In man’s unceasing endeavor to manage his affairs and appetites, throughout time with unyielding skill and determination, there are phenomenons and peculiarities to consider.
Artwork: Maelstrom, surrealism, oil on canvas. Work created by the author.
This weekend I took advantage of a seven-day free trial of STARZ and finally watched a movie I always wanted to see but never had the time, Girl Interrupted. The main character, Suzanne Kaysen, portrayed by Winnona Ryder in the movie was facing a major change and a decision-making process. She graduated high school and was facing a new life ahead of her. She begins to experience symptoms of mental illness and she makes a suicide attempt by trying to down an entire bottle of aspirin with an entire bottle of vodka to make the symptoms “stop.” She was diagnosed with the following:
Psychoneurotic Depressive Reaction, highly intelligent but in denial of her condition. Personality pattern disturbances, resistant, mixed type. R/O undifferentiated Schizophrenia
DIAGNOSIS: Borderline Personality Disorder
This led to my personal investigation into finding exactly what “psychoneurotic depressive reactions” are and how they may be defined.
Psychoneurotics are classified by many different symptoms. A psychoneurotic reaction could be defined as a young girl developing an eating disorder (anorexia/bulimia) after a boy rejects them in young adolescence. Psychoneurotic behavior is self-harming and masochistic in nature which opposes psychotic behavior. The most common sign of psychoneurotic behavior is attempted suicide. Somatic delusions can be one symptom of a psychoneurotic’s condition and Anorexics are one group that make up the class of psychoneurotics that may require hospitalization because of their long-term denial of food. As was the case of UK Big Brother TV star Nikki Grahamewho just passed away at the age of 38 after her long-time battle with Anorexia. Other definitions of psychoneurotic have included the inability or difficulty to respond to stress or stressful events and situations that are otherwise considered part of everyday normal life experiences. These stressful episodes may even “trigger” patients after they’ve achieved recovery. It is characterized as a person’s level of anxiety and response to a stressful event that is not in direct proportion to their environment. Usually, psychoneurotic individuals are living with some type of past trauma where benign events can pose real threats to their well-being. In my case, one of my psychoneurotic responses was excessive exercise and I believe the electronic targeting and electronic targeted assaults to my mind and body may be due to some veiled identity trying to control my behavior from expressing itself again.
Psychoneurotics are neurotics that experience some type of psychosis or break in reality. Neurotics can be identified, especially, when based on the emotional conflict in which an impulse that has been blocked seeks expression in a disguised response or symptom. This is often seen in cases where the impulse has been cut-off or denied by a person or event like in the death of a loved one. A psychoneurotic response may be expressed as the behavior known as “cutting” when a person feels anxious or stressed. It can also be expressed as a form of hysteria in the form of a conversion disorder. Breuer and Freud (1957) in their book, Studies on Hysteria, characterized hysteria by the conversion of psychic excitation associated with an unacceptable idea into a physical symptom. The need to perform some ritualized behavior, activity, or it can manifest as a physical symptom (tummy ache or headaches). Conversion of the psychic excitation associated with an unacceptable idea (castration, rejection, abjection) can turn psychic energy into excessive physical activity as one mode of its expression. The reason hysteria has disappeared from the psychiatric literature is that there are many different diagnoses today that would have fallen under the heading “hysteria.” To better understand each diagnosis and how they are different from one another, psychiatrists now have various subheadings under the umbrella term “hysteria.”
Speaking on the compulsion to repeat the trauma re-enactment and revictimization in masochistic neurosis, Alfred Adler wrote in New Principles for the Practice of Individual Psychology:
“Thus, the neurosis and the psyche represent an attempt to free oneself from all the constraints of the community by establishing a counter-compulsion. This latter is so constituted that it effectively faces the peculiar nature of the surroundings and their demands. Both of these convincing inferences can be drawn from the manner in which this counter-compulsion manifests itself and from the neuroses selected.”
One key difference between the neurotic and the psychotic is that the neurotic holds the possibility for the introjection of castration while the psychotic is in complete foreclosure against the castration. When a neurotic turns psychoneurotic the foreclosure is usually against the self.
Aspects of psychoneurotic symptoms include, but are not limited to; suicide attempts, successful suicide attempts, suicide ideations, schizophrenia, clinical depression where the person cannot care for themselves, seclusion, cutting, and other somatic delusions which may not only be expressed as anorexia (self-starvation). In other words, alternate body dysmorphia issues. That is, some other fixed false belief the individual has about their body, a body part, or body organ, etc., that makes the individual believe their body or some part of their body is somehow grossly deformed. People who carry out excessive plastic surgeries to correct a body part that is somehow always “too big” or “too crooked,” constantly putting themselves under the surgeon’s scalpel may be considered psychoneurotic.
NEUROTIC PATIENTS are likely to be thrown off balance by external stress and strain which can exacerbate symptoms and worsen outcomes. (e.g., gang stalking, electronic targeting, and electronic targeted assaults by sociopaths/psychopaths which the police are unable to help individuals defend themselves against in what has been termed gang stalking). External stress that is persistent and evenly applied can wear down even normal patients and cause depression which, in the neurotic patient’s case, can lead to suicide attempts, other self-harming behaviors such as drug use, alcohol consumption, or successful suicide. Seclusion and feelings of inferiority or worthlessness may also be experienced as a result.
NORMAL PEOPLE under normal circumstances do not usually think of suicide as a solution. Even in the presence of hostile environments normal people can usually work through the problem or find a solution with which to resolve or eliminate the problem. Psychopaths can create even greater obstacles for psychoneurotics who are already at a disadvantage at working through problems. As a result, the psychoneurotic may try and commit suicide or they may worsen into deeper symptomology.
In the movie Girl Interrupted, the character portrayed by Angelina Jolie, Lisa, was a sociopath/psychopath who pushed the hand of two other patients toward committing successful suicide. She does not take responsibility nor see that her words can truly affect people. She’s the dangerous liaison. She’s the one who deceives you while enticing you to play her little games. Everyone loves Lisa’s character. She can provide the force of life pulsing through the atmosphere of an otherwise boring party. Her influence holds the potential to make others believe their life, without her, will be so much more BORING and vacant. But in reality, what she does is unwittingly distract and deceive these individuals through cunning seductions, manipulations, and witty sarcasm that indulge her desires with psychopathic enjoyments while distracting others from achieving their full potential and a lifetime of success. She has no remorse and her heart is as cold as a corpse’s hand. She enjoys pushing people’s buttons and then watching them cave in the theatrical stage she just set up for them. Sadly, many psychoneurotics/neurotics may find themselves attracted to people like her.
It has been postulated that psychoneurotics symptoms may be the result of maternal depravations. In this light, the psychoanalytic theory that most aptly applies to the psychoneurotic would revolve around theories pertaining to matricide. Amber Jacob’s in her book “On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother” referred to the paranoid-schizoid splitting as belonging to a “dereliction from the maternal breast” in the desire we have to be truly loved and accepted by this Being but being abandoned by it, turns us out into madness:
“All desire is connected to madness. But apparently one desire has chosen to see itself as wisdom, moderation, truth, and has left the other to bear the burden of the madness it did not want to attribute to itself, recognize in itself. This relationship between desire and madness comes into its own, for both man and woman, in the relationship with the mother. But all too often, man washes his hands of it and leaves it to woman — women (Jacobs, 2007, p. 144).”
