Defining Casus Belli and How It Relates to Wireless Electronic Assault Torture
“The same tools that are used for healing can be used for torture … We know that now other totalitarian ideologies over the globe continue to use psychiatry and even psychoanalysis to confine and brainwash political opponents (pg. 204).”
Casus Belli is the psychoanalytic term used to describe the space in the therapeutic relationship between analyst and patient where trauma, linked to the patient’s past, erupts and awakens from repression where both enter “the field of the catastrophe.” It occurs when dissociated material comes to life and it can seem more like a “combat zone” of war than a scientific laboratory to the analyst. They call this necessary pass in cure a “casus belli” in analysis because this is the Latin expression meaning “occasion of war” in an act or event that either provokes or is used to justify war. This is the purpose of wireless electronic assault torture also known as Electronic Harassment. It is the capitulation of ruthless vengeance by someone who has been “denied,” and is the on-going repetition behavior of the narcissist who, in a psychotic state, is far from repair.
Long ago, Greek tragedies used cathartic techniques to interrupt fate’s repetition across generations. They used drama to enact the fight, called agon, so that citizens of Athens could express and expel the unsayable and unimaginable issues of trauma. Nowadays such cathartic practices are still in use, for instance, among aboriginal people, who speak of exploring “the world of the dreaming.” But strangely enough, developed countries seem quite underdeveloped in this respect. The skills we have gained in technology, consumption, and positivistic science have been lost regarding the science of healing trauma. Convulsive shock therapy and new miracle drugs now replace the cathartic techniques of the ancient past and are no better than the prehistorical good old “bump on the head (pg. 203).” The extent to which wireless electronic assault torture, also known as Electronic Harassment, seems to represent this fact as well and seems to be a way doctors and those with authority gain control over the Object-other. But it is the patients who lose a genuine chance to repair themselves through creative expression. Such is the space of the “Ritual of the Snake” which will be discussed later.
For the psychoanalyst, the casus belli can be a very dangerous place for the clinician. This unavoidable crisis issues forth the ghosts from the past. The analyst may suddenly embody a strange kind of ruthless otherness. At that moment, the Erinyes, the Greek goddesses of vengeance, known to the Romans as the Furies, with their hairdo full of snakes, enjoy a manhunt across the generations, under the cover of a scientific warrant, or a classical psychoanalytic approach (pg. 202). Through psychoanalytic training, the analyst learns to carefully place one foot inside this realm, while adhering another foot firmly outside for the purpose of gathering as much information as possible and then to “get the hell out of there.” For the psychoanalyst must be willing to enter the Hell experienced by the patient while, at the same time, trying to act as a soft cushion from which the reverberations from their Hell might be changed to a softer acoustic through better understanding of the material.
But this term is not what fascinated me the most about Francoise Davion’s chapter. It was the case analysis of Aby Warburg’s madness of 1914–1923 because it provided me the insight to our historical past and pairing of crisis and genocide that so often erupts after economic crisis, political upheaval, famine, and periods of ethnic supremacy.
Aby Warburg’s was a famous art historian of the Renaissance period. His career was considered eccentric in a family of Hamburg bankers and started with a noteworthy event. In 1879, when he was 13, he relinquished his birthright, which was to assume control and leadership of the family’s banking business, to his little brother. On one condition, they give him as many books as he wished for the rest of his life. The Warburg brothers kept their word to Aby and his famous library contained 85,000 books at the time of his death in 1929. The books were later smuggled to London Library during the Nazi occupation of 1933. The collection has been established as a working library — the Warburg Institute, in London (pg. 210).
Arby Warburg’s Madness Explained
What was Aby Warburg’s madness and what was its root cause? During the Great War, his library was a battlefield, with Warburg as the general-in-chief, receiving thousands of reports selected from newspapers, which he ordered his wife and children to bring him urgently. He came to believe in the delusion that World War I had been lost because of him. Some of his crazy rantings would prove prophetic. In the early 1920s, he went around shouting that Jews soon would be deported, tortured, and exterminated under the orders of Brinswanger the butcher. Ludwig Brinswanger was his former psychiatrist to which his family paid a lot of money to help cure Warburg of his delusions, but to no avail. He also claimed the “nice” Bellevue, his former hospital where he was an in-patient resident, was hell where the inmates were given human flesh to eat. He saw himself as “a ghost coming back from the dead.” While at the same time, Hitler was busy writing Mein Kampf from prison (pg. 210).
“Let us not be surprised to come upon madness so often in the fictions of novel and the theater. Let us not be surprised to find it actually prowling through the streets. For madness is within each one of us. All it requires is a little provocation and precipitation of peripety. Madness no longer lies in wait for mankind at the four corners of the earth; it insinuates itself with man, or rather it is a subtle rapport that man maintains with himself.” ~Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason.
Let us, for a moment, consider the truth in Aby Warburg’s madness. “How did Warburg foresee the objectifying process that would lead inexorably to the “scientific” reification and actual eradication of the mad among millions of people, and presage the genocide of the Jews? (pg. 211)
The interpretation and analysis of Aby Warburg’s delusion. Warburg’s delusion may be considered a revival of the trauma he experienced in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, during which he and his mother almost died of typhus. Moreover, he was 13 years old — the age of the pledge sealed with his brothers — when he witnessed, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, a new kind of mass anti-Semitism, especially when Hamburg anarchist Wilhem Marr launched the first Anti-Semitic League of 1879.
