On Falsehood, The Impostor, and The Object Within: Psychoanalyzing gang stalking, electronic physical assaults, and psychotronic torture
Post originally published over proclivitiesprinciplewisdom.wordpress.com on December 22, 2020. It has since been updated.
“Common to all these cases is a profound disturbance of the sublimation process which follow altogether from the failure in the synthesis of the different infantile identifications into a unique and integrated personality and from the faulty, lopsided, purely intellectual sublimation of the instincts. According to H. Deutsch, the aetiology of this state of affairs is, above all, linked to the devaluation of the object used by the child as a model for its personality.” (p. 72)(1)
It seems to me, the study of Falsehood in psychoanalysis becomes a versatile tool in understanding many faulty, lopsided, sublimation of the instincts. For example, a modern study, “The Impostor — A Contribution to Ego Psychology of a Type of Psychopath” (1955) by Helen Deutsch examines the odd nature of the tie to reality in this disturbance of psychopathy. The concatenation of psychic forces involved in both extreme narcissism and its opposite, for example, the need for others, makes for an “orientation toward reality,” but reality is viewed as a stage for the performer, with humanity as the admiring audience. (2) The disturbed personality is not just the personality of the sexual “pervert” or of transgender homosexual difference. The disturbed personality can be triggered by interpersonal events that cause a failure in the synthesis of infantile identifications. According to Freud in his analysis of “The Wolf-Man” (1918):
“…this contingency, he behaved as children in general behave when they are given an unwished for piece of information, whether sexual or of any other kind. He rejected what was new (in our case, from motives connected with his fear of castration) and clung fast to what was old.” (p. 44) (3)
In a category of crime known as Murder-Suicide (M-S), we see the narcissistic loss of the Ego Ideal. This is closely tied to the fragility and fault lines of masculinity which I will speak more of shortly. But sadly, many homosexual and transgender individuals commit suicide for similar reasons such as the narcissistic loss of the Ego Ideal. It is also interesting to note, that we never see women in the role of a mass random shooter in acts of M-S. The reason for this can be simply attributed to the differences in gender identifications unique to males and females. I’d like to provide some psychoanalytic insight. Here I’d like to refer to the work of Jessica Benjamin “The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination” (1988) of which Lucy Holmes spoke of in her book “The Internal Triangle: Theories on Female Development” (2008):
“Childbirth seems to help a woman experience herself as what Benjamin (1988) called “sovereign equal” to a man — and not by a defensive imitation of masculine power, but by an identification with a truly female power.” (p. 35) (4)
Childbirth, on an unconscious level, finally makes women Oedipal winners with the childish fantasy of obtaining a penis/child from their father at last fulfilled. In terms of phallic imagery, endowed by nature, women are given many more phallic body parts than men. Men are given a penis. But during puberty, women are given body parts that develop into; two breasts, two hips, and a rear-end. I cite these body parts because of their proclivity towards largeness due to high concentrations of adipose cells.
Objects can generate fear, envy, hate, and repudiation in the psyche of the person observing them. For women who have been raised by phallic mothers, the repudiation of the pregnant body may engender the apprehension of abuses received at the hands of an abusive mother and the oppression that went along with those abuses. For in pregnancy, a woman will have become their mother, a fact she cannot run and hide from. Her most feared object. It is for this reason we use metaphor to demonstrate because metaphor crosses the bar of repression to facilitate the poetic emergence of meaning.
Yet, in another vein, if the woman becomes the “sovereign equal” to the man’s penis, then how threatening this might be for the disturbed personality who either fears this powerful image because one has not allowed for the validation of his/her pregenital infertile penis to achieve some mode of recognition or power. Generally, healthy recognition or “power” is achieved through one’s choice of occupation and maintained through healthy relationships and support structures. This is yet another clue in the analysis of electronically targeted individuals (TIs). The perpetrator maybe someone who has never achieved a healthy mode of recognition or “power”.
Yet most women fear, hate, and repudiate the largeness associated with pregnancy and the protruding bulging belly. I will venture to say, that most women are feminists in this regard because the female pregnant body as an imago represents abuse and oppression by the female counterparts; patriarchy. Her body then betrays her too by “binding” her with excessive flesh, fatty areas, and bulkiness. Historically, patriarchy has been hell-bent on binding women to a house, a child, and a life that is spent in endless domestic servitude to others; unpaid servitude. For it is women who are expected to sacrifice their independent wishes for the benefit of the whole and not the other way around. Masculinities play a part not just in the Achilles Complex, which I will discuss again, but it also plays a part in the psyche of women. For we are all raised by two Objects; one male and one female and both masquerade as the unconscious Objects from within.
