How the Incorporation Myth in Greek Mythology Helps to Explain Gang Stalking, Electronic Targeted Assaults, and Psychotronic Torture

Karen Barna
12 min readAug 24, 2021
Athena springing forth from the head of Zeus

Definition

Incorporation — 1) To unite (one thing) with something else already in existence: incorporated the letter into her diary. 2) To admit as a member to a corporation or similar organization. 3) To cause to merge or combine together into a united whole. 4) To cause to form into a legal corporation: incorporate a business. 4) To give substance or material form to; embody. V.intr.: 1) To become united or combined into an organized body. 2) To become or form a legal corporation: San Antonio was incorporated as a city in 1837. 3) Linguistics. To move from the head of one phrase to the head of another, forming a new word by affixing onto that head, as in certain languages when a noun object of a verb is affixed to the verb. Adj. (-pər-ĭt) 1) Combined into one united body; merged. 2) Formed into a legal corporation. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/incorporation

The present-day atmosphere of the American culture demonstrates the ill-effect of American democracy’s roots in systematic institutionalized slavery. Not only was institutionalized slavery supported by our founding forefathers, but this same type of business politics was employed by the Germans following the defeat of Germany in World War I, which thereby gave rise to the Nazi German Holocaust. Genocides are no stranger to the archive of human history.

Other acts of foreclosure observed in the psychic incorporation function of marginalized groups was the historic oppression of women by male patriarchy. It was also witnessed in the killing of “witches” during the late 1600s. We witness the psychic defense function of incorporation when we hear of attempts of behavioral modification in the “teaching” or “training” practices of lesbians and gays through techniques of “brainwashing.” Attempts to ward off the image, lifestyle, behavioral tendency of those groups who have been foreclosed upon in individuals suffering problems with whole object relations. Problems with object relations can be explained by the warding off of whole attributes of an object in someone with object relations in external reality. To illustrate, in a process of psychic splitting against a female prostitute, she is not seen as a female with hopes and dreams, with a mother and father, brothers and sisters, hopes and joys, with friends and loved ones by a perpetrator. Instead, she becomes one attribute of her identity; a whore. To illustrate further, in the psychic incorporation function of marginalized groups, these “whores” will be “consumed whole” by their perpetrators and a new reality put in place. Sometimes this reality that is birthed out of the perpetrator's anal-sadistic fantasies does not allow the right of the prostitute to live a life. The prostitute will be raped and murdered, her body discarded in a watery grave or buried, hidden beneath the earth. The incorporation has taken place, the new reality is a reality free of the “social blemish.”

Today, similar to the behavioral modification of homosexuals we sometimes observe in some religious phanatic groups utilizing brainwashing, is a type of ill-produced behavioral modification techniques in people suffering the phenomenon known as the Targeted Individual (TIs). It is the desire of those in possession of a biopower to “swallow whole” the identities of the targeted population and “give birth to a new reality,” one that may be rooted in the creative perversions of the perpetrator’s anal-sadistic universe. This new reality springs forth a new reality from the intellect of the dominant power. Thereby creating an alternate new reality that is a perverse solution (a perversion) rooted in the perpetrator's anal-sadistic universe.

How do we explain this historical abuse?

This phenomenon eerily points to the indexical sign of incorporation as the means by which what is desired, envied, or feared is appropriated and taken to be one’s own. The psychopathological defense function of incorporation has a myth that is used to better understand its reason, causes, and purpose, like Freud’s Oedipus, in Greek mythology. The myth is known as the incorporation of Metis by Zeus. This myth, similar to Freud’s Oedipus, helps us to understand psychopathology. And it goes like this, Zeus swallows whole the pregnant body of his wife Metis. Then, Zeus and Metis’ fully formed fetus springs forth from the head of Zeus. To understand this myth, we analyze the narrative content of what is happening. I have stated one of the things that are happening is Incorporation. Incorporation of the mother and her subsequent disappearance/destruction form the process by which Zeus establishes his power. With the incorporation/swallowing/consuming of the pregnant mother. Zeus not only achieves the appropriation of the female reproductive capacity together with the “wisdom” of Metis, his wife but also effectively swallows and obliterates the mother-daughter relationship. Here, if we delve further, we uncover that Zeus himself possesses anxieties regarding his own mother. But how can that be? Zeus is the ultimate creator. He doesn’t have a mother and thereby debunks the entire system of an omnipotent fatherly diety and religion itself (Jacobs, 2007).

To further analyze, since the mother-daughter relationship has been destroyed with the disappearance/destruction of Metis, the fact that she has been swallowed whole into the belly of Zeus expresses Zeus now has infantilized Metis. Metis has now taken on the position of the fetus inside the male womb/brain. The appropriation gestation achieves the fusion of the mother into the daughter with the final product being Athena. Through his incorporation of Metis, Athena is born the motherless daughter, who will never become a mother herself but will remain a virgin daughter forever: an asexual, aggressive virgin, veiled, armed, synthetic, all artifice, seduction, and defense, a femininity created from the mind of Father Zeus (Jacobs, 2007). We can certainly come to understand how this explains some creative perversion of lesbian/transgender sexual/gender roles. But lesbians, nor do transgender people, do not normally pose a threat to the larger social order we live in. However, in the minds of some, unconscious fears surround gay and lesbian sexual orientations and these individuals are cast as phantoms, spirits, ghosts that frighten and threaten to annihilate us.

