The Phenomenology of Gang Stalking, The Lacanian Mirror, and H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man: A comparative analysis
Updated: August 5, 2021
“Yet the gang stalking experience has been subject to little scientific study. This paper reports an attempt to elicit the core phenomena allowing them “to emerge de novo” through the qualitative analysis of accounts of individuals who describe being gang-stalked.” [quotation marks added by the author] (1)
I found the phrase “to emerge de novo” interesting because this phenomenon is a relatively new phenomenon but for women, it has its historical roots in oppressive behavior by mainstream male patriarchy. Although this paper’s use of 50 descriptions they found that satisfy the inclusion criteria identified from the internet and subjected to content analysis, I find an association with “Fifty Shades of Grey” to discuss the sadistic attacks taken upon innocent citizens. The study confirmed the seriousness of the sequelae of the gang-stalking experience.
Stalking Defined
Stalking denotes a pattern of repeated, unwanted intrusion by one person into the life of another in a manner that causes distress, disruption, or fear. The concept was introduced in the late 1980s to describe a form of interpersonal aggression that, although common through the ages, had come to be socially unacceptable in the western world after recognition of equal rights for women and the prosecution of domestic violence.
This behavior was formerly acceptable prior to and through the Women’s Civil Rights Movements and Black Civil Rights Movements and acts as a testament to violent aggression found in men. His proclivity towards boundary violations, war, destruction, and the tearing down of individual autonomy. At the heart of the psychological research in understanding the phenomenon lies the paranoid-schizoid position.
Stalking can be employed by one person or it can be employed by a group of individuals some of who act as “proxy stalkers.” The researchers in this paper I have cited in the opening quote have taken gang stalking to mean stalking committed by three or more individuals.
This information was not part of the research paper but it can be assumed the primary stalker usually enjoying some type of respect and comraderies among the group of other stalkers with whom he engages and who may be deemed as friends and “business associates.” Here I would like to note the existence of some type of “mafia mentality” and “entitlement” to another person’s privacy.
Here I would like to note the importance in research conflict trends and conflict drivers which will place the stalker in a position where he takes control over his targets (subjects). Since there is the element of the use of multiple players as stalkers, the research paper pointed out that when there were three or more people committing the stalking, it was much harder for the victims to identify his or her assailant (6.8%) and could not even identify one single assailant. This is problematic because when you go to the police they want “a name” of someone the victim thinks might be responsible for the stalking. At which point the victim may be at a loss to identify her stalker because it becomes confusing when three or more stalkers are involved.
The researchers of this study noted a blind spot of the study which was the paper’s inability to define the fear component of stalking. In cases of coercive control, the fear component usually manifests as withdrawal, and/or the victim may shut down completely. I compare the movie The Invisible Man which was released in theatres in 2020. It reprises the novel originally written by H.G. Wells in 1897 and to which another novel was written with the same title in 1952 by Ralph Ellison. An aspect of the component of fear is the manifestation of sadism toward the stalker. At the end of the movie, the main character, Cecelia Kass, believes she is being stalked and gaslit by her wealthy, but dead husband. He leaves her $5 million but his last will and testament stipulate she must not be found guilty of a crime or lose her sanity in order to keep the money. At which point, we can come to an understanding of the reason the entire deceptive plot unfolded. Find Cecelia Kass guilty of murder, and thereby, criminally insane. The historically themed plot of the fin de siècle culture rears its ugly head again. Find the innocent, defiant, and capricious women “crazy.”
The similarities in the historical psychiatric abuses of women, that is to say, females who find themselves gang stalked with electronic targeted physical assaults and psychotronic torture, and the plot in the movie The Invisible Man are uncanny. In the end, like most abused women, they seek solutions by fighting back using the same method and tactics used by their victimizers. In the movie character’s case, she commits murder and makes it look like her husband committed suicide. The smoke and mirrors of deception, the illusion cast by “the mirror.” In the movie's case, “the mirror” is Adrian, and his reflection is cast upon this new identity that emerges in Cecilia. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, at least in theory, the mirror stage can also be achieved through inducing fear. Because the inability to define the fear component of the stalking paper cited is at a loss, we may be unable to draw any foresight for what that might mean (e.g., humiliation). When fear finally steals away a person’s capacity for making rational decisions, it re-shapes the subject (in this case Cecilia Kass) in the image of “the mirror.” And thus, we can come to an understanding of the biopolitic that is involved in using electronic torture and psychiatric abuse against innocent victims. Classic, textbook, smoke, and mirrors of the Victorian Age emerging de novo in the form of advanced technological weapons and the stereotypical “Miss Havisham” images, the spectral spinster figure haunting western imagination as an emblem of ostensibly “unjustified” and “unjustifiable” female rage. Thereby uncovering the repository for masculine fears and fantasies about women, age, sexuality, and power. The conventional representations of “Miss Havisham” is that envisaged image of irrational, imbittered, and narcissistic old woman and those that construct her as a representation of unjustifiable rage against the intersecting forces of patriarchy, capitalism, and toxic masculinity.
