Religious Fundamentalism and its Impact on the Female Gender

Religious Fundamentalism and its Impact on the Female Gender: Whether the mother is depressed and withdrawn or dominating and angry, the extremely vulnerable baby and young child fears being killed or abandoned by her, and this fear of imminent death is embedded in the brain in a dissociated alter in its right hemisphere, where it is unavailable for correction as the child grows up.1
Psychoanalysts have begun to address the fact that many of their patients continue to fear and defend against early death dealing Killer Mother alters that remain in a cut-off dissociated state in their psyches. Joseph Rheingold, a psychiatrist writing in the 1960's emphasized the child's terror of being violently killed by his or her mother who wished him or her dead and shows that the child, therefore, concludes that it must be because he or she is bad and that "by dying the child appeases the mother and hopes to gain her affection."2
Rheingold sees this not only a source of suicide and other destructive behavior but as the ultimate source of religion in rebirth fantasies such as the Christian and Islamic wish to die and be merged with God/Allah, shouting "Allahu Akbar," God is Great, "the Killer Mother is great", where, "mother's love is the prize of death." 3