On Gang Stalking, Electronic Targeting, and Electronic Targeted Bodily Assaults

The phenomenon of gang stalking, electronic targeting, and electronic targeted bodily assaults belong to the same classification of the phenomenon as any other form of antisocial criminological phenomenon; crime.

OPENING QUOTE: “To feel that we have an identity, we must know (or at least feel that we know) what is and was “real”; we must trust at least some of our memories if not most of them and be able to set them apart from our conscious fantasies. Yet it is characteristic of the victims of soul murder that they have lost the ability to make these differentiations. Erasing history by cultivating denial is essential to the brainwashing that is an inevitable part of psychic murder, resulting all too often in what Nietzsche called the worst form of slavery: that of the slave who has lost the knowledge of being a slave. No one has documented this better than George Orwell in 1984. George Orwell appreciated how complicated this denial really is (Shengold, 1989, pg. 16).”

Harriet Basseches introduced the subject of sadomasochism at the 46th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Chicago Illinois August 1, 2009, by stating that some sadomasochism is found in every case and noting that it is found at a level of differing degrees. She noted that it may be natural to find pleasure in pain, both one’s own and others’ pain, although it may be a difference in kind when the severity of the sadomasochism functions out of the normal bounds of human expectations and becomes perverse.

Basseches recounted Freud’s implication that a child’s build-in potential for sadomasochism derives from both sexual and aggressive strivings. Shengold (1989) argues for the centrality of Freud’s (1919) anal stage of development in organizing much of character and functioning. Klein (1957) sees the infant as struggling from the outset between love and hate toward the internalized essence of the caregiver. These theoreticians note the possibility of pathological, sadomasochistically tinged outcomes.

Sigmund Freud wrote of the Oedipal arrangement, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet is equally rooted in the soil of the incest complex, but under a better disguise.”

Speaking on the subject of matricide, one should not ignore the paradigm of family violence that is transmitted from mother to offspring, both male and female, and its transmission to the comparative criminological phenomenon of gang stalking, electronic targeting, and electronic targeted assaults. Domestic violence came to the fore of social attention in the 1960s with the rediscovery of child cruelty cases and battered child syndrome. Although this problem has come to our attention for a number of years, intrafamilial violence, in general, is increasing. Thus, violence is a learned behavior pattern, and the family has been called its primary training ground.

Matricide is perpetrated within a bond that must be understood in order to explain the meaning of such unconscionable antisocial behavior. In this essay, a psychodynamic formulation will be used to explain the victimizer’s central conflicts, placing them in the context of the homicidal situation and developmental history.

Like the symptoms of neurosis, myths signify a reality that is hidden from our consciousness, rejected, forbidden, or just secret — sacred or accursed. However, they are not a supernatural reality, beyond human nature and humankind’s responsibility. They are another part of the individual’s reality, the reality of the realm of the unconscious. Myths reflect basic human impulses, desires, and fears and transmit across the ages what people were like before societal taboos and institutions forced the containment and repression of primal passions. They have been a source of knowledge for diverse disciplines. As Lidz (1975) wrote, mythical thinking involves a different use of humankind’s cognitive abilities than those usually practiced in science.

In 1947, Frederic Wertham, in a study of matricide. Wertham gave the name “Orestes complex” to indicate a son’s impulse to kill his mother. According to the Greek legend, Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, killed his mother and her lover, Aegisthus, to avenge his father’s death. Greek tragedies show us that men and women are often caught up in complicated and hopeless relationships with the significant others in their lives. These are not necessarily derived from intrapsychic conflicts, although they play an important role in their lives.

In pathological-symbiotic dyad of the mother, and to which cases of matricide are carried out, there is a close and rigid interdependent behavioral pattern between two or more people who complement themselves to maintain a mutually controlling system of interaction in order to immobilize the most immature parts of their personalities. In symbiosis, each person’s self-esteem and ego-identity are felt to be dependent on each other. Its genesis is based on the failure of the projection-introjection process thus preventing the achievement of self and object differentiation.

