On The Malevolent Used Of Emotion As A Dark Mirror Of The Therapeutic Process

Karen Barna
14 min readJan 28, 2024

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"The False Mirror" (1928) by Rene Magritte. Surrealism

“The ability to maintain psychic integrity in the face of torture has become more difficult with the increasing sophistication of torture technology supplied by supportive governments of the developed capitalist world and psychology oriented methods of repression supplied by complicit medical and mental health professionals.” ~Nancy Caro Hollander, First Do No Harm: The Paradoxical Encounters Of Psychoanalysis, War making, and Resistance. Chapter 14 The Gendering of Human Rights: Women and the Latin American Terrorist State

According to Adrienne Harris (2017):

“Perhaps one of the mixed pleasures of being an older woman in this profession is that one gets to inhabit in the transference of various patients the force and dynamism of the too powerful dangerous mother.”

International Human Rights organizations have documented the military and paramilitary (police forces) assaults by totalitarian regimes on civilian suspected of supporting dissident or revolutionary movements. In one especially sadistic example, the mutilated body of a dead pregnant woman was discovered. Her fetus has been slashed out of her stomach and stuck in her mouth. This particular method of terror is a symbolic representation of the intersection between psychological and political processes. It reflects both the unconscious male dread of and hatred of the fertile omnipotent mother who, it is feared, consumes rather than feeds the baby, as well as the conscious sadistic rage aimed at women who, through her political opposition and her capacity to bring forth from the womb more rebels, is seen as a challenge to male authoritarian power.

“A woman’s body becomes a commodity in a market controlled by military officers: “Thus, while men may trade in cigarettes or male prestige when seeking favors, women more often must resort to the coin of the flesh.” ~A. Aron, S. Corne, A. Fursland, B. Zelwer, “The Gender Specific Terror of El Salvador and Guatemala, (1991).

In the literature of various mind control methods two types of processes are distinguished: Coercive and Indirect Influence. In the first, love is proffered that latter turns into abuse, coercion, and humiliation. Whereas with the second, the prisoner/indoctrinator relates to the prisoner with cruelty, then changes his face to become kind, friendly, and warm. In the first type of engineered abuse the redemption seeker (who joins the cult) is lured by the grace, warmth, and gentleness of his new acquaintances. The coercive commands are revealed only gradually, at the point when the follower has already been incrementally caught in the commands of the group. In many ways, this sequence resembles a drug changing its function from positive to negative, from a substance that procured extreme well-being and happiness to the thing that is desperately needed as a salvation from pain, despair, and collapse. In contrast to this prototypical process of becoming addicted, there is an apparently opposite, but basically similar process, in which what comes first is not love, but hate — harsh practices of attack and imprisonment, and mental or physical kidnapping that impose discipline and utter obeisance. Following the victim’s “softening" by these attacks, he is granted reprieve and acceptance by the group where he now feels he belongs when he begins to comply. He is hence rewarded in direct proportion to his self denunciation and immersion in what is dictated to him. None of the coercive -peruasive environments and procedures are a pure type, but the second type of process, hate turning into “loving kindness,” seems to be more perverse and chilling than the process where gentleness and seductive change into oppression and torture. In the world of sex work, women are sometimes lured into a “love relationships” by male pimps classified as a “Romeos" who, through lavish love gestures wins the women’s favor and coercively coxes her to become an escort/sex worker.

Schizophrenia: The gaslight conspiracy

I’d like to compare the psychological paranoid symptom of schizophrenia where one “hears voices" calling out derogatory names like, “whore,” “piece of shit,” “Boo-hoo-hoo," as one would mock a crying child, and other offensive names and phrases in the harsh method of “hate turned to loving kindness” in methods of mind control and the surreptitious technique of trying to imprison a person for a criminal’s hidden, personal gain.

Since man has harnessed the ability to manipulate the electromagnetic frequency spectrum, he has developed and advanced technology by leaps and bounds. Man has invented radio, television, the Internet, wireless router technology, cell phones, global positioning systems, and the latest greatest marvel is artificial intelligence. AI that can speaks to you and answer most of your questions in Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) chat. So, we know that technologies can transmit human voice through space and across vast distances and even monitor people’s locations and timeline of activities and social whereabouts. They can even create computer generated voices that sound like their human counterparts and they can create physical images that look just like their human counterparts using artificial intelligence. Deep fake technology of AI is an increasing area of global concern. Your cell phone is intelligent enough to know if its in your hand or laying on a flat surface. Your Google FIT device can monitor your heart beat and sends the human data via wireless remote transmission via an upload to another device. Radios and televisions can receive these wireless radio signals, as can cell phones, desktop computers, and tablets do too, and can turn them into sound (human voices), images, and data (written text). The conspiracy in the diagnosis of “schizophrenia” may very well be the malevolent use of human technology combined with jaw bone sound conduction know as the ear phone. Since we depend heavily on military defense research and defense interests, it shouldn’t be surprising this type of spyware exists or has been discovered and manipulated for military defense interests. Sound does, and can be successful transmitted through the jaw bone to the inner ear.

