Paradoxical Encounters With Psychoanalysis: Warmaking and Violations of the Hippocratic Oath, The Role of Shame, The Paradox of Electronic Harassment and Wireless Electronic Torture, Benevolence and Malevolence in Theory, God’s Jury and the Inquisition, The Role of Mutual Recognition, and Julia Kristeva’s Power of Horror
The above quote is a epithet from feminism and The Women’s Liberation Movement
The First Paradox: Violations of the Hippocratic Oath, “First Do No Harm"
As I have previously wrote, the first paradox of torture is seen in mental health professionals who swore an oath to “First, do no harm” and the active participation of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) psychologists' participation in the grizzly torture of detainees at Guantanamo during the Afghanistan war after 9/11. Psychologists were sought by the CIA because they wanted some kind of professional justification for doing what they were doing. The CIA recruited psychologists less for their supposed psychological expertise and more for a gloss of professionalism lent to their grizzly interrogation proceedings. They wanted a theoretician to tell them they could go hard but not seem like brutes. The code of ethics for psychologists, unlike that for psychiatrists and other physicians, has been porous enough to allow such participation in grizzly interrogation.
Without military research and defense interests, there would be no APA and no professional discipline of psychology of the scale it currently operates at in the United States and perhaps also internationally. An Even More Difficult Paradox. Psychologists and psychoanalysis are in a sense morally agnostic, deployable for peace and growth or deployable for destruction and malignant practices of domination. Depth psychologists offer the most powerful ideas into how character is formed, how influence is promoted, and how people are induced to act in particular nonrational ways. Mind control techniques are used in malevolent ways. Thus, psychology and psychoanalysis are handmaids of war and destructiveness and of peace and healing (Harris & Botticelli, 2010).
The Second Paradox: Shame
Shame, we know, from the dissociation and development literature, comes from powerlessness. Shame, if you like, exposes the illusion of autonomy, one lynchpin of masculinity. One of the vital components of masculinity involves gender and selfhood. Men’s relationship to women as in “not being a little girl.” That, in order to “be a man," one must not be a “sissy". Equally, and secondly, “the fundamental component of male selfhood and identity to the dynamic of male as not-female — a fundamental dynamic that perhaps particularly underpins terrorism and other male political and ethnic violence — is masculinity as being an adult man — that 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” (Chodorow, 2012).
Nancy Chodorow’s essay, “Hate, Humiliation and Masculinity,” outlines two fault lines of male development where shame exposes the illusion of “being a little girl” or “weak and powerless" in the presence of a superior male. This illusion which can generate feelings of shame in the intense driven power of male psychology as it pertains to male to male/superordinate to subordinate conflict. Where feelings of shame and powerlessness can be the driving components of male violence and aggression. Warmaking, injuring others, repairing, all cohere around the role and presence of (disavowed or prominent) SHAME. The second paradox. Identifications can only be constituted through some encounter with shame, limits, and the culture’s requirements conveyed through the family and powerful others. Yet, identity is threatened whenever shame dominates. We know this from the dissociation and trauma literature. We know this from developmental studies. Whereas guilt may target and organize around particular acts or traits, shame is a full-bodied experience. Shamed, the self imploded, identity itself is shattered (Harris & Botticelli, 2010).
The threat of shame haunts, and upon injury or trauma, shame accompanies the soldier and his illness every step of the way. From Nancy Hollander we see that women are crucial as targets and pawns for warmaking. Through rape and sexual assault, shame with its effects on the collapse of identity, war is waged and trauma is incurred. If, the culture colludes, or requires a particular formation of self, gendered, racialized, culturally inflected, cultures, through medical and political personnel and through public discourse, have a stake in the maintenance of those identifications. Shame comes from powerlessness. The ultimate powerlessness of the soldier is extraordinarily visible in the trench warfare of the First World War (Harris & Botticelli, 2010).