The severity of the pathological link can be distributed along a spectrum ranging from mild cases to extremely severe, where the total absence of motherliness has to be regarded as a psychopathological case. In psychotic, psychopathic, and primitive conditions, the atrophy of motherliness, submerged under infantile neediness, has been repeatedly observed. A mentally disordered mother seems to have a special predilection for tantalizing her offspring, as if, as Searles (1965) would say, she was trying to drive the child crazy. This means that when a primary parent is physically and emotionally sadistic, the child will usually establish a sadomasochistic primary attachment (Solnit, 1986).

Garcia Badaracco (1986) offers a clear picture wherein he writes about the “maddening object” stating that the presence of primitive sadism and primitive sexuality in the human object relation with the child creates a perverse bond that tends to structuralize, imposing a psychotoxic pathological features that unconsciously induces the other to act in a wicked and sadistic way. This terrifying and paralyzing situation creates a fixation in a traumatic relationship with a fundamentally needed human object that is experienced as all bad. It’s important to note the primary difference between boys and girls with regard to the psychotoxic pathology experienced at the hands of this “maddening maternal object” may be seen as the difference between projective identification and introjective identification. Whereas projective identification is placed onto external objects in defense of self which allow for crimes of murder, serial murder/rape, gang stalking, electronic bodily targeted assaults to take place. Introjective identification, on the other hand, allows for forms of internalized intrapsychic murder or internalized attacks upon the self as the violence is played out in the mind and on the canvas of the body/self. Thus, a form of internal matricide is committed. The attack is directed at the internalized malevolent object. The same actors play out the tragedy except there is no legal criminal responsibility as suicide, gender dysmorphia, and other associated pathologies are considered more of a moral issue. This may be seen in cases of anorexia, bulimia, gender dysmorphia, and gender reassignment and in cases of attempted or successful suicide. Both projective identification and introjective identification hold true to what Garcia Badaracco (1992) points out, “Madness is always a folie a deux” (p. 177). When violence is projectively carried out, it is cast out into the external world and onto Object(s). This is the primary mode of masculine development, according to Freud, in identification with the idealized powerful father and his phallus.

Alternately, Nancy J. Chodorow provides us the “Achilles Complex,” in her chapter essay “Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinities” in her book Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice which addressed the psycho-dynamics of violence and its pathology. Chodorow began by addressing what she considered the fault lines of masculinities. The first fault line of masculinity involves gender and selfhood in relation to women and femininity. Men’s relationships to women, forged originally in the relationship to the mother, bring up a range of threats to masculinity and the male sense of self — especially fears of dependency, abandonment, and loss of self, as well as an intolerance and fear of women’s sexuality. This negotiation of maleness in relation to the mother — masculinity as developmentally not-female and not subordinate to women — is one component of masculinity. Masculinity, here, has to do, fundamentally, with not being a woman or dependent upon a woman. Freud, Horney, Stoller, and many psychoanalytic feminists have shown how the repudiation of women and fears of feminization, beginning with the threat of humiliating inadequacy vis-a-vis the powerful mother, are developmentally fundamental to masculinity and tied to the male sense of self.

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. Masculinity thus defines itself not only as not-femininity and not-mother, in a way that femininity is not cast primarily as not-masculinity or not-father. In addition, 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.

The second fault line of masculinity is the fundamental component of male selfhood and identity is that of being an adult man and not a little boy. Humiliation, specifically, is especially a 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, depends 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 in relation to an adult/father, and it is signaled psychically by not being subordinate to, shamed by, or humiliated by other men. In unconscious fantasy, the theme of masculinity as subordination or non-subordination to another man usually hinges on being not a little boy in relation to an adult father or more powerful men, although sometimes it can result, as Freud (1914, 1921) noted in a drive to submit to and identify with a seemingly powerful and invulnerable male leader. This brings up an important point as the term “gang” in gang stalking. This male-male world seems to figure in “ordinary” warfare as well as in childhood fistfights, in both of which the threat is of being defeated or humiliated by other males (and dominant, controlling mothers). In more virulent and pathological form, it seems primary in underpinning psychodynamically the kinds of religious, ethnic, nationalist, and gang-related violence that have been so much at the forefront of our lives in recent years, most notably manifesting as the phenomenon of gang stalking and targeted electronic violence.