People who are using illegal narcotics, or who are mentally ill, who are “resistant" to therapy, or people who are part of other marginalized groups, such as women and homosexuals (refer to the medical use of conversion therapy of mind control to change sexual orientation and personality), may be vulnerable to a conspiracy due to a breakdown in mutual recognition and may be surriptisously be being abused by a perpetrator in a major gaslight to get them into “therapy” or “imprisoned in a hospital setting,” as was common practice by men who couldn’t control their wives during the 19th century. Or, God forbid, incarcerated as a means of “dealing with them.” This is one way criminal behavior employs the malevolent use of the dark mirror and, so too, how the medical treatment of mentally ill people, by “medical professionals,” may be employing it to aid in “moving a person into therapy.” It is being employed by the perpetrator for “defense purposes,” or more accurately, in my opinion, as a “defensive mechanism.” It is Macheivallian deception at its finest. It is the smoke and mirrors of mind control. The use of harsh technology and tools employed for mind control can be explained by feminist psychoanalysts and other professionals seeking to achieve change in the use of torture in medicine by doctors who took a Hippocratic oath to “first do no harm.” Where methods and machinations are devised to break the mind instead of cure it.

Freud wrote in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937) on how psychic defenses originally acquired to ward off threats posed by the ego, by a dangerous and unpleasurable outer and inner reality, can themselves become a threat to life itself: “if the perception of reality involves unpleasure,” Freud writes, “that perception — e.g. the truth — must be sacrificed. The ego further weakened by the internal that threaten unpleasure, defends itself by distorting reality and, in fact, by seeking situations that justify its its maintaining its habitual modes of reaction, even when unnecessary.” We recognize here the definition of the repetition compulsion. It appears in this particular writing of Freud’s as an outcome of situations in which the truth of a perception, if painful, is sacrificed in favor of a less painful lie. Tying this observation to the issue he is investigating — what makes analysis so difficult and what makes some analyses fail — Freud goes on to say that one half of the job of analysis is to LIFT REPRESSION, while the other half is to RECOGNIZE which DEFENSE MECHANISMS are exacting too high a price for the ego. These ego-modifying defense mechanisms emerge in analysis as resistance to cure. When reality is too painful to tolerate, we may both register the reality and simultaneously sacrifice what we know to be true to a more tolerable lie. War is man’s biggest repetition compulsion and cultural amnesias always reappear following wars through out history, as men quickly forget the tremendous toll war takes on both sides, at various levels: social, economic, physical, psychological and generational.

Where the problem exists. Terms such as gaslight, soul murder, and “driving the other person crazy" have been used to describe procedures of unacknowledged or dissociated domination and psychic exploitation within the imprisonment of closed quarters of the family or analytic situation. I had personally made an appointment at a mental health facility for therapy, Oaks Integrated. Upon arriving at the time of my appointment with my therapist and while receiving wireless electronic frequency assault/torture (pain and suffering), I witnessed the receptionist personnel and another employee at the receptionist’s desk (who were a black male and a black female) using a hand held device and appeared to turn something off, at which point, I felt a reprieve from the wireless electronic torture. Remember where I previously wrote on methods of mind control:

“Following the victim’s “softening" by the attacks, he is granted reprieve and acceptance by the group where he now feels he belongs when he begins to “comply.” He is hence rewarded in direct proportion to his self denunciation and immersion in what is dictated to him.”

This is the major gaslight in a perpetrator’s criminal use of mind control to “move a person into a hospital setting” or “demonstrates the criminal use of mind control to manipulate and use another for personal gain.”

The movie Gaslight (1944) describes the process where one person plots to undermine the sanity of an intimate other. They describe the confusion of the victim, who struggles with the feeling that her mind plays tricks on her and that she is losing her sanity. Her anguished self-doubt grows without her suspecting that it is her husband that is deceiving her by deviously staging these distortions. The concept of the effort to “drive the other person crazy,” was developed by analysts who worked with schizophrenics, such as Silvano Arieti (1955), Harold Searles (1959), and Robert D. Laing (1967). Arieti talks about “externalized psychosis” of people who specialize in creating certain situations that produce or accelerate psychosis in the other while they themselves remain immune to overt symptoms. Couples therapy works with solid awareness of phenomena of induced craziness in one or both partners.

