The Theatre of Cruelty and Survival in Wireless Electronic Assault Torture as the Reproduction of Evil
Updated: March 4, 2024
“In the perpetration of evil, in the elaboration of the execution itself, there is always another story (Grand, 2000, pg. 41).”
In some people, but not all, suffering the long-term affects of malignant trauma in their childhoods; loss, guilt, and despair are void. Survival is modified and reshaped into a manic defense of cruelty and contempt (see Segal, 1964). Here, the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing and the sacrifice of the ‘Other.’ In a paranoid schizoid personality constellation, one buys oneself freedom from the penalty of dying, or being killed through the death of the other (Rank, 1936, p. 130). Such survivors of malignant trauma will not remember their own transgression. The survivor lives in a state of forgetfulness about their own crimes. They neither will register an accusation against their own oppressor. “In such cruelty and forgetfulness, the existential problem of survival is foreclosed, and all conflict silenced. The ethics of mind and the survival of the body no longer live in an impossible, but authentic antagonism. The survivor does not want death for wanting life, the survivor wants another’s moral abasement.
In this type of personality constellation, the malignant aggression doe not necessarily spell out murder, per se. Rather, in some personality types of malignant trauma, it can spell out humiliation, violation, cruelty, and acts of sadism inflicted onto the other. This is the reproduction of evil. It forecloses a subject-to-subject dialogue with a possible exchange of verbal or written communication which can potentiate reparation, justice and redemption. This potentiates the possibility of repair and cure.
How Wireless Electronic Assault Torture Can Be Abused in Methods of Mind Control
In social cultures in which victims are contained as depraved human subjects, the victims may come to long for redemption and acceptance by her oppressor(s). In her humiliation, annihilation, and degradation of her tortured body, she must turn away from herself toward another committing herself to a life of restitution and reparation to her oppressor(s)/perpetrator(s). In her newly formed inter-subjectivity she may find reprieve from the torture if she finds it through acts of reparation to her oppressors, she may find it through the slow embrace of her newly reshaped human bonding. In the abandonment of her former self, it is her repentance to her oppressor that proceeds her survival from death. As torture brings the victims to the brink of the ultimate annihilation, its purpose is to induce the fear of death. Today, it is my belief, this is accomplished through the acquisition of health insurance and entry into the mental health care system and psychiatry which makes use of modern technological innovations. Because this form of treatment employs the use of violence through the infliction of torture, it is highly concerning and the ethical uses to its practices should be reconsidered.
The psychological affects of brain overload (ie: torture techniques) is to facilitate changes in awareness. In the process of extreme influence, when sufficient pain is inflicted on a person, the victim ends by feeling sympathy and affection toward the perpetrator. This is known as Stockholm Syndrome. When a person is held in a captive situation and threatened with extreme violence, torture, or death the immediate instinct is self-preservation. Thus, any sign of kindness displayed to the victim by the perpetrator, the victim immediately senses that they can preserve their life by pledging allegiance to their captor. If 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. Through what is known as the politics of experience in mind control techniques, a person or group exploits the right one person has over another to validate or invalidate the other’s experience (Laing, 1967). Laing saw the family, and by extension other social frame works, as arenas of the struggle to control behavior by defining experience. Laing left us penetrating accounts of how he who gets to define experience gets to control it, and the subtle ways this is done by sick individuals in families. As with totalitarian re-education programs discipline mostly does not need brute force; it rather operates by a calculated gaze and by exercise (timetables, drills, and rituals). Foucault’s description of the organized sadism and the indirect, regimented violence endemic to the incarceration system, and too, to the system Targeted Individuals find themselves living in, brings out the affinity with thought reform regimens. In short, re-education programs. It is the mining and cultivation on the affects of these re-education programs that have been the most creative insights and grand achievemnents of the thought reformers. After all, re-education would be an abstract and quite ineffectual process had the victim not been subjected to the emotional sloughing off of the former self. One’s exposure and amplification of negative emotions toward the self was aided by the work of the state panopticon searching for degrees of authenticity. Here, I could start a discussion about how the incarcerated population comprises mostly black inmates. But that is something I leave you to ponder in how it relates to my story as a Targeted Individual suffering Electronic Harassment. Because this is an important aspect of the harassment and abuse I have endured from the public, in public spaces from the black community (in fairness, from whites as well ) in what can be described as a form of “malignant dissociative contagion.”
