I have said that there is no such thing as adult analysis, a statement often met with great surprise. Yet all an analyst can do is look at and undo the impact of early trauma dealt to the infant when his mind was shattered. And all of our minds are shattered—before birth or shortly after—by the projection of the unwanted and unconscious content of the mother’s mind.

It is this missile that enters the fragile mind of the infant and tears it apart. The infant is caught off guard, and does not even have recourse to language to express the effect of this violent attack. In time the infant understands that it must gather all this trauma--as well as the knowledge that it is the mother herself responsible for it, the one on whom he depends for his life--and put it aside. It is the only way for the infant to survive.

So when analysts talk or write about certain character structures or anyone’s character in the course of the work of analysis, it is to this state that the reference is made. In the course of any analysis the work is arduous to get to this point. It will take years, and every inch of ground is fought over. Think of any war—think Vietnam, think Afghanistan—in which the contest is grim and determined, and the stakes are life itself.

No matter how educated you are as an analyst, how learned or intelligent or dignified, the patient will fight with unrelentingfury to defeat you and he always has the means with which to do it, even if he agrees with you and sees the rationale of your plan.

He can leave the work, and thus he can win. But in terms of there being a transformation of his essential self, he will have lost. Frankly, he will have to lose in order for there to be a transformation.

Analysis is fundamentally about change: not change in intellectual content, but change in the emotional body. And such change cannot come about without getting access to and then facing this early catastrophe—taking it piece by piece and knitting it into a healthy entity called the useful mind.

What does this trauma look like? What does this early infantile trauma look like? It looks like shock, fear, and terror; it looks like bafflement, horror, like insecurity, disbelief, paranoia, paralysis, numbness, and rage; it is impotence and anguish and the deepest sorrow, and it feels like wishing to die.

We are all now living and experiencing what we as infants experienced in some measure and developed antidotes to in some measure, and we have lived with these defensive maneuvers undetected, especially when they fall within the range of what is considered normal.

So when bin Laden says he’ll make us feel what the Arab world (and he can say the Asian world and the African world) has been feeling all this time, what he’s saying is true.

Shall we consider him a terrorist or a “wild psychoanalyst” who made a remarkable interpretation before the western world, now the patient, was ready for it?

For underneath it all—black skin, yellow skin, brown skin, or white—we are all the wounded infants of time.