On Psychic Masculinity
The first psychic fault line of masculinity involves gender and selfhood in relation to women and femininity. Men’s (and women’s) relationships to women, forged originally in the relationship to the mother, bring up a range of threats to masculinity and the male’s (and female’s) sense of self — especially fears of dependency, abandonment, and loss of self, as well as intolerance and fear of women’s sexuality. (For women, I have said it is the fear of the female pregnant body in all its largeness, a fear at first thought of as not normally belonging to men. Men’s phallic endowment is admired, even fantasized about by some men.)
We observe a negotiation of maleness in relation to the mother and it is seen as the dominance of masculinity. This masculine development is “not female,” and is “not subordinate” to women, which is one of the components of masculinity. On the flip side of this masculinity theory would be the woman who refuses to be dependent on the male, thereby possessing masculinities herself. Masculinity in women, here, has to do, fundamentally, with “not being a weak or a dependent woman,” but possessing virility (here phallic power is seen in terms of fertility or sexual power) and control. Freud, Horney, Stroller, and many psychoanalytic feminists have shown how the repudiation of women and fears of feminization (becoming the subordinate sex), beginning with the threat of a humiliating inadequacy vis-a-vis the powerful mother, are developmentally fundamental to masculinity and tied to “a male sense of self” and not being the woman. For women with phallic mothers, this fear may manifest as the repudiation of maternity and ultimately the repudiation of the female, not only the pregnant body but the complete feminine bodice because this would render the child impotent, a subordinate and infertile being like in traditional Freudian femininity.
Because of this developmental context, issues of selfhood as well as of gender tend to differentiate men from women, such that the male’s sense of self may typically be more defensive and in need of protecting its boundaries than the female’s typical sense of self. The female sense of self may be more interested in protecting itself from the abuses, oppression, and castration connected through the male phallus to maternity (ie: historical oppression by patriarchy). (*) I’ll discuss this further in a moment at the end of this post. Masculinity thus defines itself not only as not-femininity and not-mother, in a way that traditional femininity is not cast primarily as not-masculinity or not-father. For the most part, seeing the self as not the other, defining the self in opposition to the other, does not seem generally as important to women as to men, nor does merging seem as threatening (see Chodorow, 1978, 1979). Dominant masculinities that result in extreme violence are defensive strategies that may be employed when faced with a powerful female presence or a powerful male presence who may seek to emasculate. But here I am comparing a tendency to pit femininity against itself in opposition to the traditional mother or pure forms of femininity. Rather it is in not being “the mother” but more about being “the father” where childbearing is feared and repudiated thus placing importance on the theory of phallic monism.
Humiliation seems in some way to affect men and women in different ways, this can be expected from the classical Freudian account of challenges to phallic narcissism and from feminist descriptions beginning with Horney, of the humiliation of being a little boy in relation to a grown woman. However, the humiliation of a woman by another woman, (the feminine pitted against the feminine) is a scenario I’m interested in working out as a woman’s own possessed sense of masculinity may be sparked in psychic defense against castration of feared Objects in her relational world.
The male’s need to maintain his masculinity against the threat of feminization and developmentally related anxieties of identity and selfhood has been well theorized, but we need to consider a second fault line pertaining to men. For men, individual and cultural narcissism and humiliation derive also, and perhaps more prominently, from male-to-male relationships than from the relationships of men to women. An equal and fundamental component of male selfhood and identity to the dynamic of male as not-female (not weak or impotent) — a fundamental dynamic that perhaps particularly underpins terrorism and other male political and ethnic violence — in masculinity as being an adult man and not a little boy. Humiliation, specifically, is especially male-to-male — originally father-son — affair. In the normal developmental course of events, much hinges on how a boy relates to his father and turns into a man — the delicate negotiation of this transformation, of identification, of how to replace or join without bringing on retaliation, castration, or humiliation. All of these, in turn, depend partly on a father’s own sense of confident masculinity and selfhood. As much as it is being not-female, then, masculinity is not being a boy/child (or weak and impotent) in relation to an adult/father, and it is signaled psychically by not being subordinate to, shamed by, or humiliated by other men (or women). Gay male psychoanalytic writing has been particularly clear about how a becoming-gay, not-masculine-enough little boy (thinking back to the father of the peewee goalie, we might extend this in some cases to any son who displays softness, not tough behavior) can feel rejected and turned away from by his father.