A Third Paradox: Electronic Harassment and Electronic Wireless Assaults and Torture of the Targeted Individual
It is here that the long-term sequele of Electronic Harassment, the phenomenon of the Targeted Individual experience, and wireless electronic assaults and torture can be compared and linked to the complacency of the APA and the military culture’s torture programs rooted in Chodorow’s essay of the Achilles Complex and fault lines of masculinity and masculine control and dominance. Targeted individuals are, in a sense, involved in a mini war, on a smaller scale with gang stalking, electronic harassment, cyber security harassment and hacking, wireless electronic assaults that torture, cyber surveillance as well as security camera surveillance, and the wireless electronic torture of high pitched sound or ringing in the ears diagnosed as “tinitus” obfuscates the psychics phenomenon of harmonization of molecule particles to a particular frequency signal being transmitted to the human body. A targeted individual’s life, is a life where they must muddle through existence constantly fending off attacks or being subdued by them. Put down, in a sense, on bed rest in feelins of illness. Although different from war veteran trauma, trauma is still inflicted and incurred by helpless citizens. Vulnerable individuals who may suffer silently, obscured by the smoke and mirrors of a false narrative and misinformation put forth by their perpetrator(s). The shame these victims feel comes from a sense of powerlessness in fending off or stopping the assaults from occurring again and from the abusive torture itself (being made weak or weaker, making it difficult to perform daily chores and be your best self). Abuse is shameful. Violence is shameful. Rape is shameful. Intimate Partner Violence is shameful. Domestic violence is shameful. War is shameful. As a woman, I am pretty well versed in being the “castrated" other. I have had to navigate a secondary position for most of my life except when I became a mother. Only then, did I have a subject under me. But even then, there were powerful others in my relational orbit who influenced my son’s parenting outcomes. I could not raise my son alone. I depended on the help of family and friends.
We say, “Shame exposes the illusion of autonomy, one lynchpin of masculinity” because, most of the time, children are raised by two genders: a mother, and father. We all have a psychic triangle of Mother-Father-Self (Holmes, 2008). The shifting struggle of mutual recognition, even as it maintains an awareness that such recognition is always at best a temporary achievement, continually subject to breakdown, in which the encounter between two subjectivities degenerates into a struggle for power and is constantly present in human mutual recognition theory (Benjamin, 2004). Women have been perceived as the weaker, powerless, and subordinate, lesser Other in male-female relations. But this intersubjective breakdown exists in all human relationships.
In the sphere of cultural studies, Judith Butler (2009) has drawn on psychoanalytic (especially Kleinian) categories in her effort to understand how it is that some lives come to count as human lives, worthy of mourning if they are lost, while others do not. Contesting the differential valuation placed on Western and non-Western lives as shown, for instance, in the conduct and media representations of current wars, Butler insists on our interconnectedness as the basis of moral action: [T]he subject that I am is bound to the subject I am not … we each have the power to destroy, and … we are bound to one another in this power and this precariousness. In this sense, we are ALL precarious lives.” More recently, Butler (2021), also wrote on these non-valuable lives and has said schemas, like racial schemas in dichotomies like white versus black following the death of George Floyd, “have historically produced and informed policies on world health (American health care included), refugees, migration, culture, occupation and other colonial practices, police violence, incarceration, and the death penalty, intermittent bombardment and destruction, war, genocide. Although, Foucault identifies “state racism” as one of the central instruments for the management of the life and death of populations, he does not tell us precisely how racism works to establish relative values for different lives. There is, of course, a clear sense that some populations are targeted by modes of sovereign power and that there is a “letting die" orchestrated by biopower, but how do we account for the differential ways in which lives and deaths matter or fail to matter?” (see Rasmussen, 2011; Stoler, 1995).
On The Return Of Bad Objects (Kleinian Theory)
In the psychoanalytic work done with war veterans, the return of bad objects provided by Fairbairn (1952) speaks of war neuroses as an example of this kind of ferocious reappearance of repressed bad internal objects, triggered by both intrapsychic circumstances and external reality and causes a break down in mutual recognition. His work is drawn on in Ruth Stein’s Chapter on Notes on Mind Control: The malevolent uses of emotion as a dark mirror of the therapeutic process (Harris & Botticelli, 2010). He notes, the return of, or release from memory, repressed bad objects that may be observed to particular advantage in wartime in military patients on whom the phenomenon may be studied on a massive scale. Releasing of bad objects from the unconscious mind is observed in dreams. The most common dreams are nightmares or night terrors. For war veterans, dreams of being chased down by the enemy, shot at by the enemy, crushed with great weights, being bombed by airplanes (described as “great black planes"), being strangled by someone, being pursued by pre-historic animals, being visited by ghosts, and about being shout at by the sergeant-major. In particular, Fairbairn’s psychoanalytic work done with a psychopathic soldier, he observed the revival of repressed memories from childhood. Shortly after, the patient slipped into a schizoid state. The repressed memory was of being abandoned by his mother in his pram on a station platform and seeing his mother enter the railway carriage with his older brother. In reality, his mother was just seeing his brother off, but he was left with feelings of abandonment, feelings of being deserted during the pre-oedipal period of psychic development. This revival of a repressed memory, of course, allowed for the release of bad objects from the unconscious. The patient then experienced the return of another memory, a shop belonging to him had been bombed. After surveying the sight of the damage he returned home. When he went to bed, he felt as if he was being choked and experienced a powerful impulse to smash up his home and murder his wife and children.