Here, I’d like to defer to how rules and norms are informally formed in different cultural social groups. Cultural values and rules are carefully crafted to institute a symbolic representation of that group’s culture. When a malignant narcissist, wants to humiliate, annihilate, and degrade the ‘Other’ in an attempt to elude the death fear, the object-other which is in conflict with the malignant narcissist’s sense of superior self, all conflict must be silenced. To create cultural values, rules and norms, that prohibit the care of self, forbidding exercise, healthy eating habits, promoting smoking and its continuation, and drinking in excess, behaviors that undermine a person’s wellness and long-term health, is an act of malignant sadistic cruelty in what can be best described as “the reproduction of evil.” To further facilitate adherence to these cultural rules and norms, through the use of wireless electronic assault torture (radio frequency — similarly used in electro-convulsive shock therapy) to move the victim into a state of obedient compliance through repetitive torture (ie: abuse) which issues forth the victim’s relinquishing of her former self to move the victim into submissive compliance and obedience is nothing more than a re-capitulation to Bush’s Foreign Policy post 9/11 in the development of illegal detention and torture programs of foreign nationals at Guantanamo. In sadistic terms, it is nothing more than the chewing-up and spitting out of the victim which is rooted in the anal-sadistic universe of perversion.
At the opening of this essay, I included a quote by Sue Grand. “In the perpetration of evil, in the elaboration of the execution itself, there is always another story.” Regarding my story, there are at least three other stories associated with it, at the least! How did I find myself being wirelessly electronically tortured? And why is it being used so violently against me for seemingly insignificant reasons? My torture increased significantly in 2009. It is for this reason, I am using 2009 as a point of inception which begins my timeline of events. This year is significant because it is two years following my report of sexual assault to the MCPO (Dec. 2006) and two years following entry into the Mercer County Board of Social Services (Jan. 2007). It is the year following the United States banking failure with Fannie and Freddy Mac within the housing industry (2008). And eight years after 9/11 and Bush’s Foreign Policy changes that essentially turned the United States of America into a foreign nation and turned all its citizens into foreign nationals for the purpose of eavesdropping surveillance and information gathering in the service security sector (2001). The critical element to any violent attack and the special area of concern for psychoanalytic inquiry was, and remains, motivation, especially unconscious motivation. To re-iterate the psychological state of our nation following 9/11 and the hidden purpose behind wireless electronic torture of Targeted Individuals also known as Electronic Harassment follows in the aftermath of a narcissistic blow.
“The attack provided the narcissistic blow that brought broad support, or at least acquiescence, to the preemptive use of military force. The alacrity with which the American people were willing to go forward with an invasion of a country innocent of the attack (Iraq), illegal detention, and even torture indicates that the assault on the World Trade Center evoked a previously split-off grandiosity and its associated sense of entitlement (pg. 162 — First Do No Harm).”
In fact the U.S. government could not move forward with their pre-planned preemptive invasion of Iraq until 9/11 occurred. The attack provided the psychic ammunition with which to fuel an unjust take over of the country’s oil. It provided the U.S. with a much need “psychic cause.”
How Surviving Abuse Is Transformed In The Reproduction of Evil
In her book, “The Reproduction of Evil: A clinical and Cultural Perspective,” Sue Grand recounts a case study of a woman named Donna, at the same time she herself was battling a mysterious illness. She had developed a failing immune response to potential viral and bacterial pathogens and had become increasingly resistant to antibiotics. As a result, she endured serious re-occuring infections. She continued to maintain office hours and made the decision to take on Donna as a new patient. Donna was an intelligent, middle-aged, professional who volunteered in a hospice with terminal AIDS patients and cancer patients. Manifestly kind to the point of self abnegation, she sought treatment for sexual difficulties, claiming her female lover repudiated Donna’s advances. Donna possessed the type of schizoid aggression which is insidious, cold, paranoid, and inhumane (Guntrip, 1971). They worked hard together, they had insights, Donna felt nothing. She always did the “right” thing, but was devoid of any emotive core.
After six months, she developed a cough. After two weeks of the cough, she made a rather bland announcement that she had viral “walking” pneumonia, although she barely felt ill. Manifestly unconcerned about her own health, she induced in her analyst the terror that she had been infected with a potentially lethal infection. In her state of compromised immunity and resistance to antibiotics, her analyst accepted her into treatment as a denial of her own mortality. The Donna she had taken into treatment was a healer. Together they were grandiose. If her analyst had disavowed the prospect of infection, so Donna had disavowed her vulnerable self: she had no aperture for infection, no infant self continuously in the process of dying.
Her analyst confronted Donna about Donna’s recurring infections and explained to her that she was immune-suppressed, although she did not have AIDS or cancer, she would provide Donna with a referral. Instead, Donna pursued a three-week treatment to cure her walking viral pneumonia. They continued their sessions via the phone. After three weeks Donna returned to in-person sessions. Although she felt conflicted about returning, she reported a sense of empowerment. She experienced feeling and sensation as she released her anger. It seemed that the two were functioning as analyst and patient. But her analyst refused to know that nothing was neat and that nothing was held in the containing parameters of their goodness.