The myth of Zeus’ parturition functions to foreclose the question of the scar of the navel (belly button), the one indelible mark of the connection to and disconnection from the original maternal body. Athena becomes the precious proof that the father is the prime author of identity. She will represent this grandiose logic/phantasy and devote her work to endorsing and institutionalizing it as law in her court of justice, as dramatized in the Oresteia. Unaware of the story of her own mother, Athena will condemn Clytemnestra and declare that the mother will not be mourned. The murdered mother will signify no loss, and Athena’s culture will collectively deny that there has been any loss at all. It will become a buried loss that cannot be mourned, experienced, or represented. The name of Metis is shrouded in silence along with the eradication of the navel as a symbolic mark of the generative link between offspring and mother. Eradication of Metis via the incorporation defensive function sustains the parthenogenetic phantasy on which Zeus’ order is based. Athena, as Zeus’ perfect abstraction, represents the radical divorce of the patriarchal social symbolic order from its roots to the flesh of the maternal body and the violence committed against the mother. Metis the Titaness is ransacked, raped, pillaged, and eaten. She will then be eradicated from representation in the moment that Zeus’ order of democratic justice is established through his perfect creation: Athena and her court of law (Jacobs, 2007).

To demonstrate the significance of Zeus’ incorporation for the sake of argument, let’s reiterate Levi-Strauss’ point that in order to understand one myth one needs to explore its relationship to other myths. The Metis myth is matricidal. It inextricably relates to the Oresteia yet is only visible in the latter through the figure of Zeus’ perfect abstract creation, The Court of Law of Athena. Athena’s motherless status functions to secure her royalty to Orestes. In this way, the Oresteian myth conceals within it the story of the incorporation of Metis. If we reread the Oresteia in relation to the myth of Metis, we are able to discover what I consider to be the defensive function of the Oresteian myth. That is to say, the Oresteian myth distorts and reworks the myth of Zeus’ rape and incorporation of Metis in such a complex way that it functions to keep it concealed beneath its manifest content. The Oresteian myth conceals this matricidal myth of Metis as part of the desire of the masculine cultural imaginary that seeks to eradicate the process and the memory of the mother’s exclusion (parturition). (Jacobs, 2007)

Therefore, in this way, the Orestreian myth effects censorship of the Metis myth for the purpose of consolidating and further sustaining the paternal law of the father. This paternal law depends on the foreclosure of a generative matricide. Yet the myth, like the dream (phantasy), reveals the traces of its censoring process through distortions, blanks, and alterations, which if analyzed properly can lead to the reconstruction of the original censored elements. Rereading the Oresteia in relation to the myth of Metis serves to restore a vital link between these two matricidal myths, whose severance hitherto has resulted in an incomplete analysis of the Oresteian myth and, further, has led to the situation in which matricide becomes a non-concept that cannot deliver its underlying structural law (Jacobs, 2007).

What is striking about the myth of Zeus and Metis is its representation of the violent primitive process of oral incorporation as the means by which what is desired and envied is appropriated and taken to be one’s own. To demonstrate the significance of this incorporation we must refer to Abraham and Torok’s distinction between incorporation and introjection. In their essay “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection Verus Incorporation,” Torok and Abraham identify incorporation as a phantasy and introjection as a process; both are psychic mechanisms that attempt to negotiate the loss of a loved object. In the case of Metis, a loved maternal object.

To describe and understand this psychopathology of the psychotic foreclosure defensive function which acts like Metis’ parturition and incorporation function by Zeus to foreclose the scar of the navel (belly-button), the indelible mark of connection to and disconnection from the original maternal, the “original maternal body” can also be represented as the intimate space once enjoyed with someone once romantically loved or the intimate space of brotherhood once enjoyed between business associates, family members, or gang members.

The psychic mechanisms of introjection and incorporation both pertain to taking something inside, but incorporation is not a process. For Abraham and Torok, it is a phantasy that blocks the possibility of transforming the loss into symbolism. That is to say, transforming the loss into personal symbolism. Incorporation defends against the process of introjection in whole object relations. In the process of introjection, the loss of the loved object is acknowledged and mourned, allowing the loss to be converted into words. It is through the process of introjection that the loss becomes generative. Incorporation, however, is a phantasy that functions to deny the fact that there has been any loss at all: Failing to feed itself on words to be exchanged with others, the mouth absorbs in fantasy all or part of the person — the genuine depository of what is now nameless. The crucial move away from the introjection to incorporation is made when words fail to fill the subject’s void and hence the imaginary thing is inserted in the mouth in their place.

Incorporation is a refusal to introject loss. Incorporation results from, those losses that for some reason cannot be acknowledged as such. In this way, the incorporated object is rendered as unspeakable, unknowable, unable to be mourned or replaced with a substitute. Incorporation is the annulment of figurative language and allows for the fantasmic destruction of the action by means of which metaphors become possible. The phantasy of incorporation functions in the active destruction of representations. Thus, the clues are rendered as active destruction of the metaphorical through incorporation (parturition). Secrecy is imperative for survival and since incorporation is an eminently illegal act it must hide its face even from the ego.

If we analyze the TV show Star Trek and The Next Generation, the incorporation process might be recognized as the act of “assimilation” in Borg attacks against innocent and vulnerable populations. We witness similar attacks in acts of genocide and the brainwashing techniques used to transform gays and lesbians into heterosexuals. In psychiatry, the use of electroconvulsive shock (ECT) therapy has been used to transform patients into more “model citizens.” Of course, surrounding the medical therapy known as ECT is the requirement of legal consent. But we can certainly understand how the patient gets “gobbled up” and thereby transformed by the power of the intellectual authority in possession of advanced bio-medical power. What is the connection? Doctors, men in possession of advanced bio-medical power, also get to decide who lives and who dies.

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Karen Barna

I am a Targeted Individual suffering electronic harassment. I write about gender difference and object relations and feminism. I am Gen. X