Psychoanalytic ideas were able to play a constructive role in devising therapy for shattered minds of traumatized soldiers, providing a more humane alternative to such routinely practiced “treatments" such as electric shock that aimed at getting the patient back to the front lines as quickly as possible.
Benevolence and Malevolence in Psychoanalytic Theory
First, the discipline of psychology and psychoanalysis is morally agnostic, as previously stated, deployable for peace and growth or deployable for destruction and malignant practices of domination. Psychodynamic theories can be tools with which individuals and groups launch attacks on the psychic integrity and on the emotional, mental and physical health, of civilians and soldiers, victims and perpetrators. There is the potential in the theory for care and damage. There is the potential in analysts or caregivers for transformation from good to bad objects and also there is the perversion of ideas and personnel in the hands of ideologues and forces of domination which may come in the form of individuals or states (Harris & Botticelli, 2010).
The traditional methods of torture often most heard about in the media and movies — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions — hardly require knowledge of theories (see Seligman’s learned helplessness). By contrast, the interrogation methods that rely on building rapport with criminal suspect, eschewed under past American intelligence gathering program post-9/11, are reportedly more effective than torture in gleaning information, and actually require a degree of clinical skill and training. Torture is unethical and destructive. It does not produce useful information. The harm to the victim and to the torturer radiates out to family, and to the wider society, leaving decades long, multigenerational effects of shame and rage. As many have argued these practices, along with many other aspects of American defense policy, have left us radically less safe than ever before.
The Geneva Convention (1949) was established out of the attrocities of the genocide of World War II. They are a body of protocols of Public International Law, also known as the Humanitarian Law of Armed Conflict, whose purpose is to set a standard of humane treatment, and fundamental guarantees of respect to individuals who become victims of armed conflict. The United States was in direct violation of these laws and protocols at Guantanamo.
God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
Cullen Murphy (2012) gives an historical account of the proceedings of Inquisitions established by the Catholic Church in 1231 AD. These barbaric rituals lasted seven hundred years. In this book, he describes how mutual recognition falls apart by the Roman leaders of the church, under their observation of a simple country people and villagers known as the Benandanti. The sad truth was these simple country people were simply performing what seemed to them a harmless nighttime spiritual ritual, a procession of providence if you will, intended to produce an abundant and fruitful harvest. The Benandanti’s nighttime walks were a battle for fertility in the good human spirit. A spirituality connecting the good spirit of the Earth to human endeavor, armed with sprigs of fennel and sorghum stalks, of course, to defend against witches both male and female, in an attempt no evil befell their crops. I am instantly reminded of the theories surrounding the ancient rituals of Stonehenge, a simple people gathering around the pillars at the Spring or Summer solstices to ensure the same protection. Processions of people with similar earthly objects, making a ritual hike to their sacred place for worship. Yet, the Roman Catholic leaders, at the time of the Benandanti, at first not knowing what to make of them, would come to view these rituals as nighttime rituals, to gather in the darkness, to commune with Satan, and to have sex with him to produce demonic offspring. In short, Evil. Thus, ushering the complete and utter annihilation of the Benandanti and their ancient fertility rituals.
It has been said pragmatic accommodations are sought out in order to maneuver in dangerous environments. Robust and outspoken opinion is replaced with oblique suggestion or calculated silence. It was the strategy of writers in the Soviet Union and it was the strategy of the times during Roman Inquisitions. As the Roman Inquisitions sought to silence their challengers, so too, is the purpose of wireless electronic assaults and torture.