Two of the psychoneurotics in the movie Girl Interrupted, Jamie and Suzanne, both had issues with maternal depravations in identification with Lisa’s character. Both characters found themselves attracted to her personality. When Lisa left them, Jamie completed successful suicide while Suzanne fell into an even deeper depression. These two patient’s connections to a psychopath (Lisa) with worsening outcomes cannot be understated.
If we consider Julia Kristeva’s book Black Sun she makes quite a few points. Firstly, she posits the existence of a matricidal drive. Secondly, she equates the loss of mother with matricide. Thirdly, she asserts that, if the mother is not killed in the service of individuation and development, melancholia and depression will be the result, in an attempt to turn the aggression against the self. In other words, one either kills/damages the object, or the self. This view seems to be in accordance with the theory of the death instinct and with Freud’s theory of melancholia and the superego. It does not examine ways in which aggression and destructiveness can be worked through or transformed. The choice is, basically, to turn the aggression either towards the object, or towards the self.
For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine qua none of individuation, provided that it takes place under optimal circumstances and can be eroticized … The lesser or greater violence of matricidal drive, depending on individuals and the milieu’s tolerance entails, when it is hindered, its inversion on the self; the maternal object, having been introjected, the depressive or the melancholic putting to death of the self is what follows, instead matricide. (Kristeva 1989, pp. 27-8).
For a paranoid schizoid male, this might mean making the projection onto a woman and then carrying out the sorted little details. Since little boys retain the phallus and identify with the idealized/powerful father, killing or damaging the maternal object is more likely to take place as projection. For the paranoid schizoid female, this might mean killing the maternal object within through a variety of self-destructive acts, but more potently suicide.
Jacobs, Amber. (2007) On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother. New York. Columbia University Press. “Irigaray frequently refers to Greek myth as the place where “traces” of a powerful and benign mother-daughter relation can be found, reclaimed, and used to rectify what she terms women’s “dereliction” …. part of the vast simulacrum of manifest mother-daughter relations that are produced by the male imaginary …. cannot be effectively used for feminism unless they are decoded and restructured according to an approach that is concerned with moving out of the realm of description and/or projection and into that of theory. It is not enough to go back to myth and describe and promote the apparently once harmonious mother-daughter relation before the patriarchal order effected its violent obliteration (pg. 137).”
Irigaray, Luce, The Bodily Encounter with the Mother, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
Kristeva, J. (1989) Black Sun. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wieland, Christina. (1996) Matricide and Destructiveness: Infantile Anxieties and Technological Culture. British Journal of Psychotherapy 12(3), pp. 300-313.
King Farouk of Egypt in foreign exile after he was thrown out of power in 1952.
I cannot even begin to think of a better quotation to open this discussion than from the film “Angels and Demons” when the killer said to Tom Hanks and the female physicist he was with, in the Vatican, that he wasn’t paid to kill them, and so, was going to let them live but if they chose to follow him, well, then that was a different story. He issued the following warning to them before he left:
“Be careful. These are men of God.”
King Farouk of Egypt came to symbolize over-indulgence, in excess, corruption, in-effective weak governance, and kleptocracy as he was perceived as stripe mining the nation’s wealth and leaving the Egyptian people poorer.
In symbolism, his body image is associated with the female pregnant body. Lucy Holmes wrote, “Childbirth is woman’s talisman, manifest and indisputable evidence of female power. The ability to create new life is the earliest and most profound source of power, and we all, men and women, fear it.” (Holmes; 2013) This fear is born out of the paternal superego based in defence protection because of the idealization of the father and of the masculine. It has its origins in the defence against the omnipotent bad mother — omnipotent because she is needed, omnipotent because she is desired, omnipotent because she is identified with, omnipotent because she is hated, omnipotent because she is seen to have murdered the father. (Weiland; 1996)
Nancy J. Chodorow and Adrienne Harris wrote in the foreword of Rosemary Balsam’s work “Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis“:
“We are all too familiar with the fear and accompanying degradation of women, the concern with bigness and expansiveness, the anxious unsettledness in cultural and psychoanalytic reactions to female flesh. By contrast, it has been a hallmark of writing about male oedipal development to think of the pleasures of bigness, the delight (and fear) in the boy’s links to power and expansiveness. Balsam asks us to question how these processes get reversed when it comes to the maternal body?” (Balsam, 2012).
In my opinion, because the superego is a paternal superego the female pregnant body represents the void; laziness, weakness, lack of discipline, oppression, subordination, and passivity as its constitution even though it symbolizes the power of female fertility and the power of femininity it is not perceived in this light because of the idealization of the father. In fact, the maternal symbolic order is a far cry from the talisman of male phallic symbolism. A symbol that has been historically represented to display the power of male fertility and the phallus or King was the shape of an obelisk. Long, lithe phallic power that resembles a penis. We can find modern cultural examples of human proclivity towards the male symbolic in the fashion industry. All one has to do is look at the runway model.
In psychoanalysis, we understand the introjection of the female pregnant body as the symbolic for maternity and its healthy introjection allows for little girls the ability to embrace their power and be open to motherhood. We use the perspectives of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus to explain the little boy moves away from the mother and toward identification with the father’s penis which is a symbol of active, dominant, warrior, protector, and self-disciplined (Freud, 1924). But this move away from mother happens with little girls as well especially through ambivalent attachment or what is known as the ambivalent breast. The ambivalent breast is characterized as a breast that is frustrating and if the ambivalent breast surpasses the frustration tolerance of the infant then a sudden violent, traumatic rupture with mother is theorized to occur (Jacobs, 2007; Klein, 1946). Female attacks on the female body permeate modern culture. Anorexia nervosa, bulimia, cosmetic plastic surgery; breast enlargements, breasts reduction, noses, thighs and bellies are modified to achieve some ideal of beauty. “The concept of “beauty” lives deep in the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem. Fashion insists that beauty can be bestowed from the outside. It is essentially visual; all the other senses, smell, taste, touch and sound, that make a woman erotic, are effectively cancelled out … What is deeply, essentially feminine — the life in a woman’s expression, the feel of her flesh, the transformations of childbirth and menopause, are reclassified as ugly or diseased. Fat and aging are transformed into conditions that must be altered by beauty products [and by advances in technology] (Wolf, 2002; Holmes, 2013).” But the attacks don’t just stop at the plastic surgeon’s office. Attacks against the female body have been pervasive throughout modern Western culture which will be described in the section on femininities and masculinities, and attacks have been carried out by both men and women alike. The weaponizing of technology in the form of electronic radio frequency assaults, remotes that control biological implants, the use of cell phone technology, global positioning systems, and the advent of electronic weapons of war has opened the door for a new age of matricidal destructiveness and war on crime. Through what Freud called the Electra complex and penis envy little girls can also experience a sudden violent, traumatic rupture/loss and separation from the mother as well due to this ambivalence and hints to this matricidal destructiveness can be seen in the disorders of anorexia and bulimia (Freud, 1905; Freud, 1925; Freud, 1931; Freud, 1932). As a result, some little girls strongly identify with their fathers and if the rupture against the mother is a complete foreclosure, homosexuality (lesbianism) can develop or a disturbed personality in paranoid fear of castrating, not only maternal Objects but also paternal Objects, in the little girl’s object-relational world (Jacobs, 2007; Klein, 1946; Klein, 1964). It is for this reason personality disorders are closely studied alongside sexual orientation and gender issues.