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 summarize 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 here, certainly — Briseis (and earlier in the narrative, Agamemnon has sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, who had been promised to Achilles) — but the attachment to her seems minor compared to Achilles’ passion about his treatment by Agamemnon.

It is important to note, that just like the act of matricide, gang stalking, electronic targeting, and electronic targeted bodily assault have in common two components: attribution and control. Kernberg (1992) noted that what is projected outside is still, in part, felt inside, with the additional need to exert control over external objects onto whom aggression has been projected. Fixation on specific hated objects illustrates attachment to the enemy or persecutor. And, thus in terms of matricide, the infant’s internalization of the aggressive behavior of the mother is enacted in other object relations with the mother and/or with other human objects, between persecutor and victim, alternating these roles in the infant’s identifications while projecting the reciprocal role in the object.

As my 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 the 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.

It is important to note the sequelae of long-term gang stalking, electronic targeting, and electronic targeted bodily assaults is psychological damage as well as; financial losses, change in lifestyle, determination to fight back, find support from other gang-stalking victims (support groups), and the development of hatred/violent tendencies. It’s interesting to note that stalking is a social construct that arose in the 1980s following broader social awareness of domestic violence and interfamilial abuses surrounding batterers. Might this phenomenon be part of clandestine male attempt to assault their female/male victims?

“Madness is always a folie a deux.”

Sources:

Sinkman, E. (2010). Battling the life and death forces of sadomasochism. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91(4),

Shengold, L. (1989). Soul murder. New Haven, CT. Yale University Press.

Freud, S. (1914). On narcissism: An introduction. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Standard Edition. Volume 14. pp. 67–102. London. Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1919). A child is being beaten: A contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Standard Edition. Volume 17, pp. 175–204. London. Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Standard Edition. Volume 18. pp. 1–64. London. Hogarth Press.

Klein, M. (1957). Envy and gratitude. New York. Basic Books.

Silberstein, J. (1998). Matricide: A Paradigmatic Case in Family Violence. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 42(3), 210–223.

Laing, R.D., & Esterson, A. (1964). Sanity, madness and the family. London. Tavistock.

Lidz, T. (1975). Hamlet’s enemy. New York. International University Press.

Wertham, F. (1947). Dark legend: A study in murder. New York. Duell, Sloan and Pierce.

Searles, H. (1965). The effort to drive the other person crazy: An element in the aetiology and psychotherapy of schizophrenia. In Collected papers in schizophrenia and related subjects (pp. 304–316). New York. International University Press. This paper provides an important clue to the psychological make-up of perpetrators carrying out gang stalking and electronic targeted assaults. That is a psychological make-up belonging to schizophrenia. In addition, as part of the long-term sequelae of gang stalking, electronic targeting, and electronic targeted assaults is to drive the person “crazy” hints towards a disturbed or disorganized personality.

Solnit, A. (1986). Introduction. In R. Lax, S. Bach, & J. Burland (Eds.), Self and object constancy (pp. 1–7). New York. Guilford Press.

Garcia Badaracco, J. (1986). Identification and its vicissitudes in the psychoses: The importance of the maddening object. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 67, 133–146.

Garcia Badaracco, J. (1992). Comunidad Terapeutica Psicoanalitica de Estructura Maltifamiliar [Therapeutic psychoanalytic community of multifamily structure]. Madrid: Tecnopublicaciones.

Chodorow, Nancy J. (2012). Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice. New York. Routledge. pp. 121–136

Sheridan, Lorraine; James, David V.; and Roth, Jayden. (March 12, 2020) The Phenomenology of Group Stalking (‘Gang Stalking’): A Content Analysis of Subjective Experiences. International Journal of Environmental Research Public Health. 17(7), 2506. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/7/2506/htm#B5-ijerph-17-02506