Malevolence and the Disavowal of Malevolence: Defining Malignant Dissociative Contagion

Updated: March 5, 2024

It is important to note that when I write about “the trauma survivor” in this post, I am referring to the type of trauma endured during pre-oedipal development before the formulation of language. In the pathological regression of such states where there was no experience of “I” who can reflect and remember her own history thus facilitating accountability for her sadistic cruelty onto others.

The reproduction of evil is an attempt to answer the riddle of catastrophic loneliness that results in the wake of massive trauma. In her core, the trauma survivor remains solitary in the moment of her own extinction. No one knew her in the moment she died without dying. I propose this is the effect that wireless electronic assault torture has on the victim that makes the victim feel “alone in her torture” in “her solitude” emersed in the presence of another unknowable object who is not present in her visual field of reference, and who seems to be infused with hate, fear, shame, loss and despair. It seems to be a re-capitulation of the perpetrator’s own deadness. Death has possessed him in his impenetrable solitude. Because that traumatized self is defined by solitude, survivor/perpetrator’s resurrection requires that he be known by another in this solitude, for Benjamin (1995) notes, “The sea of death can be crossed only by reaching the other (pg. 186).” How can the survivor be known by another in a moment defined by its loneliness? Who will be the knower and who (and what) will be the known? This is the ambiguity encapsulated in wireless electronic assault torture. This loneliness is not something wordless that can ultimately be rendered in speech. It is unformidable it cannot be represented mutually in linguistic narrative. Whatever can be known mutually through linguistics about traumatic experience is not death’s solitude but something else, some other pain that exists at the perimeter of death. This is annihilation’s paradox: that the need to be known continually meets the impossibility of being known. And the need to be known meets, as well, an inner refusal to be known.

Why the Phenomenon of the Targeted Individual Continues to Remain Poorly Understood

Wireless electronic assault torture is not a pathway to “treatment” or “cure.” Rather through its continuity, habituation, and repetitive nature it eviscerates the possibility of psychic repair, if psychic repair is required in the individual.

I have previously stated I am punished with wireless electronic assault torture for performing exercise in my living room. I have uncovered a manic psychic defense in schizoid states that helps to explain why this is happening. Since evil seduces with its perverse promise of recognition, and evil always is constituted so that each victim is accompanied by her perpetrator to the obscure solitude of extinction, the victim-perpetrator shares her own catastrophic loneliness in what Bollas (1995) calls the “companionship of the dead.” Evil reaches it terminus in shared loneliness and in the shared disappearance of selves. For, as Bion (1965) and Grotstein (1990) have suggested, destruction is a force of nothingness that subjects human experience to a centripetal pull into the void. Man’s elemental hate, envy, and greed (Freud, 1930; Klein, 1935, 1940, 1955) are embedded in this force of nothingness. But, as Greensberg and Mitchell (1983) note, the nothingness of destruction is not an instinct. It is a perverse hungering for an object, as a reprieve from the objectlessness of annihilation (Fairbairn, 1952a, b; Guntrip, 1971).

Thus, the survivor-cum-perpetrator works out her trauma on the human race by “trying to bring others to an equivalent Fall” (Bollas, 1995, pg. 1184): he lives, masters, transforms, and re-obliterates the forgotten forms of his own traumatic past. And the no-self of survival is sustained by the imminence of contact by extinguishing the other before too much contact is made (see Laing, 1960; Winnicott (1960); and Guntrip, (1969).

This stated excavated psychoanalytic truth is supporting evidence to why wireless electronic assault torture technology would make a perfect medium for controlling victims whose perpetrators are suffering malignant trauma from early childhood because it limits contact with the victim while maintaining “annihilation’s paradox”: the need to be known continually meets the impossibility of being known. And the need to be known meets, as well, an inner refusal to be known. Much as another’s empathetic understanding is critical for the perpetrator’s self-resurrection, so that very understanding threatens to renew the perpetrator’s annihilation. Any presumption of knowledge will eviscerate the truth of her loneliness, collapsing the core of her traumatic identity. Loneliness is the sacred container of the survivor-cum-perpetrator’s residual sanity; it is the survivor’s ultimate testimony. It must not, cannot be foreclosed.

Thus the “shattered self” of trauma is suffused with death anxiety, with the sense that there is no self. Such a personality becomes pre-occupied with the protection and concealment of the no-self and its deadness and vacuity are the defining qualities of the person’s tenuous identity. Other people become figures of hope and dread while they potentially offer much needed confirmatory evidence of the existence of the self, they nonetheless threaten to eclipse the perpetrator’s self with the larger presence of their own identities (Grand, 2000, pg. 4–9).

This desire by survivor-cum-perpetrators of malignant trauma to remain hidden, limiting contact with their victims is what makes wireless electronic assault torture technology so desirable to these types of perpetrators. It appeases the survivor-perpetrator’s need to remain hidden and “not known” at the same time it limits contact with the victim. Here, think of how Rex Heuermann used prostitutes to elude his death anxiety and could exist triumphantly after a brief encounter with these women, in which he ended their lives, and survived death yet again in the re- enactment of his former trauma.

Malevolence and the Disavowal of Malevolence

The primary reason why the phenomenon of the Targeted Individual remains so poorly understood is because “silence is the facilitator of destruction: it is through denial that evil consolidates its power” (Grand, 2000, pg. 10).