Julia Kristeva felt the separation from the mother was such a complex issue that if separation didn’t happen in the correct way abnormal psychological development could ensue. Kristeva felt matricide is our psychic necessity if individuation is to occur in the establishment of our own unique identities (Kristeva, 1989). Lacan believed the violent rupture from the maternal order is necessary for the establishment of the symbolic order or patriarchy. This may be true if we are speaking in terms of the “traditional” symbolic order of feminine and masculine, but as you know there are peculiarities to consider, anomalies that do not fit “traditional” gender relations or “normal” personality growth.
Julia Kristeva wrote poetically when she wrote in her work ‘Stabat Mater’ the following:
“For more than a century now, our culture has faced the urgent need to reformulate its representations of and hate, inherited from Plato’s Symposium, the troubadours, and Our Lady, in order to deal with the relationship of one woman to another. Here again, maternity points the way to a possible solution: a woman rarely, I do not say never, experiences passion — love or hate — for another woman, without at some point taking the place of her own mother — without becoming a mother herself and, even more importantly, without undergoing the lengthy process of learning to differentiate herself from her daughter, her simulacrum, whose presence she is forced to confront (Walker, 1998).”
What is missing from Freudian analysis and ‘Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex‘ is the possibility that some individuals do not experience a violent rupture, they experience a gradual working through of the loss and separation from a mother who makes them feel secure which can be explained by attachment theory (Wallin, 2007; Main, 1995; Klein, 1959). The violent rupture seems to occur as a result of the ambivalent breast and not a result of secure attachment. As a result, depending on the specifics of each individual’s development, the rise of unique psychic growth patterns due to a diversity of maternal psychic conflicts and/or foreclosures occur thus creating troubled personalities first observed by Freud and known as ‘Fort-da’ or the compulsion to repeat and the child’s use of objects as mastery over his/her reality (Freud, 1920; Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986; Knafo and Feiner, 2006; Weiland, 1996, Winnicott, 1971). Juliette Mitchell described in her work, Madmen and Medusas: Reclaiming hysteria, that attachment can be undone through the onset of difficult and frustrating environments as we have seen in such cases of the side-effects of war, and so, we can see how trauma can affect a person’s attachment, undoing or disturbing it through manipulative, destructive, infantile acts that inflict trauma in the minds of an Object by a “Master“, and is observed in cases utilizing modern advanced technological culture (i.e., electronic weapons, cyber misbehavior, and global positioning systems, etc.) to manufacture a particular reality (Mitchell, 2000; The United States Attorney’s Bulletin, U.S. Department of Justice, May 2016).
“Subjection is defined as the act or fact of being subjected, as under a monarch or other sovereign or superior power; the state of being subject to, or under the dominion of another; hence general subordination.” ~Oxford English Dictionary.
In the case of one Targeted Individual (TIs) the simultaneous use of cell phone/computer blocking technology to frustrate the Object, and then, at the same time deliver electro-convulsive shock therapy to sedate the frustrated Object is on par with the Nazi Holocaust medical experiments. The Operator/Controller (i.e., the “Master“) is the Dr. Mendel of Jewish extermination practices! (Perper and Cina; 2010). In addition, regarding this one particular case of a Targeted Individual, receiving unexpected, unannounced, and un-consented electronic assaults to her body in the middle of the night was part of the torture and abuse. At approximately 3:45 AM in the morning, the victim is reported as being awakened by the turning on of an electromagnetic field (RF) and then receiving electro-convulsive shock stimulation to the brain. These are but only two accounts of the torture and abuse the victim has received at the hands of some unknown assailant (see Butler, 1997). We can make a comparison between Targeted Individuals (TIs) suffering electronic assaults with the grooming and targeting practices used by sexual predators on college campuses. One facet of sexual predation on college campuses is the expressed behavior by those individuals interested in preying on others to meet their own sexual needs and/or exert a sense of power and control through sexual assault and rape. Predators use coercion and grooming behaviors to lower the defenses of the target and increase their vulnerability to sexual violence. Predators seek to lessen a victim’s ability to advocate for personal safety and disempower them from bringing concerns forward to authorities. These behaviors also occur in social settings where the targets are softened through environmental factors such as unrestricted access to mass quantities of alcohol, parties with limited exits or lacking quiet, safe places to check in with supportive friends, and the saturation of misogynistic or sexually charged posters, music, or visual displays (Van Brunt, Murphy, Pescara-Kovach, and Crance, 2019). One of the aspects to one individual’s account of targeting through electronic assault was the ability, through remote radio frequency control, to lower the conscious awareness of the individual in lieu of alcohol or sedating drugs. This capability opened up access to the victim so that the predator(s) could victimize the target. It also allowed analysts to point to Winnicott’s theory (1971) theorizing an important aspect of object relations was the survival of the object, and by survival, we mean the object doesn’t retaliate.
It is important that we realize the internal struggle of men exists on both an individual level as well as a cultural level. So, I want to include a passage from Christina Weiland’s paper, ‘Matricide and Destructiveness: Infantile Anxieties and Technological Culture‘ which was published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1996:
“It is a truism to say that all our patients are engaged in an internal struggle with their objects, especially the mother. This struggle, hidden for some, open for others, seems to underlie the human condition. In this sense it constitutes a fundamental human problem — the solution to which is both an individual and a cultural one. This fundamental human condition has to do with an inadequate separation from the maternal object and the need to separate and individuate. Culture, as a space where the working through of fundamental human problems takes place, constitutes a container; culture, as an ideal and a prohibition, constitutes part of the superego. For the individual the solution to any particular psychic problem will depend on both his/her object relations as well as the cultural space. So, when I refer to matricide I do so on both levels — the individual and the cultural (Weiland, 1996).”