Leon Shengold borrowed the term soul murder from Freud 's Schreiber case to describe extreme parental abuse. Shengold attributed the origins of the concept to the Nordic dramatists Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg who wrote about “the attempt to erase or spoil the separate identity of another person.” Steinberg, more vociferous than Ibsen, was intensely pre-occupied with mental hostility and the battle of minds that happens in the paradigmatic situation of two people who hate each other and strive to drive the other to doom.

It seems to me, that “love” following persecution and causing pain and suffering, makes it possible to gain a deeper insight into the thirst for human masochism. Dispensing tenderness, warmth, and friendliness after periods of creating terror, hate, and guilt, and shame is a powerful tool for changing someone’s character into an obedient, AUTOMATIC, careless creature that is extraordinarily pliable and open to receiving the pouring into him of contents from outside. I have heard the term “automata,” as in a human automatron or human robot. One of the areas investigated by the CIA was mind control. The CIA’s human behavior control program was chiefly motivated by perceived Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques. One area they explored through various medical treatment centers, medical doctors' and human test subjects' participation was the use of LSD for mind control research. The first program originated in 1950, during the Cold War, called BLUEBIRD. In 1951, after Canada and Britain were included, the project’s name was changed to ARTICHOKE. A declassified CIA document (CIA MORI 190691, p. 1), “Hypnotic Experimentation and Research, 2/10/1954,” describes an attempt to hypnotically create unsuspecting assassins (in Mind control Cover-up; updated May 21, 2005).

Self-Loathing: The side effects of remote wireless electromagnetic frequency assault during routine daily exercise

Whether conscious or self-conscious, the sense of self as bad, malicious and unworthy is often the sickest element in one’s core and is thus the most dangerous element in a person’s psychic economy. Self loathing is chronic, amplified shame. I theorize the use of remote wireless electromagnetic assaults/torture purpose is to help to create the atmosphere for feelings of amplified shame, in unable to complete routine daily exercise in repetitive defeat by a perpetrator/captor. “Shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, of inferiority, and of alienation. No other affect is closer to the experienced self, writes Gershen Kaufman (1988). The capacity to experience shame is a precarious developmental achievement, an acquisition of a sensitive marker of boundaries, warning us against behaviors that will diminish, mortify, or endanger us psychologically. The mature, self-protective version of “signal -shame" is the dialectical opposite and a good version of the searing, internalized version of traumatic shame that accrues from being found undeserving at one’s core. This is one reason why I believe my captor is trying to imprison and perform a sort of “soul murder” through direct infliction of trauma, by violent means (pain and suffering via remote wireless electromagnetic assaults/torture) rather than through open dialogue and discourse. This exposes the human male tendency of masculinity with its tendency for warmaking and the masculine tendency to castrate the other (see Chodorow, 2012). It points a glaring red flag to Freud’s paper entitled “Terminable and Interminable” (1937) and when he definines the defense mechanisms that emerge from replacing an intolerable truth with a more tolerable lie (see Holmes, 2012 and her writing on the repetition compulsion and the promise of psychoanalysis).

Internalizing shame, in contrast to signal -shame, violates our essential dignity as human beings. In cases of mind control, the external accusations that one is a criminal, “whore,” “piece of shit,” “bad and unlovable,” fold into interior pre-exesisting feelings of self-hatred and sinfulness via trance like states induced by remote wireless electromagnetic assaults/torture. Funny, men who are sexually driven to conquer multiple women and have multiple marriages, are not often seen as “deranged,” the perverse term “derilict from the breast" or “sexually addicted” but might rather be perceived as “the typical male” warrior who seeks to conquer and destroy. There exists a perverse subtle tendency of men to collude and maintain political and social control via the subtle art of coercion and persuasion. Donald Trump and Jeffery Epstein.

Intimacy: The tank in the bedroom, on totalitarian regimes and Trump’s winning the 2024 New Hampshire primary

It seems extraordinary to me that a country, a nation’s medical community, thought of as a “healing" profession, can make use of such dark techniques and technology. In the marriage between the APA’s psychoanalysts and the military defense program at Guantanamo. But such collusions came out of the Republican Bush administration following 9/11. Adrienne Harris wrote about the impact of political and totalitarian regimes on intimate life. Her goal of the paper was to convey, sexuality, gendered subjectivity, and intimacy are not simply personal and self-contained but rather invaded by, and cohabitating with, forces of power and history.

“If we fail to stand up and say something about the inequality of the behavior to employ torture as a means of “therapeutic technique" in methods of mind control, then we, in a sense, are participating with it by allowing it to continue.”

Prague psychoanalysts, during Nazi and then later communist regimes, manage to demonstrate a remarkable ability to survive long-term totalitarian oppression and maintain a — even if quite weak — continuity.