Freud wrote in 1927 “The Future of an Illusion”: “It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.” The political power of this position lies in it’s universalism, its assertion of common human need, the denial of which provoked people to rebel. As Terry Eagleton (1996) put it in a defense of essentialism, “Needs which are essential to our survival and well-being … [are] politically criterial: any social order which denies such needs can be challenged on the grounds that it is denying our humanity, which is usually a stronger argument against it than the case that it is flouting our contingent cultural conventions.” (p. 104)
Julia Kristiva’s “Power of Horror": In The Analysis Of A Dream
In making a connection with Julia Kristiva’s Power of Horror: An essay on abjection and the eruption of the Real in feminist theory to my personal trauma and wireless electronic torture, she draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the “I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal Complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist theory. The abject marks a “primal order" that escapes signification in the symbolic order, the term is used to refer to the human reaction of horror or vomit to the threatened breakdown in meaning caused by a loss of distinction between subject and objects which marks a difference between the self and the other (Kristeva, 1982).
The abject is a position that radically excludes and draws toward a place were meaning collapsed. It is neither object or subject, the abject is situated at a place before we entered into the symbolic order “Abjection preserves what existed before in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence of which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.” The abject is what marks “primal repression,” one that proceeds the establishment of the subject’s relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before the establishment of the opposition between consciousness and the unconscious. This primal repression is rooted in a time before the acquisition of language, that is the learned capacity to formulate with words to express, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions with words. However, on the level of our individual psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment from when we separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between “me" and “not me," that is between “me" and “(m)other." The abject is a precondition to narcissism, which is to say, a precondition for the narcissism of “the mirror stage," which occurs after we establish these primal distinctions. The abject at once represents the threat that meaning is breaking down and constitutes our reaction to such a breakdown and re-establishment of our primal repression. The abject has to do with “what disturbs, identity, system, and order." What does not respect borders, positions, rules, and so, can also include crimes like Auschwitz. Such crimes are abject because they draw attention to “the fragility of the law.”
We can take these associations with “the abject" in its relation to such a “breakdown” in what disturbs identity, system, order in actions and events that do not respect borders, positions, rules and so we can include within this category sadistic sexual assault, physical assault, and violent acts of bondage and discipline in BDSM as well as with the tethering of a subject with wireless electronic frequency with which to torture and abuse.
Eruption of the Real
Kristeva associates such a response with our rejection of death’s insistent materiality. Kristeva is quite careful to differentiate knowledge of death or the meaning of death (both of which can exist within the symbolic order) from the traumatic experience of being actually confronted with the sort of materiality that shown one’s own death:
A wound with blood and puss, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death — a flat encephalograph, for instance — I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit is what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.
The corpse especially exemplifies Kristeva’s concept since it literalizes the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object that is crucial for the establishment of identity and our entrance into the symbolic order. “What we are confronted with when we experience the trauma of seeing a human corpse (particularly the corpse of a friend or family member) is our own eventual death made palpably real.” As Kristeva puts it, “The corpse seen outside of God and outside of science is the upmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.”
Bridging the connection of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory and the eruption of the Real to my macabre dream of death, the corpse in a stone sarcophagus, decaying flesh, bloody water (fluids), and the flying blue eye ball:
“In my dream everything takes place in darkness, that is in the absence of daylight. In my dream, a woman I don’t recognize, has died. She has blondish hair and blue eyes and died rather young. I would say somewhere in her 40s. I remember her wearing a red hooded cloak that was obviously worn for warmth. It was made of some plush textile or red velvet. At this woman’s funeral the embalming process had been terribly botched. In my dream, the funeral arrangements went on as planned and looked terrible. It was terrible work as far as preparing a body after death and for the presentation for viewing, As far as I was concerned. In my dream, you could revisit this woman’s body, night after night. She was placed in a type of stone sarcophagus and the lid could be removed to view the body. Every night I went back to her sarcophagus, and the lid was removed for me to view the body. Every night I went back to her sarcophagus, and the lid was removed for me, and every night her body became more and more disfigured. Until one of the final viewings of her body, she was completely submerged in water, as the sarcophagus was filled with fresh clean water, it had a light illuminating the inside, similar to a light that would illuminate a pool at night. In the last viewing of her body, when the lid was removed, there was blood in the water and the body was gone. All that remained was her severed head. In my dream, one of her eyes was removed from her head and this woman’s eye was preserved and turned into a flying eyeball. Although, the eye ball didn’t look like a left over body part. It resembled more closely a mechanical Android eye. A computer eye ball that contained and preserved the woman’s personality, her identity as she presented herself as a human being on Earth. It could fly and maneuver in the air without the help of wings or a propeller and it could talk to you. It has the preserved intelligence of the dead woman. The eye was blue just like her living eye balls. In one sequence of the dream, I was accompanied by a male, of whom I did not recognize, and we were alerted by the authorities that there were reports from airplanes of a glowing round object in the night sky and reports that claimed this light was growing and getting larger, expanding itself. Well, it turned out that this large circular growing light in the night sky was in fact coming from the blue flying eyeball.”