The Differences Between the Genders Regarding the Introjection of the Mother
At this point in the paper, I would like to discuss the psychic fear of becoming the “maternal imago” both in the female psyche (Holmes, 2008; Balsam, 2012) and the male psyche (Freud, 1924; Chodorow, 2012). How the female pregnant body can be perceived as “humiliating” because it represents effectual leadership/governance, over-indulgence, subordination to a higher power, oppressed, weak, diseased, undisciplined, and the “feminine little girl” who lacks a penis. For women who have incorporated a paternal superego, void of a positive female pregnant body experience will, in all likelihood, reject maternity and repudiate motherhood for the repressive, humiliating symbol it represents to her ego (Balsam, 1986; Walker, 1998; Holmes, 2013; Kristeva; 1977). And how so, too, the overweight, fat, ineffectual male paternal body can be used, at least in an imaginary sense, to fill this same symbolic mythical imaginary as the “weak little girl“. Something we will come to realize as one of the fault lines and fragilities of man’s narcissistic ego in the formation of the ego Ideal; that is, modern, dominant, phallic ego’s insistence on “not being the mother.” Either way, because the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego, no one wants to be symbolized as a “King Farouk” (i.e., over-indulgent, in excess, ineffectual leader, passive and weak “little girl“, subordinate to a higher power (in Farouk’s case, he was subordinate to the British monarch). These are the psychic roots of not only the establishment of dominant male patriarchy and the weapon welding warriors of the industrial war complex but, according to the Freudian theory of ‘Fort-da‘, the compulsion to repeat, they also find their roots in, and are tied to, acts of sexual sadism, the anal sadistic universe, practices in BDSM, and other forms of sexual deviance like homosexuality as well as personality and psychiatric disorders such as Paranoid Personality Disorder (PPD), anorexia and bulimia (see Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984).
So first let’s discuss the female psyche with its introjection of the maternal imago. “Femininity, with all its complexities, has been explained by the fact that in this world, woman functions as the deficient “Other” (de Beauvoir, 1952). Monotheism has also reinforced this unconscious hidden hostility toward the mother by praising “God the Father,” thereby obliterating the paternal couple. “Monotheism was praised by Freud, among others, for representing the abstract principle over the concrete. This has been taken, since the establishment of Christianity, as a sign of intellectual and spiritual superiority of Western culture over other cultures. The violence and destructiveness involved in the establishment of this principle have been hidden in the unconscious only to erupt from time to time in unspeakable fits of destructive frenzy (Weiland, 1996).” And herein lies the charlatan act, the lie, the fraud carried out by doctors, scientists and those interested in knowing, and showing, how advancing technological culture can work for the dominant orders by manufacturing a false reality through the compulsion to repeat via manipulations thru advancing modern technological culture (electronic weapons, telemetry, media) and advances in modern medicine (human, inhumane, unethical experiments, biological implants that respond to electromagnetic frequency).
But let us continue our discussion of female development and the female psyche with its introjection of the maternal imago. For the most part, girls do not define themselves in terms of the renunciation of pre-Oedipal relational modes to the extent that boys do, so regression to these modes feel less threatening to women than to men. I say “for the most part” because there are a small group of women who do kill. “Most girls, as a result, remain in a bisexual triangle throughout childhood and puberty — and though they usually make a sexual resolution in favor of men, they retain an internal emotional triangle throughout life (Holmes, 2008).” Except where there is a complete foreclosure on the maternal order and one where the little girl chooses women over men as a sexual partner resulting from the over frustration of the ambivalent breast (see Klein, 1946, Some Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms). It is also interesting to note, Chodorow described penis envy as “the symbolic expression of the wish to detach from the mother and become autonomous rather than as a wish to be a man. A daughter does not have the different and desirable penis the son possesses to oppose maternal omnipotence, and she sees the father’s penis as a symbol of independence and separateness [from an otherwise over-controlling phallic] mother.” Chodorow saw Freud’s notion that there is only one genital which people either have or are missing as a way the child defends himself psychologically against the overwhelming importance of its early mother image (Chodorow, 1978). It is here that Kristeva’s comment that “matricide is our vital necessity” can be reinforced because it is seen as a way for the girl child to achieve individuation, autonomy, and dominance against the oppressive psychic forces of maternal omnipotence. It’s a psychic defence against the maternal order. It can be theorized, based on this psychoanalytic information, that most women do not seek a creative perversion to defend against these psychic forces, but that a small percent of women do, and here is where we can begin to discuss diverse outcomes like lesbian homosexuality, personality disorders like PPD, and other psychiatric disorders resulting from a complete foreclosure of the maternal object (anorexia and bulimia).
Secondly, the development of masculine male identity is a little different, but when contemplated upon, you begin to see how the two are connected, and so, how the two share similarities to the same psychic conflict, although, for the most part, the two genders express these conflicts differently. Freud described the little boy’s move away from the mother, in identification with the father, as the beginnings of the ‘Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex.’ “What follows the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is not the establishment of a parental couple but, on the contrary, its destruction. What follows is an idealized/castrating father ruling over a desexualized ego and a repressed maternal world. Ernest Jones, in opposition to Freud, saw the phallic phase as following the Oedipus complex (1927). He maintained that to save his penis the boy gives up mother and substitutes her by his penis. In this reading of the outcome of the Oedipus complex masculine narcissism incorporated in the penis replaces the longing for mother and the accompanying dread of castration. Whichever way we read it; however, the castration complex is central to the outcome of the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1924; Jones, 1927; Weiland, 1996).”
Chodorow on the other hand in ‘Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity,‘ studies the psychodynamics of violence in modern Western culture. She writes there are two points of diversion in men with regard to how they handle the introjection of mother and this is represented in the separation and loss of mother regarding the little boy’s masculinity. She writes, “The sense of gender in this context comes in only secondarily, at the language of ethnic or religious hatred and is often cast in gendered and sexualized terms (Chodorow, 2012).” That is to say, this supports the notion of an ever-present “cultural hatred” towards women. And here it is interesting to see how the infantile anxieties in dominant male patriarchy, one with access to an advancing technological culture are playing out with regard to a number of cyber violations and this includes the electronically “targeted individual” (TIs) suffering “electronic assaults” (EAs).
With that said, the first fracture in the fragilities and fault lines of masculinity within an advancing technological culture is the paranoid-schizoid splitting that results from felt threats to the self, and humiliation that reacts to narcissistic injury, and these felt threats and humiliations are experienced by humanity in general (see Klein, 1946). National and religious ethnicity of peoplehood are experienced psychodynamically as a “cultural selfhood,” and one where threats to such identities are experienced as threats to the cultural-national self. I’ll come back to this discussion with an explanation of a “technological culture of selfhood” in just a moment, and this applies to both men and women alike. However, it is only a small group of women who carry out masculine defence mechanisms against Objects in their relational world through violent retaliation and physical violence (James Alan Fox, and Emma E. Fridel, 2017). Chodorow writes:
“This first psychic fault line of masculinity involves gender and selfhood in relation to women and femininity. Men’s relationships to women, forged originally in the relationships 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 [my bold, italics and underline added]. 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 (Freud, 1924; Horney, 1932; Stoller, 1965) …
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 (see Chodorow, 1978, 1979, 2012).”