From time to time, she continued to articulate anger at her analyst’s disruption of Donna’s treatment. Her analyst began to realize she had to rely on Donna’s accuracy and truthfulness when Donna stated she was not contagious. This began the analyst’s first encounter with real annihilation. “I did not feel as if I was relying on a patient for my life; I was relying on a patient for my life. If she was wrong, it could kill me.” Although her analyst did not, as of yet, experience her wanting to kill her, she rather experienced her as someone who was capable of casually killing her. Recalling her speaking with pseudo-concern of all the deadly infectious diseases she could contract in the hospice. Donna insinuated to her analyst, in not so uncertain terms, that this incident would not be the last. Her analyst realized she had refused to hear something Donna was struggling to tell her, that their danger was present and irremediable, that her hate was murderous and without cease; and that her analyst’s abandonment of her was infinite and had no conclusion. As a result, her analyst could not hear her metaphor of an infant-dying. Her analyst’s deafness was due to the fact that she required her own antithesis: a wall, solid, immune, and unbreachable. Donna required access, symbiosis, toxic permeability. Where her analyst was in search of endings, borders, and containers; Donna was interested in transmitting her toxic substance via infectious flus, colds, pneumonia and her analyst was criticized for not accepting it. As a result of this “split-off” communication, her analyst realized that Donna could be in another incubation period, and she would never know it until it was too late. Thus, her analyst could always be in the process of being murdered. When her analyst tried to leave Donna beyond the wall, voiceless, Donna would not remain silent beyond the wall. Donna began to insinuate that her analyst was delusional, malingering, and weak. Donna was strong. When her analyst spoke of Donna’s hatred toward her, she attributed it to her analyst’s madness. When her analyst spoke to her of her analyst’s abandonment of her and the pain of dependency, she attributed it to her analyst’s madness. As a result, Donna was lost in the foreclosure against her maternal symbolic. Donna had no feelings of love and tenderness toward her symbolic mother in the transference. Her message was clear; “Mother me or I’ll kill you!”
The Second Story Behind Donna’s Foreclosure
Donna’s analyst uncovered Donna’s mother was a single parent who spent long days locked in her own bedroom. As an infant, and as a toddler, Donna was left in pools of urine, in foul diapers with only scraps of food and no water. Each night Donna’s affectionate uncle would stop by. She would be briefly awoken to moments of human contact, and then, he would depart for long hours of silence. Disturbed by the neglect of this child, he entreated various relatives to care for Donna during the daytime. They did so inconsistently, and impersonally. When Donna was just past three years old, the uncle moved in and her mother disappeared altogether for long periods of treatment. In subsequent years, Donna’s mother lived with them. Her mother was withdrawn and socially humiliating, although never overtly abusive. As a teenager, Donna completely repudiated her mother as a psychotic embarrassment, identifying exclusively with her kind and self-sacrificing uncle. Her analyst now understood that Donna had a raging and abandoned infant self beneath her numb exterior and her analyst knew that she had become the mad and abandoning mother figure.
There were two memories Donna held in amusement. At age 10, she urinated in her mother’s tea, and had watched as her mother gagged while drinking it. Donna’s mother looked confused; Donna felt triumphant. At age 12, Donna left fresh excrement in a pile of her mother’s clean laundry, with similar sentiments. When her uncle discovered these episodes, he laughed and did nothing to stop her. In his laughter, this self-sacrificing uncle was transformed, momentarily, into a lively being. Because Donna could not turn to her own mother with her own dependent longings, nor could she reparatively “heal” her mother’s emotional illness. (*) But she could create a bond with her uncle and identify with him and restore him to an affective life through their mutual torment of the depressed mother. And so, her warm human rage at her mother’s abandonment became consolidated into a cold and remorseless cruelty, shedding light onto her lesbian sexual difficulties.
Through a psychoanalytic lens, Donna’s need and abandonment caused terrible pain and gave rise to a rage which then became cruelty. Donna’s infant self was likewise met with internal contempt and cruelty. Although Donna’s analyst knew that she could not be infected through casual neglect, but rather with sadistic intent. Donna chose to end treatment with a schizoid compromise. Citing a series of concrete impediments (fees, hours, insurance limitations), she indicated that continued sessions were not feasible. She did not, would not, attribute her termination to their shared mutual destructiveness. Donna’s need to be “properly” mothered and her analyst’s need for placing prohibitions on Donna for her “infectious toxicity.”