Martin Mahler, a contemporary analyst in Prague, conjured up the clinical, social, and professional dilemmas when Czech citizens began to rehabilitate and recover psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic work after the collapse of communism.

“The Hungarian writer, Gyorgy Konrad, once wrote (2009): Some time ago, a butcher lived in our village. He had a house on the corner, of a steep street. There was a military base near the village. Once, the butcher’s wife was changing bedding and a tank crashed through the bedroom wall because the road was ice and slippery. The front of the house was damaged. The woman was also damaged, but not too much. When I met the butcher next time, I asked him about what happened. “History came at us,” he said. The grotesque presence of a tank in the bedroom describes the ever-repeating experience of loss of a safe and familiar home, a very “unheimlich” space in Central European experience (Mahler, 2014).

This repeating presence of violence across the spectrum of normative development circumstances, and also in circumstances of extreme social destructiveness, always trying to uncover the elements of intimacy in the phenomena, is especially true for electronic harassment and wireless electronic assault/torture. I feel it is crucial to understanding intimacy’s role in the violence. Intimate life, particularly the intimate life of the body, a gendered experience and of sexuality, is always already infused by regulation, by violence, and by power.

Ruth Stein, in her paper “Notes on Mind Control: The malevolent use of emotion as a dark mirror of the therapeutic process,” notes the parallels between totalitarian methods and certain (but not all) models of psychoanalytic training. She writes,

“The infantilization of “candidates," the mistrust toward their independent thinking and competence, the mystification that surround senior (training) analysts who occupy positions of power (training analysts were, and in some cases still are, elected by votes cast by a small group of older, privileged training analysts in the institute, who promote members who tend to think like them and leave out those who disagree), the intolerance for dissident opinions and their categorization as “nonanalytical” and even psychopathological — all these phenomena have controlled, and still, in part control, the mind of aspiring analysts in training.”

In forensic analysis, in the absence of a subject, an individual personality is only comprehensible from the informational clues left behind at the scene. In relational models of psychoanalysis the individual is only comprehensible to the analyst within a complex field of conscious and unconscious forces. Relational psychoanalysis considers shifting self states, as multiple sites where psychic states join social links. This perspective also parallel “intersectional" models of the subject. The intersections are where the different sites cross, where movement is regulated or unregulated, violent or orderly, and include self-states of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, culture, historical incident. All these experiences operate in the subject in unique and emergent combinations. Feimberg (2005) speaks of telescoping of generations, the unconscious transfer of alienated narcissistic identifications arriving often as uncodeable and undecipherable to their senders and to their recipients. These seemingly unnoticed experiences where techniques in mind control are employed to control the population by its leaders. Jessica Benjamin investigated the complex interface of self and other, intimate and social, through the work of Thirdness. This concept of Thirdness is the space where mutual recognition takes place. (see Benjamin, 2018 “Beyond Doer and Done To"). This space of Thirdness is not present in the perpetrators' utilizing wireless electronic assault/torture against their victims. It is most definitely being used as a bias against my perceived possessed personal identity. My womanhood.

Donald Trump and his 2024 campaign for re-election sends me into a state of dread. Trump easily seized the New Hampshire primary making him the more likely Republican nominee. One of the reoccurring unconscious psychic phenomena involves the fantasy of the “all powerful omnipotent dangerous mother.” Fear and dread abound in re-occuring fashion in dreams, fantasy and phantasy, opinions, and unconscious forces that cause us to take action or inaction, time and time again, according to the psychoanalytic literature. Ron Desantis dropped out of the 2024 Presidential Election making Niki Haley the other Republican candidate on the ballot. Dare I say any more?

Sources:

First Do No Harm: The Paradoxical Encounters of Psychoanalysis, Warmaking, and Resistance (2010). Adrienne Harris and Steve Botticelli (editors). New York. Routledge. Relational Perspective Book Series Volume 45.

Lucy Holmes (2013) Wrestling with Destiny: The promise of Psychoanalysis. New York. Routledge.

Nancy Chodorow (2012) Individualizing Gender and Sexuality. New York. Routledge. Relational Perspective Book Series Volume 53. Chapter 9. Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity.

Adrienne Harris. Intimacy: The tank in the bedroom. International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2017) 98:895–907.

M. Mahler (2014). Underground in Prague, 1–12 pp. Paper given at the Sandor Ferenczi Center, New School University (unplublished). Included in Harris' above mentioned paper in references.

Martin Mahler. “Underground psychoanalysis in Prague. Part 1.” Retrieved on January 28, 2024. https://psychoanalyzadnes.cz/2017/03/27/underground-psychoanalysis-in-prague-part-i/

Jessica Benjamin (2018) “Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition and Theory, Intersubjectivity, and the Third.” New York. Routledge.

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Karen Barna
Karen Barna

Written by Karen Barna

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