Chodorow further writes, “the second psychic fault line of masculinity has to do with the superordinate-subordinate, male-to-male relationship is not reducible to male-to-female. We can find a mythical developmental representation of this dilemma of humiliation and subordination to another man, but it is not Oedipus. (Chodorow, 212).” Here is where I feel she is wrong since a small group of women, like men, employ the same psychic fault line of masculinity thereby allowing for the possibility of male-to-female, female-to-female, and also female-to-male superordinate-to-subordinate object relations. The reason for this failure is attributed to the fact psychoanalysts can’t find a “mythical developmental” representation with which to resolve this dilemma of hate, humiliation, and subordination in terms of male-to-female, female-to-female, female-to-male. Although statistically, we know it occurs (see James Alan Fox, and Emma E. Fridel, 2017). Here Chodorow suggests that if we are interested in myths that capture the inevitable challenges, anxieties, and conflicts of two generations, two genders, power and powerlessness, and desire and its limits, then the story of Persephone in mythical development is more accurate for girls. But in terms of the mythical development to explain male-to-male, superordinate-subordinate object relations it is the “Achilles complex” found in the Iliad by Homer.
In order to capture the intense and driven power in male psychology of male-to-male/superordinate-subordinate conflict, the core development and psychodynamic narrative come from Homer in the Iliad. In this account, 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 Achilles’ 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 the affront dished out to him by Agamemnon.
As the invocation to Achilles would imply, the superordinate-subordinate, male-to-male relationship may particularly underpin terrorism and other male political and ethnic violence. This surely does give us an accurate framing of the psychodynamics of violence in our culture. Another way to formulate this mythical 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.
In terms of the “technological culture of selfhood“, of which I spoke earlier, in an advancing technological culture, it is technology then that becomes the avenue with which the establishment of a masculine sense of selfhood (identity) is attained. Especially when we think about how “technology has its roots in the use of the object and in object mastery (Weiland, 1996).” The use of the object is, as we know from Winnicott, ruthless and only eventually, with the survival of the mother and with the emergence of externality, will the child develop ‘concern‘ and the ability to ‘make reparation‘. But what if reparation is not possible because the mother has not survived, or even worse because the mother has been murdered (Weiland, 1996)?
Since the “technological culture of selfhood” becomes an integral part of advancing technological culture, and part of a technological culture is Object mastery, technology becomes the avenue with which men seek to vindicate their injured narcissistic ego against the “Achilles complex”. And herein lies the charlatan act, the lie, the fraud carried out by doctors, scientists, and those interested in how advancing technological culture can be employed to work for the dominant order by the mere sleight of hand in manufacturing a false reality through the manipulations of advancing modern technology and advances in modern medicine against the affronted “bad objects.” And here I am speaking of electronically targeted individuals (TIs) and electronic assaults (EAs). And since Western culture, as well as the individual, is interested in how advancing technological culture can be employed to work for their benefit by the mere sleight of hand (creations of illusions based in delusions) we are witnessing the manufacturing of false reality through the manipulations of advancing technology and advances in modern medicine against the affronted “bad objects.” Do we not hear a hint towards Klein’s “bad object”, and now the bad object has become the frustrating ambivalent father whose lack of concern for the son becomes the roots with which we explain the psychodynamics of male-patterned violence? Does this not accurately describe the events of January 6, 2021 when an angry mob of people stormed the US Capitol? And so, too, does this psychodynamic of violence not play out in the female psyche as well?
Chodorow writes:
“On the ground, my own historical reading is that both components of masculinity fuse in the Holocaust and in other genocides, where ethnic cleansing often includes the mass rape of women and the murder of helpless old men and boys, in the sexual humiliation and torture of men as well as women by right-wing dictatorships, and in those Islamic countries that restrict and terrorize women and punish severely those who violate sexual codes. Male sexual terrorism against women and men express ethnic, religious, and state power in reaction to national and ethnic humiliations through gendered and sexual psychic lenses …
We find similar dynamics in homophobia, which is often latent in terrorist ideology and direct in the torture and murder of gays, both in the United States and as we find homosexuality proscribed and brutally punished in other countries. In this context, homosexuality is figured both as submissiveness to other men and as challenging the male-to-female divide, making some men feminine [as I have theorized in the opening with the fear surrounding the symbolic imaginary of the female maternal body]. The particular dynamics that lead to homophobic violence are, of course, complex and varied, but I think it is worth stressing the regressive pull toward and fear of old libidinal and identificatory positions — in the case of men, schematically, to attachment to father and to a terrifying identification or fusion with mother (Chodorow, 2012).”
It is important to say that there is a small category of men who are turned into the submissive Object by their dominant abusive female spouses. Although domestic violence (DV) and intimate partner violence (IPV) are acts carried out primarily by men against women, there are a small number of women who have been labeled “Deadly Women” because of the violence they employ with others. These women abuse their male spouses as well as others, both male or female, who stand in their way.
How the psychodynamics of violence are diffused in acts of sexual deviance
Body expansion, BE and B2E, fantasies are tied to these same roots of hostility toward the maternal/female body. Instead of binding the body with rope, tape, or some other ligature, this form of BDSM binds the body with its own flesh or a flesh substitute which is usually represented as a rubber inflatable suit (Gates, 2000). These psychic fantasies, when primarily used against females, may hint towards the complexity surrounding the introjection of mother and the absence of a normal Oedipal growth pattern, lacking a gradual working through of the loss and separation of mother that Kristeva speaks of and which I referenced early in this paper (Kristeva, 1989). We can certainly make a connection here to Winnicott’s theory (1971) on object mastery:
“At this point of development that is under survey the subject is creating the object in the sense of finding externality itself, and it has to be added that this experience depends on the object’s capacity to survive.” (It is important that ‘survive’, in this context, means ‘not retaliate’.)
The maternal body introjected into the psyche when a sudden, violent, traumatic rupture occurs can develop into Freud’s Ego Ideal, that is, the narcissistic idealization of the paternal image born of the powerful father in the exaltation of the psychic murder of the mother. Weiland writes:
“Irigaray describes Clytemnestra’s murder as the archaic murder of the mother that established the right of the father. Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Oresteia, portrays the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and, subsequently, the murder of Clytemnestra, together with her lover Aegisthus, by their son Orestes. After the murder Orestes is persecuted by the Furies, maternal goddesses that seek revenge for the murder of the mother, and by Clytemnestra’s ghost. Exhausted he arrives in Athens and takes refuge in Athena’s temple. In the final part of the Oresteia Orestes is tried by the Athenian High Court presided over by Athena, with Apollo taking Orestes’ defence. In this trial Apollo argues that the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra is a bigger crime than the murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes because the child does not belong to mother but to father. Orestes’ duty was, therefore, to avenge his father’s death by murdering his mother. In Athena’s casting vote that declares Orestes innocent we have the final dictum that the child belongs to father, not to mother, and in Apollo’s passionate defence of Orestes we have the birth of the paternal superego. The paternal principle having thus been established, Orestes is exonerated and the Furies are rendered harmless — they are indeed invited to make Athens their residence and are offered a cavern on the Acropolis” (Weiland, 1996).