“Generation after generation, mankind has turned against itself in cruelty: in the familial violations of rape, child abuse, child neglect, and spouse battering; in the anonymity of violent crime; in the mass depredation of war, genocide, and racism. Generation after generation, evil assumes subtle, pedestrian forms. Sometimes sadistic, but more often banal, these interpersonal acts may be perpetrated with or without the conscious intent to destroy. Evil seems to be everywhere. And even as it is everywhere, it is everywhere denied; perpetrators and bystanders collude in its obfuscation. Evil tends to be brazen in its presence and yet radical in its concealment. Evil degrades all truth to meaningless trivialities; it utilizes “language rules” and “holes of oblivion” to marshall its force in a culture of lies: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength (Orwell, 1949, pg. 7).

The diabolic is an arena of disorientation and confusion in which truth is lost, becoming unrecognizable even when seen (see Grotstein, 1979; Bollas, 1992, 1995). This arena is the perpetrator’s cloak of invisibility, the evacuation of the victim’s mind, the bystander’s refusal to acknowledge sin (Coser, 1969; Peck, 1983). Throughout human history, the truth of evil is occluded; the tyrant finds his permit in mankind’s credulity: “I shall present propagandistic grounds for starting the war (with Poland); whether they are believable is irrelevant. The victor will not be asked later whether or not he told the truth” (Hitler, 1939, as quoted by Gebhardt, 1970).

In this obfuscation of the truth, evil eludes accountability and justice. Secrecy, concealment, denial, ambiguity, confusion: these are Satan’s fellow travelers, requiring elaborate interpersonal and intrapsychic collusion between perpetrators and bystanders. The operations of silence potentiate evil and remove all impediments from its path (Grand, 2000, pg. 9–11). And this is why certain individuals with accredited and advanced degrees in criminal justice and psychoanalysis continue to report the phenomenon is too “poorly” understood and requires further investigation. These individuals may have a vested interest in obfuscating the truth and refuse to provide accurate knowledge regarding its presence in our current time period.

“Not knowing” tends to be regarded as a separate simpler variable intersecting with man’s dark internal forces. To provide you some historical examples look to the Serbian eradication of the mass graves of genocide. This was perceived and regarded as a “strategic evasion of accountability.” Another historical example can be found in the “apparent ignorance” of “good Germans” during Nazi occupation which was attributed to a “desire for security” during prewar and war years (Grand, 2000, pg. 11–12)

The disavowal of evil and the perpetration of evil are singular manifestations of traumatic memory. Together they are the deep structure of evil. There is deep significance to Herman’s (1992) perception that “the study of psychological trauma has a curious history — one of episodic amnesia — though the field has in fact abundant and rich tradition, it has periodically forgotten the truth of its past and must be periodically reclaimed.

Conclusion

Our human history, with its proclivity for collusion and concealment of evil, acts that manifests “the appearance” and “disappearance” of evil, is an ongoing process that rediscovers and disavowals its very presence. Systematically, the facts of evil seem to press toward communal knowledge just as some counterforce undermines the emergence of such knowledge (Grand, 2000). This is also true for the evil being perpetrated on victims of wireless electronic assault torture by victim-perpetrators of malignant trauma (ie: Targeted Individuals suffering Electronic Harassment). It would seem the phenomenon of cultural malevolent disavowal for the memory of evil, is a systematic process in which awakening alternates with obfuscation. Psychoanalytically speaking, the scary truth regarding this phenomenon is that this systematic enactment is a precise reflection of the survivor-perpetrator’s internal struggle between the desire to be known, the fear of being known, and the impossibility of being known. And it is a precise mirroring of developmental regression with its attendant loss of history and agency.

“When the family or culture reflects these dynamisms when the communal history of evil is one in which truth continually appears and disappears, humanity is testifying to the paradox of the perpetrator’s no-self. If trauma survival is a “mutually obscuring relationship between being alive and being dead (Ogden, 1997, pg. 61) in which the survivor “cannot historicize his experience because he remains anchored in a moment of cruelty and cannot turn perception into memory” (Auerhahn ande Laub, 1987, pg. 327), then cultural context of victimization is a larger refraction of this mutually obscuring relationship. Malevolence is inextricably linked to a relational system in which there is a continuous “retrospective falsification of the past” (Bromberg, 1994, pg. 537) and a continuous erasure of the present” (Grand, 2000, pg. 15).

“For this shared experience to occur, perpetrators must solicit victim, bystander, and culture to collude in the shared disavowal of evil. So ubiquitous is the process that it must be named (Grand, 2000, pg. 16).” Sue Grand refers to this process as “malignant dissociative contagion.” Malignant dissociative contagion is a dialectical system. Its field is characterized by heightened awareness and vigilance, vociferous claims to truth and knowledge, exhortations to communal awakening and action, and by heroic acts in which those who perform them feel acutely awake and alive” (Grand, 2000, pg. 17).

Malignant dissociative contagion is a system of “mutual influence” (Beebe and Lachmann, 1988; Aron, 1996; Bromberg, 1998). In mutual influence systems, people unconsciously act upon one another. Here, there is frequently an asymmetry in power (Aron, 1996); someone in a position of dominance inevitably fails to achieve empathetic recognition for the other’s autonomous human existence or feeling states. As Aron (1996) suggests, perpetual systems of mutual influence are systems of inherent danger: “If two people do not acknowledge each other as separate autonomous subjects, then in one way or another they are dominating or submitting to each other. Or as Bach (1994) puts it, “the unilaterally imposed fantasy is the hallmark of an act of violence” (Grand, 2000, pg. 17).

Primary Source:

Sue Grand. (2000). The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ. The Analytic Press. Note: I want to credit to Sue Grand for providing the psychoanalytic insights that helped me to understand and explain Wireless Electronic Assault Torture in the phenomenon of the Targeted Individual suffering Electronic Harassment.

Other References:

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