individual terrorism. They are searching for identity, a place in society and also a relationship, which includes the sexual sphere. Their voluntary taking up arms points to various motives: • Protest against their position at the outskirts of society • Latent violence directed against other or self (suicidal thoughts) • The longing for a new identity and belonging to a group • Lack of one or more loving relationships to adults (parents) • Aggression, subsumed in heroism and victim status The political scientist and socio -cultural anthropologist Schmidinger helped found the NGO Netzwerke Sozialer Zusammenhalt (NSZ; Networks of Social Solidar- ity), which offers counseling to young people (and their families or friends) who are at risk of joining an extremist political movement. In its first year (2014), the NSZ counseled 70 adolescents who either wished to journey to Syria, already were there or stood at the outset of radicalization. Concerned family members of these adolescents could turn to the NSZ, which offered preventive workshops for parents, teachers, police officers and municipal staff. The book Jihadismus (Schmidinger 2015) summarizes Austrian experiences and field research concern- ing volunteer fighters from Europe in Syria and Iraq. The radicalization process, with its attendant fantasizing, can occur at various speeds; there is no one simple explanation for it, and a whole range of motivations as well as biographical roots can be discerned in case studies. With male adolescents, the strongest factor is the boy’s preoccupation with his own masculinity – something already operative for any male adolescent. “With many boys, it is noticeable that they often come from families where there was either no father or a dysfunctional father figure,” writes Schmidinger (2015, 80) – i.e., one of the causes of radicalization. Typically, the boy’s father has abandoned the family, and he cannot develop a loving relationship to his mother’s new part- ner or husband, instead viewing him with jealousy or dismissal. Unconsciously, they are searching for a masculine role model, which is then fulfilled in jihad preachers or older “brothers”. With both sexes, sexuality plays a major role – something handled quite restrictively in Islam, where arranged marriages and strict celibacy prevail. Groups such as the Islamic State (IS) promise an alternative to this not only in heaven, but already here on earth. Islamic marriages can already be arranged at the age of nine. Repressed sexuality, along with the experience of being “aban- doned” by the mother for another, new man, has one consequence in Internet forums – misogynistic, hateful blogs. After large formerly Christian Yazidi terri- tories were conquered in Iraq, social media openly discussed whether it would be halal (religiously permitted) to “enjoy” the “war booty” (see Schmidinger 2015,