Weiland further writes:
“Technology is, of course, linked to the use of the object. As such it partakes in the struggle for the establishment of externality and involves attacks on the object, as well as the search for an object which, unlike the murdered mother, would survive the attacks. To the extent to which concern has not been established technology is ruthless. To the extent to which externality has not been established technology is a narcissistic extension of the self that relates more to faeces than to baby” (Weiland, 1996).
So, the introjection of mother as the “bad object” is a predominant theme that holds true for both little boys and little girls. But what happens when an adult bisexual female Object who, forced through electromagnetic frequency assaults and manipulations, that is clandestine, surreptitious electronic assaults and electronic attacks against the body via an electromagnetic tether is made to give up her paternal superego defence; active workouts and weight lifting which act as a psychic defence AGAINST her internalized maternal bad object, and instead is abused through forced sedation/stimulation via an electromagnetic tether? Do we not have an unknown dominant phallic ego abusing a female bisexual subordinate Object into further subordination through the “silencing and muting her sexuality” (Walker, 1998)? We can read the silence to this act of matricidal destruction by its projection onto the hated Object the repudiated cultural symbolic of the maternal body. Through electromagnetic manipulations, the “bad object” is destroyed and replaced with the repudiated cultural symbolic of the maternal body. This is exactly the matricidal destructiveness born out of infantile anxieties in an age of advancing technological culture! Let me reiterate, since the “technological culture of selfhood” becomes an integral part of advancing technological cultural, and part of a technological culture is Object mastery, technology becomes the avenue with which men (and women) seek to vindicate their injured narcissistic egos against the “Achilles complex”. And herein lies the charlatan act, the lie, the fraud carried out by doctors, scientists, and those interested in how advancing technological culture can be used to work for the dominant order by the mere sleight of hand in manufacturing a false reality through the manipulations of reality using advances in modern technology and advances in modern medicine against the affronted bad objects. And since Western culture, as well as the individual, is interested in how advancing technological culture can be employed to work for their benefit by the mere sleight of hand creating an illusion based in a delusion, the manufacturing of a false reality through advances in modern technological culture and medicine becomes the narcissistic ego’s solution in defence against their affronted bad objects. This is how the masculine ego shores up its wounded identity when there has been a psychical defeat. Do we not see Western cultures “Fort-da”; its compulsion to repeat by creating an illusion based in a delusion? Do we not hear a hint toward Klein’s “bad breast/object“, except the bad object can be worked out as belonging to both the frustrating ambivalent breast of the mother with a lack of concern for the infant and the frustrating ambivalent father whose lack of concern for the son becomes the roots with which we explain the psychodynamics of male-patterned violence? Were these not what the Witch Trials were all about (Hill, 1995)? The Oresteian myth stands, next to the Oedipus myth, as does Homer’s Iliad with its “Achilles complex” as central Greek myths that express both a psychical and a cultural problem. They both can be used as tools to explain the psychodynamics of violence for both men and women because both men and women are raised by two gendered Objects; one paternal and one maternal. They, therefore, introject both objects in a variety of diverse way but always in some meaningful way, and since The Oresteia portrays vividly the violent event that brings about the death of the early powerful mother as well as the need for defence against the internal persecutors that such an attack on mother produces we can use them side-by-side along with the “Achilles complex” to help explain Western cultures phenomenon of violence and the electronically targeted individual.
Manufacturing the Monster
Weiland is most certainly correct to compare modern advancing technology to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as it portrays phallic omnipotence in the manufacturing of a monster in the image of the self. The manufacturing of a monster with an observable lack of concern for those involved. Like technology, Frankenstein’s monster was not a monster to start, but as the monster absorbs the projections of those with whom he is confronted he evolves. Technology, like Frankenstein’s monster, has become “the thing” that cannot feel empathy, concern, or pity for those that use it. Like money, it has become a vehicle for which men assuage their fears and mount their hopes for the future, for something better. Hopefully a better life. But like Dr. Frankenstein, technology cannot fill the empty void; the fracture in the soul of man. It becomes the band-aid for a wound that is too deep to fix without the work of mourning.
While writing this paper, the events in U.S. News on January 5 and January 6, 2021, transpired. First, on January 5, some unknown person hacked a “secure” radio frequency and several New York air traffic controllers heard an automated message “We are going to fly a plane into the Capitol on Wednesday. Soleimani’s death will be avenged.” Then on January 6, a large group of protesters dressed like Trump supports stormed the US Capitol, breaking through barricades, smashing the Capitol’s windows, and mounting a revolt inside the state complex against the election of Joe Biden. I like to quote Adrienne Harris:
“Whether as a bludgeoning force or a subtle glance, “History comes to us,’ in the neo liberal state, as in the totalitarian. Intimacy is the contradictory site of freedom and regulation. Intimate life, particularly the intimate life of the body, of gendered experience, and of sexuality, however delicate, sensually rich, secretive, archaic, or primitive, is always already infused by regulation, by violence, and by power (Harris; 2017).”
Harris’ said one of her tasks in writing ‘Intimacy: The tank in the bedroom‘ was to speak about intimacies’ ties to and dependency on social and historic forces. I see it as my task to talk about the manufacturing of ‘monsters’ through the very same forces and the last four years of US politics and news seemed to be focused on just that, manufacturing the ‘monster’. For one might say, that like Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster that stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a projection of Donald Trump’s own creation. And what further complicates these manipulations by political leaders are the actions by other players, who, with the interest to further manipulate the press, employ tactics known as ‘spin’. I believe this is what Russia-Gate was about in the Facebook conspiracy that sought to create ‘spin’ surrounding a US president and a Russian leader. This tactic allowed for ‘kick-back’ to be analyzed. These manipulations further exacerbate the problem that creates distortions, delusions, and illusions. Much like the manipulations of reality through the use of advancing technology and advancing medical technology to create a false reality with regard to the Targeted Individual (TIs) suffering electronic assaults (EAs). These actions are the result of matricidal drives which display a lack of ‘concern‘ and ‘reparation‘ toward objects which are hidden unanalyzed, unconscious fantasy in the psyche of men because there has been no working through mourning the loss and separation and rupture with the mother (see Winnicott, 1971, Playing and Reality). And because the act of targeting certain individuals with electronic assault is part of “manufacturing the enemy“, (i.e., manufacturing ‘the monster‘) that is based on the sleight hand of an illusionist creating a mythical evil rooted indifference, we can understand these events for what they represent. The manufacturing of ‘Evil’.
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Wolf, Naomi. (2002). The Beauty Myth. New York. Harper Collins.
King Farouk of Egypt in foreign exile after he was thrown out of power in 1952.
by Karen Barna
I cannot even begin to think of a better quotation to open this discussion than from the film “Angels and Demons” when the killer said to Tom Hanks and the female physicist he was with, in the Vatican, that he wasn’t paid to kill them, and so, was going to let them live but if they chose to follow him, well, then that was a different story. He issued the following warning to them before he left:
“Be careful. These are men of God.”
King Farouk of Egypt came to symbolize over-indulgence, in excess, corruption, in-effective weak governance, and kleptocracy as he was perceived as stripe mining the nation’s wealth and leaving the Egyptian people poorer.