In order to capture the intense and driven power in male psychology of male-male/superordinate-subordinate conflict, I would suggest that men are vulnerable to an Achilles Complex, that a core developmental and psychodynamic narrative comes not from Sophocles but from Homer. Who can forget the opening lines of the Iliad, when Homer calls on the goddess to sing of Achilles’ rage at Agamemnon and in a few short lines summarizes for us how this rage will almost destroy the Greeks? Achilles is a junior man, powerless, humiliated, and taunted by Agamemnon, a senior man who already has a wife and children. On a whim, to feed his own narcissism and to humiliate and taunt this challenging young warrior, Agamemnon takes away Achilles’ prize, Briseis, a woman of Achilles’, not of Agamemnon’s, generation. In his sulking retreat bred of humiliation, Achilles does not care if the entire war is lost. There is a woman involved her, certainly — Briseis (and earlier in the narrative, Agamemnon has sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia, who had been promised to Achilles) — but the attachment to her seems minor compared to Achilles’ passion about his treatment by Agamemnon.
As the invocation of Achilles would imply, the superordinate-subordinate male-to-male relationship may particularly underpin terrorism and other male political and ethnic violence. Another way to formulate this mythic developmental story is to suggest that the Achilles heel of men and boys — that is, of both father’s and the son’s generation — is the fear of narcissistic humiliation by another man, or by other men, and that the currency of this humiliation is often capricious and arbitrary control through war and conquest, or the monopolization, not of the mother, but of younger women who should rightfully belong to the younger man. (5)
Analysis of the Group Phenomenon Known as Electronically Targeted Individuals
Originally, I was going to do this analysis from two different axis; one male and one female before I realized it would behave exactly the same for both. They both work out the same. You’ll see, I typed as I was originally working it through:
From the Male Axis of Traditional Masculinity
Here we can analyze the targeting of individuals through electronic harassment and torture from both axes; from the male axis, the targeting is being carried out based on fears of abandonment, loss of self, fears of castration, and the humiliation received by another male. The perpetrator being empowered by a sense of masculine dominance using the electronic tether, thereby absolving fears of being abandoned, castrated, and humiliated. He could never be perceived as “a weak little girl” or “effeminate.” Also, if the Object target is a love object, they will always be kept close together, united by the electronic tether thereby eluding fears of abandonment and castration.
From the Female Axis of Masculinity (Pitting the female against another female)
The female axis of masculinities found in electronic targeting works by controlling fears of abandonment, loss of selfhood, fears of castration, and humiliation by the Object Other being targeted. She is being empowered by a sense of dominance which seeks to alleviate fears of being impotent and weak. But there are other facets to the psyche of this person. The psyche of the person doing the electronic targeting possesses the knowledge that women fear largeness, that all women seem to fear the female pregnant body which renders the Object (the female pregnant Object or symbol of the maternal Object) a subordinate and impotent and effeminate being. This is what made me believe at first the original perpetrator was or is a being belonging to womanhood. This is something understood by most female psychoanalysts who study female development. By using electronic torture, the perpetrator creates a situation where the female Object is rendered and kept a humiliated and a repudiated Object, a doormat. The Object of female largeness, that image of the maternal Object with protruding bulging belly that is most feared and repudiated is a staged recapitulation of the original humiliation, it recaptures and plays out the past trauma, the former psychic humiliation from which the masculinities of the torture are being employed. Although it is by passive-aggressive means of degradation and humiliation of the targeted Object, the electromagnetic tether (electronic device) must act like a counter-phobic object; a security blanket or an unconscious fantasy-based object of self-defense that protects the perpetrator like a cloak. Like the “Wolf-Man” (1918), the contingency is that the child behaves like children often do when they receive an unwished-for piece of information. The child rejects the new information and clings tightly to the old, obsolete past. And so, it is with the intention and psychic need that perpetrator merge the Object’s image with the image of the phallic mother, that maternal feared and hated Object which has reawakened her anxieties surrounding past fears of abandonment, loss, and separation in early childhood. This image of the maternal imago, at least in the psyche of the perpetrator, would be most humiliating and castrating in the psyche of the targeted Object who is perceived as being on par with the hated maternal Object. By stealing away the targeted Object’s fertility (her youthful sexuality by putting a prohibition on physical exercise and handing down a penal sentence of perpetual torture), her power is castrated, and it is replaced with the hated love Object’s image from the perpetrator former past; the staged dereliction can be presented to a viewing audience as a scene of illusion by a master illusionist. For the targeted Object has now become the Object of derelict from the “good breast”, the all-loved maternal image, and replaced as the hated maternal image belonging to the “bad breast”. In this staged theatrical seduction, she thereby merges the target Object (which has now become the hated love Object from her past or that Object belonging to the “bad breast”). With this image, she brings the target Object closer to humiliation, annihilation, and thus, ultimately psychic death. But I fear there is more anal-sadism to this, like an actual mortal death for the targeted Object as the perpetrator's ultimate goal may be in complete annihilation. Here we can return to Judith Butler’s two works, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in subjection and The Force of Non-Violence: An ethico-political bind. We can understand the reason behind the manifestation of such violence as an attempt to “form the subject” and, in another vein, an attempt to deem certain populations “livable” and other populations “non-livable.” That is to say, certain populations “valuable” and other populations “non-valuable.”