Wilhem Marr was a German agitator who campaigned in central Europe which culminated into Nazi anti-Semitism that put in place a surge of political perversion during times of financial crisis. It is my opinion that this is the character of wireless electronic assault torture and the phenomenon known as Electronic Harassment. That is to say, a crisis rooted in the perpetrator’s object relational world. Coincidentally, the onset of increased wireless electronic torture exponentially increased in 2009 following the fall of Fannie and Freddie Mac. Let’s compare, through a historical lens, the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the need for new research and developmental market economies in the unstable market of a free capitalistic economy.
At the end of that war, France had to pay compensation for its defeat and did so in a surprisingly short time, in 5 years with gold money. German banks were destabilized, the Warburg bank nearly bankrupt, and Jewish bankers held responsible for the financial crisis. At the same time, as Hannah Arendt (1948/1978) described, new rights for Jews fostered, paradoxically, a new kind of massive anti-Semitic hatred still unimaginable. With a delay of 25 years, Warburg’s delusion showed the way to explore the trend leading to mass murder (pg. 212).
Trauma has a way of reappearing years after it has taken place. At the eve of World War I, Warburg launched his research, deemed psychotic by others but actually bearing on areas of death, taped during his youth on the delicate apparatus he called “the seismography of my soul.” As is always the case, his delusion was not only a sophisticated tool of investigation, but also a theory for healing (pg. 212).
During the first World War, he was indeed showing, pointing out what could not be said, nor heard. This specific knowledge — denied by the classical language game of signifiers, allowing repression — was conveyed through sensorial images, which he called “surviving images (pg. 212).”
Could there be a parallel between the September 2008 housing crisis in America, which seems to parallel the agitation following the crisis of the Franco-Prussian War and World War I? Genocides and torture follow in the aftermath of crisis whether it be economic, political, famine, or otherwise. Wireless electronic assault torture and Electronic Harassment is a form of torture. Let there be no doubt!
In addition, Ronald Reagan ushered in the repudiation of Keynesian economic principles, which believed, in order to maintain a stable market economy, government intervention was necessary. The Reagan years established free market trade for the purpose of promoting research and development in the new emerging tech industries at the price of an unstable market economy (ie: computer technologies, cell phone, GPS).
Genocide and Tortures are carried out for a number of reasons: resource extraction (compare Elon Musk’s monkey brain chips and unethical medical experiments of the German concentration camps), territorial expansion (see Russian expansion in Ukraine and Israeli occupation of Palestine), the ethnic cleansing of “defective character traits” (see the German Holocaust as well as the philosophy of the eugenics movement). In addition, domestic violence occurs during times of stress. Similarly, some people, when placed under stress, will resort to the use of mind-altering substances in an attempt to reduce anxiety. Wireless electronic assault torture poses an increased risk for the use of substances abuse by compromising an individual’s copying skills which degrades the individual on a personal level.
The crime of genocide has been defined as, “any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group; deliberately inflicting on the group’s condition of life, calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. This has been defined by Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948.
One psychoanalyst had said to her colleagues of a patient, “I had somehow to “humanize” the monster that was inside this patient.” To which one of her colleagues replied, “I don’t agree. The point is not to have the “snake” become “human,” but for us “humans,” to become the snake.” Employing another colleague’s input, an Athapascan Indian, Art Blue, spoke of the “Hopi snake dance.” The ritual consists of having an individual dance with a live snake between their teeth and hands, at which point, you either get bit and die, or you become one with the snake.
How does Aby Warburg’s story end? Ludwig Binswanger, Warburg’s psychiatrist, agreed to finally discharge him on one condition: Warburg must prove his sanity by giving a lecture on his research to the staff and the patients. What does Aby Warburg give a one-hour lecture on? On April 13, 1923 Warburg gives a one hour lecture on “The Ritual of The Snake.” At the heart of Warburg’s lecture was the confrontation with terror, a casus belli. Remarkably, Warburg tied the ritual of the snake found in several native American tribes to the terror of wiping out the Jews during the German Holocaust. For a half an hour, Hopi dancers hold rattlesnakes in their mouths and hands, representing a terror otherwise unspeakable. Afterward, they throw the snake back into the wild space of the desert, where they are said to take on the shape of lightening and become messengers for rain and conduits for power coming from the ancestors, who creep between our world and the world underneath, the world of the dead. This ritual enacts the shift between the threat of an imminent death — the venomous strike of the snake, as fast as lightening — and the renaissance of language from an unspeakable anguish (pg. 213).
“Adrienne Harris (2007) called such a passage “the bridge world,” which connects a new social link, “a particular province of unlinked speech” and the creation of otherness (pg. 214).”
When time stops in catastrophic areas, the normal dimension of causality is defeated. On the border of the “nameless dread,” and Lacan the Real, lies the space in which the wirelessly electronic tortured victim finds themselves. In a perpetrator’s re-enactment of a ritual of violence that links a “special causality” in the spatial dimension of the “invisible spaces” (space time) with the repetitive ritual of a re-enactment of torture.
“One could almost say that man is a ceremonial animal.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
SOURCE:
First Do No Harm: The paradoxical encounters of psychoanalysis, warmaking, and resistance (2010). Adrienne Harris and Steven Botticelli (editors). New York Routledge. Chapter 10, Casus Belli by Francoise Davione (pg. 201–221). NOTE: I want to give credit to the author for his insightful discussion on the nature of, and cause for Casus Belli in the therapeutic space of psychoanalysis.