In symbolism, his body image is associated with the female pregnant body. Lucy Holmes wrote, “Childbirth is woman’s talisman, manifest and indisputable evidence of female power. The ability to create new life is the earliest and most profound source of power, and we all, men and women, fear it.” (Holmes; 2013) This fear is born out of the paternal superego based in defence protection because the idealization of the father and of the masculine. It has its origins in the defence against the omnipotent bad mother – omnipotent because she is needed, omnipotent because she is desired, omnipotent because she is identified with, omnipotent because she is hated, omnipotent because she is seen to have murdered the father. (Weiland; 1996)
Nancy J. Chodorow and Adrienne Harris wrote in the foreword of Rosemary Balsam’s work “Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis“:
“We are all too familiar with the fear and accompanying degradation of women, the concern with bigness and expansiveness, the anxious unsettledness in cultural and psychoanalytic reactions to female flesh. By contrast, it has been a hallmark of writing about male oedipal development to think of the pleasures of bigness, the delight (and fear) in the boy’s links to power and expansiveness. Balsam asks us to question how these processes get reversed when it comes to the maternal body?” (Balsam, 2012).
In my opinion, because the superego is a paternal superego the female pregnant body represents the void; laziness, weakness, lack of discipline, oppression and subordination, and passivity as its constitution even though it symbolizes the power of female fertility and the power of femininity it is not perceived in this light because of the idealization of father. In fact, the maternal symbolic order is a far cry from the talisman of male phallic symbolism. A symbol which has been historically represented to display the power of male fertility and the phallus or King was the shape of an obelisk. Long, lithe phallic power that resembles a penis. We can find modern cultural examples of proclivity towards the male symbolic in the fashion industry. All one has to do is look at the runway model.
In psychoanalysis, we understand the introjection of the female pregnant body as the symbolic for maternity and its healthy introjection allows for little girl the ability to embrace her power and be open to motherhood. We use the perspectives of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus to explain the little boy moves away from the mother and toward identification with the father’s penis which is a symbol of active, dominant, warrior, protector, and self-disciplined (Freud, 1924). But this move away from mother happens with little girl’s as well especially through ambivalent attachment or what is known as the ambivalent breast. The ambivalent breast is characterized as a breast that is frustrating and if the ambivalent breast surpasses the frustration tolerance of the infant then a sudden violent, traumatic rupture with mother is theorized to occur (Jacobs, 2007; Klein, 1946). Female attacks on female body permeate modern culture. Anorexia nervosa, bulimia, cosmetic plastic surgery; breasts enlargements, breasts reduction, noses, thighs and bellies are modified to achieve some ideal of beauty. “The concept of “beauty” lives deep in the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem. Fashion insists that beauty can be bestowed from the outside. It is essentially visual; all the other senses, smell, taste, touch and sound, that make a woman erotic, are effectively cancelled out … What is deeply, essentially feminine – the life in a woman’s expression, the feel of her flesh, the transformations of childbirth and menopause, are reclassified as ugly or diseased. Fat and aging are transformed into conditions that must be altered by beauty products [and by advances in technology] (Wolf, 2002; Holmes, 2013).” But the attacks don’t just stop at the plastic surgeon’s office. Attacks against the female body have been pervasive throughout modern Western culture which will be described in the section on femininities and masculinities, and attacks have been carried out by both men and women alike. The weaponizing of technology in the form of electronic radio frequency assaults, remotes that control biological implants, the use of cell phone technology, global positioning systems, and the advent of electronic weapons of war has opened the door for a new age of matricidal destructiveness and war on crime. Through what Freud called the Electra complex and penis envy little girls can also experience a sudden violent, traumatic rupture/loss and separation from the mother as well due to this ambivalence and hints to this matricidal destructiveness can be seen in the disorders of anorexia and bulimia (Freud, 1905; Freud, 1925; Freud, 1931; Freud, 1932). As a result, some little girls strongly identify with their fathers and if the rupture against the mother is a complete foreclosure, homosexuality (lesbianism) can develop or a disturbed personality in paranoid fear of castrating, not only maternal Objects but also paternal Objects, in the little girl’s object relational world (Jacobs, 2007; Klein, 1946; Klein, 1964). It is for this reason personality disorders are closely studied alongside sexual orientation and gender issues.
Julia Kristeva felt the separation from the mother was such a complex issue that if separation didn’t happen in the correct way abnormal psychological development could ensue. Kristeva felt matricide is our psychic necessity if individuation is to occur in the establishment of our own unique identities (Kristeva, 1989). Lacan believed the violent rupture from the maternal order is necessary for the establishment of the symbolic order or patriarchy. This may be true if we are speaking in terms of the “traditional” symbolic order of feminine and masculine, but as you know there are peculiarities to consider, anomalies that do not fit “traditional” gender relations or “normal” personality growth.
Julia Kristeva wrote poetically when she wrote in her work ‘Stabat Mater’ the following:
“For more than a century now, our culture has faced the urgent need to reformulate its representations of and hate, inherited from Plato’s Symposium, the troubadours, and Our Lady, in order to deal with the relationship of one woman to another. Here again, maternity points the way to a possible solution: a woman rarely, I do not say never, experiences passion – love or hate – for another woman, without at some point taking the place of her own mother – without becoming a mother herself and, even more importantly, without undergoing the lengthy process of learning to differentiate herself from her daughter, her simulacrum, whose presence she is forced to confront (Walker, 1998).”
What is missing from Freudian analysis and ‘Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex‘ is the possibility that some individuals do not experience a violent rupture, they experience a gradual working through of the loss and separation from a mother who makes them feel secure which can be explained by attachment theory (Wallin, 2007; Main, 1995; Klein, 1959). The violent rupture seems to occur as a result of the ambivalent breast and not a result of secure attachment. As a result, depending on the specifics of each individual’s development, the rise of unique psychic growth patterns due to a diversity of maternal psychic conflicts and/or foreclosures occur thus creating troubled personalities first observed by Freud and known as ‘Fort-da’ or the compulsion to repeat and the child’s use of objects as mastery over his/her reality (Freud, 1920; Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986; Knafo and Feiner, 2006; Weiland, 1996, Winnicott, 1971). Juliette Mitchell described in her work, Madmen and Medusas: Reclaiming hysteria, that attachment can be undone through the onset of difficult and frustrating environments as we have seen in such cases of the side-effects of war, and so, we can see how trauma can effect a person’s attachment, undoing or disturbing it through manipulative, destructive, infantile acts that inflict trauma in the minds of an Object by a “Master“, and is observed in cases utilizing modern advanced technological culture (i.e., electronic weapons, cyber misbehavior, and global positioning systems, etc.) to manufacture a particular reality (Mitchell, 2000; The United States Attorney’s Bulletin, U.S. Department of Justice, May 2016).
“Subjection is defined as the act or fact of being subjected, as under a monarch or other sovereign or superior power; the state of being subject to, or under the dominion of another; hence general subordination.” ~Oxford English Dictionary.