It cannot be denied that what we see here, as in theatrical stage performances, is the creation of an anal-sadistic universe, an undeniable desire to place a targeted Object symbolically in the place of the love-hated Object (the Oedipal mother). An artful creation that displays and exemplifies the targeted Object as the repudiated and distasteful image. Upon carefully examining the pre-text, we find that the acting-out is always present and that the creation itself may be considered as an acting-out aimed at miraculously restoring the virility of the penis. It is the gap between reality and illusion, or the gap between a young boy’s prepubescent infertile penis (ie: his castrated penis) and the virility of the father’s potent mighty, and a bigger than life sized penis; omnipotent and all-powerful.
Originally, you can see, I thought this might work out as a Female Masculinity but in reality, phallic mothers can affect both male and female children in the same way. All you have to do is change the pronoun from “he” to “she” in the above passage.
Now, the electronic targeting of individuals holds real implications to an experimental design in social science, thereby facilitating introjections in the psyche of individuals. When people are forced into castration, and one they have no absolute control over because it’s invisible, one of two things can happen: sublimation or psychosis. That is, the targeted object accepts their weakened, subordinate, and effeminate position or they foreclose upon it completely and take action. This has happened, sometimes violently in people claiming they suffer from the phenomenon. The radio frequency signals are cast from a carefully concealed distance thereby skillfully hiding his/her identity. Something must be said about proximity in relation to the targeted Object of electronic targeted physical assaults and psychotronic torture.
“To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what one is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependent upon that very power is quite another. We are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order. This is surely a fair description of part of what power does. . . .Foucault. . . . understands power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are.” ~Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in subjection
(*) Referring back to boundaries that need to be protected with regard to a being’s sense of self. The reason aggression, in any form, should never be excised from the psyche is because aggression is what allows the individual animal its self-defenses. Imagine taking a wild tiger from the African Savannah and de-clawing and de-toothing the animal so that it could not kill. What would the long-term outcome for the tiger be? Ultimately, death because it could not adequately feed itself the necessary nutritional requirement based on an African Savannah plant-based diet.
Reading Sources:
(1) Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. (1984) Creativity and Perversion. London, England. Free Association Books. Chapter 7, “A Psychoanalytic Study of ‘Falsehood’” (p 72).
(2) Helen Deutsch. (1955) The impostor: contribution to ego psychology of a type of psychopath. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Vol. 80, №4. Published October 2011 (pp. 1000–5–24). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51754147_The_impostor_contribution_to_ego_psychology_of_a_type_of_psychopath_1955
(3) Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. (1984) Creativity and Perversion. London, England. Free Association Books. Chapter 5, “A Re-reading of Wolf-Man” (p. 44).
(4) Lucy Holmes. (2008). The Internal Triangle: Theories of Female Development. New York. Jason Aronson. Chapter 2, “The Object Within” (p. 35).
(5) Nancy J. Chodorow (2012). Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice. New York. Routledge. Chapter 9, “Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity”, (p. 121–136).
(6) Judith Butler. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, California. Stanford University Press.
(7) Judith Butler. (2021). The Force of Non-Violence: An ethico-poltical bind. New York. Verso Publishing.