“An angry woman is an unstable one, her rage never able to be understood as something correct and justifiable, only unwieldy and volatile.” ~Clementine Ford (2)
This places Adrian as one of the most pathetic and disgusting human beings imaginable. As “the mirror,” he manifests through psychological conjuring the image of a type of “Miss Havisham” from Charles Dickens’ play “Great Expectations.” Havisham’s love does not bring forth love, but instead greed, betrayal, and deception. In the analysis of The Invisible Man, “Miss Havisham” is really Andrian Griffin. Like Miss Havisham, he preserves himself and his house just as it was while he was married to Cecilia claiming he was beat-up by his brother and held prisoner in his own house. Shutting out the outside world, he feigns suicide. To exact his revenge on his wife, Cecilia, for leaving him he heartlessly manipulates her until she becomes as bitter and lost in her own pain as he. This is what electronic targeted physical assaults (torture) and psychotronic torture tries to accomplish. Adrian, in using his experimental optics suits to acquire invisibility, uses advancing technology as a transitional object to feign off the fear and anxiety of the depressive type of loss.
Additionally, in my analysis of my gang stalking with electronic targeted assaults and psychotronic torture, it is important to note that the deception in the vertical arrangement of daughter-mother, in the comparative literary symbolism of Great Expectations, written by Charles Dickens, of Miss Havisham and her daughter Estella, is a stereotypical assumption within a family. I believe the analysis of Miss Havisham is of a wealthy, eccentric old woman who lives in a manor house where she is often manic and seems insane, flitting around in her home wearing a faded wedding dress, keeping a decaying feast on her table, and surrounding herself with clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine. Because Miss Havisham was jilted by her fiancé minutes before her wedding, and now she has a vendetta against all men. She deliberately raises her daughter Estella to be the tool of her vengeance, training her beautiful ward to break men’s hearts. This symbolism is commonly cast upon women labeled “vamps” or “insatiable animals” called “cougars.” These are symbols of feminine evil rooted in fin de siècle culture. These are mostly delusional representations. One may appear “Miss Havisham” like or even “Emily Grierson” like, but no one is an exact replica of “Miss Havisham” or William Faulkner’s “Emily Grierson” although uncanny similarities may appear in actual cases. It’s important to note that stereotypes don’t serve us very well. But in my case, it is a case of the projection of feminine evil onto Object other or the “femme fatale” symbolic manifesting out of rejection which can cast a bullseye on people’s backs and makes them targets for violence. This is how violence toward transgender females in which eccentric and strange behaviors are associated with “evil.” Just because you may act “weird,” even violent, doesn’t mean you are crazy or Aboriginal. Even Winston Churchill had more in common with Hitler than history would like to tell. Why? Churchill, as a white supremacist, took part in what he called “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” in Africa. He believed Africans were violent, not because the Brits were invading their land, but because they had a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill.” According to Churchill, these Africans were violent, not because they were defending themselves against invasion, but because they were fundamentally “unrefined animals.”
I believe this was someone’s twisted perception about my family’s vertical matriarchy and patriarchy and which has contributed to our electronic torture/targeting and psychotronic torture. This symbolic, mean, old spinster, witch, and warlock alike, has been cast and recast in many literary works. Perhaps the one re-casting of the warped and twisted character of Emily Grierson written by William Faulkner entitled “A Rose for Emily.” Instead of a decaying feast left on the table, like in Miss Havisham’s case, Emily Grierson kept her love interest, Homer Barron’s, decaying corpse in the bedroom, perfectly preserved and to which she slept with every night.
It is interesting to note, that in Faulkner’s work, there is a connection to antebellum Southern aristocracy and the ruling will of the Queen. This themed absolutism, the law of the mother, law of the land in matricidal theory are bound in notions of The Dead Mother which reverberate in Miss Havisham’s character cold-hearted vendetta against all men. Idols of Perversity and fantasies of feminine evil of fin de siècle culture. My point is, sometimes it’s not the woman who is the evil person pulling the strings, it’s a projection being cast upon the woman by a hidden operator seeking to dethrone her and who most often is a man.
Sources (not in alphabetical order):
(1) Sheridan, L., James, D., & Roth, J. (2020). The Phenomenology of Group Stalking (‘Gang-Stalking’): A Content Analysis of Subjective Experiences. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(7),
(2) Nelson, .C. (2002). Miss Havisham’s Rage: Imagining the ‘Angry Woman’ in Adaptations of Dickens’ Famous Character. Adaptation, Advance Article,
(3) LitCharts.com. Great Expectations. Characters. Miss Havisham. Retrieved online August 4, 2021. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/great-expectations/characters/miss-havisham
(4) Gaddini, R. (2003). The Precursors of Transitional Objects and Phenomena. Psychoanalysis and History, 5(1), 53–61
(5) W.D. Winnicott. (1951) Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomenon. Retrieved online August 4, 2021. https://d3aencwbm6zmht.cloudfront.net/asset/71961/Winnicott_ch1.pdf
(6) Southworth, C., Finn, J., Dawson, S., Fraser, C., & Tucker, S. (2007). Intimate Partner Violence, Technology, and Stalking. Violence Against Women, 13(8), 842–856.
(7) Simonson, P., Morooka, J., Xiong, B. & Bedsole, N. (2019). The Beginnings of Mass Communication: A Transnational History. Journal of Communication, 69(5),
(8) Christoff, K. (2014). Dehumanization in organizational settings: some scientific and ethical considerations. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8,
(9) Chescheir, M., & Schulz, K. (2004). The development of a capacity for concern in antisocial children: Winnicott’s concept of human relatedness. Clinical Social Work Journal, 17(1), 24–39.
(10) Wieland, C. (1996). Matricide and Destructiveness: Infantile Anxieties and Technological Culture. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 12(3).
(11) Wikipedia.com. “A Rose for Emily.” A Rose for Emily — Wikipedia