Conclusion
In the absence of the reparative death, survivors live in an abortive relation to reparative hunger. Those who retain bestial guilt and bestial memory survive in masochism and tend toward revictimization. In this masochism, the survivor sustains the condition of existential mindfulness, in which the ethical contradictions of survival cannot be dissociated or foreclosed. She cannot forget that mankind “is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures . . . He is never free from the dichotomy of his existence: he cannot rid himself of his mind, even if he would want to; he cannot rid himself of his body as long as he is alive — and his body makes him want to be alive (Fromm, 1964, pg. 253).
And while she turns accusation and remembrance against the self, she retains an image of goodness. She exists in a nascent depressive subjectivity, in the potentiality of object-related concern and hatred.
This potentiality resides in the predicament of masochism. For the masochistic survivor has often found that her own bestial gesture was made by the perpetrator’s deadness, by his satisfaction and contempt. In such a context, an immoral act continues to be registered as immoral: the perpetrator’s very contempt consolidates the victim’s guilt and sense of otherness. As long as the survivor retains a sense of agency and remorse, some autonomous fragment of the survivor continues to live in reparative longing. And if she has had some opportunity to offer tenderness to other victims in their own abasement, she will retain the memory and the inspiration of goodness (see Todorov, 1996).
But for those like Donna for whom loss, guilt, and despair are void, survival is transmuted into the manic defense of cruelty and contempt (see Segal, 1964). Here, “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed” (Rank, 1936, p. 130). Such survivors exist in the condition of forgetfulness; they will neither remember their own transgression, nor will they register an accusation against their own oppressor. In such cruelty and forgetfulness, the existential problem of survival is foreclosed, and all conflict is silenced. The ethics of the mind and the survival of the body no longer live in an impossible, but authentic antagonism. The survivor does not want death for wanting life; she wants another’s moral abasement.
If the good, masochistic survivor locates her nascent goodness in the interpersonal conditions of her trauma, so the cruel survivor likewise locates the origins of her cruelty.
In the minds of victims of malignant trauma turned perpetrator, where there was either schizoid deadness or murderous chaos within the perpetrator, there is now warmth, and apparently benign communion with the victim. The perpetrator is manifestly restored to “sanity” by the victim’s inhuman act. Now survival, ethical concern, reparative longings, and agency suddenly appear coextensive, where they have been in existential conflict: the victim can be “good” and nonetheless take manic flight from the memory of annihilation and despair. Reparative and manic defenses collapse into one another in a labyrinth of defensive sadism. One “loves” through the restoration of one’s perpetrator; one “loves” through the denial of pain and of one’s own history; one “loves” through the torture of another. In a modified sense, this dynamism is operative in Donna’s family system: she brings her depressed uncle to life by tormenting the mother, even as she consolidates her attachment to him as her only available object. Such processes may underlie what Lifton (1986) describes as the “healing-killing paradox” of warfare and genocidal culture, wherein one is encouraged to kill in order to “heal” one’s own damaged or endangered community. Once immersed in the “healing-killing paradox,” one experiences no moral transgression; one need not want death for wanting life. One need only inflict death. And so, the reproduction of evil locates its endgame (Grand, 2000, pg. 112–114).
(*) Since Donna’s sexual orientation is foreclosed against the opposite sex (paternal symbolic), this makes me wonder about the extent of early childhood abuse and neglect plays on sexual orientation in the development of homosexuality. Since the psychic foreclosure against same-sex parent (maternal symbolic) is also present, it makes one wonder about how people creatively endeavor to recuperate the lost treasures of childhood such as the recuperation of “lost objects” and how they creatively devise ways to possess adequate maternal care and maternal love.
Primary Sources:
First Do No Harm: The Paradoxical Encounters of psychoanalysis, warmaking, and resistance. (Adrienne Harris and Steven Botticelli, editors). New York. Routledge. Relational Perspective Books, Volume 45.
Sue Grand. (2000). The Reproduction of Evil: A clinical and cultural perspective. Hillsdale, NJU. The Analytic Press. Opening quote, Chapter 3, “Child Abuse and the Problem of Knowing History.” Other source related material included from Chapter 5, “Malignance and the Bestiality of Survival,” (pg. 101–114).
Other References:
Segal, H. (1964). Introduction to the works of Melanie Klein. New York. Basic Books.
Rank, O. (1936). Will Therapy and Truth and Reality. New York. Knopf.
Laing, R.D. (1967). The politics of experience and the bird of paradise. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Guntrip, H. (1971). Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy and the Self. New York. Basic Books.
Fromm, E. (1964). The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil. New York. Harper & Row.
Todorov, T. (1996). Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camp. New York. Metropolitan Books.
Lifton, R.J. (1986). The Nazi Doctors. New York. Basic Books.