This dream I had I am comparing to the psychoanalytic breakdown and collapse of mutual recognition between two separate subjectivities (Jessica Benjamin, 2018) and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of the “abject". I believe my dream is connected to my personal experience with my father’s long-term illness, having to care for him in a weak and decaying state for several years, all while suffering the effects of wireless electronic torture and harassment. This was my personal confrontation with my own mortality. What disturbs, identity, system, and order? Death and state assisted suicide definitely disturbs the living order of things. As does wireless electronic torture and wireless electronic harassment. In particular, our reaction to it. One would obviously think one’s reaction would be one of Horror and Terror. In that the abject represents the threat that meaning is breaking down and constitutes our reaction to such a breakdown, that the collapse represents “what does not respect borders, positions, rules and so one can include crimes such as Auschwitz. Genocide/Suicide.
It’s important to note I did not enter a schizoid state after the dream which might happen with patients suffering PTSD like after war veterans experience nightmares. That is, I did not have an impulse to smash up my house, kill my relatives/son. That involves Notes on Paranoid Mechanisms in Kleinian theory. Rather my dream, I feel is connected to, Julia Kristiva’s concept which has to do with the abject, and that is death itself and the crime of sanctioned killing, with the viewing of my dead father’s body after state assisted suicide. These are stories people don’t like to talk about. It’s a confrontation with death and the reality of one’s own precarious mortality. My interpretation was that this dream was rooted in trauma and the painful witnessing of my father’s protracted illness, suffering and subsequent suicide. I felt like a crime had been committed. That somehow, the whole world was so wrong for allowing sanctioned killing. I was forced to look at the abject, death and killing, repeatedly over the course of his illness that lasted several years and his final human act. My dream had surrealistic undertones, that a person’s entire identity (personality) could be uploaded and saved in a mechanical flying eye ball. An eye ball that could talk to you like Alexa artificial intelligence and fly without propulsion might be rooted in wish fulfillment but is probably not too far off from our technical realities. It was as if my dream was writing two chapters in a science fiction novel where the aspect of torture and self-inflicted death were being explained in what seemed like fantasy but was my, very real, reality. Where wireless electronic assaults and torture destroy a person’s health like the death camps at Auschwitz. It has also destroyed my dreaming and sound sleep. I want to say its effects evolved but the truth is men use technology and psychoanalytic techniques for malevolent purposes as well as benevolent ones. Historical Inquisitions and modern US foreign policy at CIA black sites are brothers from the same mother. Power, control, and domination.
Sources (in order as they appear in the post):
Chodorow, Nancy J. (2012). Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice. New York. Routledge. Relational Perspective Book Series. Volume 53.
First Do No Harm: The Paradoxical Encounters Of Psychoanalysis Warmaking and Resistance. (2010). Adrienne Harris and Steve Botticelli (Eds). New York. Routledge. Relational Perspective Book Series. Volume 45.
Lucy Holmes. (2008). The Internal Triangle: New Theories of Female Development. New York. Jason Aronson: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Jessica Benjamin. (2018). Beyond doer and done to: An intersubjectivity view of thirdness. New York. Routledge.
Judith Butler. (2009). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York. Verso.
Judith Butler. (2021). The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind. New York. Verso.
Kim Su Rasmussen. “Foucault’s Genealogy of Racism.” Theory, Culture, and Society. 28:5, 2011. (p. 35–51)
Ann Stoler. (1995). Race and the Education of Desire. Durham, NC. Duke University Press.
W.R.D. Fairbairn. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies On The Personality. London. Tavistock.
Cullen Murphy. (2012) God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Terry Eagleton. (1996). The Illusion of Postmodernism. Oxford, UK. Blackwell.
Julia Kristiva. (1983). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. by Leon S. Roudiez. New York. Columbia University Press.
Powers of Horror. Wikipedia.org. Retrieved January 23, 2024. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Horror