In the case of one Targeted Individual (TIs) the simultaneous use of cell phone/computer blocking technology to frustrate the Object, and then, at the same time deliver electro convulsive shock therapy to sedate the frustrated Object is on par with the Nazi Holocaust medical experiments. The Operator/Controller (i.e., the “Master“) is the Dr. Mendel of Jewish extermination practices! (Perper and Cina; 2010). In addition, regarding this one particular case of a Targeted Individual, receiving unexpected, unannounced, and un-consented electronic assaults to her body in the middle of the night was part of the torture and abuse. At approximately 3:45 AM in the morning, the victim is reported as being awakened by the turning on of an electromagnetic field (RF) and then receiving electro-convulsive shock stimulation to the brain. These are but only two accounts of the torture and abuse the victim has received at the hands of some unknown assailant (Butler, 1997). We can make a comparison between Targeted Individuals suffering electronic assaults with the grooming and targeting practices used by sexual predators on college campuses. One facet of sexual predation on college campuses is the expressed behavior by those individuals interested in preying on others to meet their own sexual needs and/or exert a sense of power and control through sexual assault and rape. Predators use coercion and grooming behaviors to lower the defenses of the target and increase their vulnerability to sexual violence. Predators seek to lessen a victim’s ability to advocate for personal safety and disempower them from bringing concerns forward to authorities. These behaviors also occur in social settings where the targets are softened through environmental factors such as unrestricted access to mass quantities of alcohol, parties with limited exits or lacking quiet, safe places to check in with supportive friends, and the saturation of misogynistic or sexually charged posters, music, or visual displays (Van Brunt, Murphy, Pescara-Kovach, and Crance, 2019). One of aspects to one individual’s account of targeting through electronic assault was the ability, through remote radio frequency control, to lower the conscious awareness of the individual in lieu of alcohol or sedating drugs. This capability opened up access to the victim so that the predator(s) could victimized the target. It also allowed analyst to point to Winnicott’s theory (1971) that an important aspect of object relations was the survival of the object, and by survival we mean the object doesn’t retaliate.
It is important that we realize the internal struggle of men exist on both an individual level as well as a cultural level. So, I want to include a passage from Christina Weiland’s paper, ‘Matricide and Destructiveness: Infantile Anxieties and Technological Culture‘ which was published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1996:
“It is a truism to say that all our patients are engaged in an internal struggle with their objects, especially the mother. This struggle, hidden for some, open for others, seems to underlie the human condition. In this sense it constitutes a fundamental human problem – the solution to which is both an individual and a cultural one. This fundamental human condition has to do with an inadequate separation from the maternal object and the need to separate and individuate. Culture, as a space where the working through of fundamental human problems takes place, constitutes a container; culture, as an ideal and a prohibition, constitutes part of the superego. For the individual the solution to any particular psychic problem will depend on both his/her object relations as well as the cultural space. So, when I refer to matricide I do so on both levels – the individual and the cultural(Weiland, 1996).”
The Differences Between the Genders Regarding the Introjection of the Mother
At this point in the paper, I would like to discuss the psychic fear of becoming the “maternal imago” both in the female psyche (Holmes, 2008; Balsam, 2012) and the male psyche (Freud, 1924; Chodorow, 2012). How the female pregnant body can be perceived as “humiliating” because it represents effectual leadership/governance, over-indulgence, subordination to a higher power, oppressed, weak, diseased, undisciplined, and the “feminine” little girl who lacks a penis. For women who have incorporated a paternal superego void of a positive female pregnant body experience will, in all likelihood, reject maternity and repudiate motherhood for the repressive, humiliating symbol it represents to her ego (Balsam, 1986; Walker, 1998; Holmes, 2013; Kristeva; 1977). And how so, too, the overweight, fat, in effectual male paternal body can be used, at least in an imaginary sense, to fill this same symbolic mythical imaginary as the “weak little girl“. Something we will come to realize as one of the fault lines and fragilities of man’s narcissistic ego in the formation of the ego Ideal; that is, modern, dominant, phallic ego’s insistence on “not being the mother.” Either way, because the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego, no one wants to be symbolized as a “King Farouk” (i.e., over-indulgent, in excess, in effectual leader, passive and weak “little girl“, subordinate to a higher power (in Farouk’s case, he was subordinate to the British monarch). These are the psychic roots of not only the establishment of dominant male patriarchy and the weapon welding warriors of the Industrial War Complex but, according to Freud through his theory of ‘Fort-da‘, the compulsion to repeat, they also find their roots in, and are tied to, acts of sexual sadism, the anal sadistic universe, practices in BDSM, and other forms of sexual deviance like homosexuality as well as personality and psychiatric disorders such as Paranoid Personality Disorder (PPD), anorexia and bulimia (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984).
So first let’s discuss the female psyche with its introjection of the maternal imago. “Femininity, with all its complexities, has been explained by the fact that in this world, woman functions as the deficient “Other” (de Beauvoir, 1952). Monotheism has also reinforced this unconscious hidden hostility toward the mother by praising “God the Father,” thereby obliterating the paternal couple. “Monotheism was praised by Freud, among others, for representing the abstract principle over the concrete. This has been taken, since the establishment of Christianity, as a sign of intellectual and spiritual superiority of Western culture over other cultures. The violence and destructiveness involved in the establishment of this principle have been hidden in the unconscious only to erupt from time to time in unspeakable fits of destructive frenzy (Weiland, 1996).” And here in lies the charlatan act, the lie, the fraud carried out by doctors, scientists and those interested in knowing, and showing, how advancing technological culture can work for the dominant orders by manufacturing a false reality through the compulsion to repeat via manipulations thru advancing modern technological culture (electronic weapons, telemetry, media) and advances in modern medicine (human, inhumane, unethical experiments).
But let us continue our discussion of female development and the female psyche with its introjection of the maternal imago. For the most part, girls do not define themselves in terms of the renunciation of pre-Oedipal relational modes to the extent that boys do, so regression to these modes feel less threatening to women than to men. I say “for the most part” because there are a small group of women who kill. “Most girl’s, as a result, remain in a bisexual triangle throughout childhood and puberty – and though they usually make a sexual resolution in favor of men, they retain an internal emotional triangle throughout life (Holmes, 2008).” Except where there is a complete foreclosure on the maternal order and one where the little girl chooses women over men as a sexual partner resulting from the over frustration of the ambivalent breast (Klein, 1946-1963). It is also interesting to note, Chodorow described penis envy as “the symbolic expression of the wish to detach from the mother and become autonomous rather than as a wish to be a man. A daughter does not have the different and desirable penis the son possesses to oppose maternal omnipotence, and she sees the father’s penis as a symbol of independence and separateness [from an otherwise over controlling phallic] mother.” Chodorow saw Freud’s notion that there is only one genital which people either have or are missing as a way the child defends himself psychologically against the overwhelming importance of its early mother image (Chodorow, 1978). It is here that Kristeva’s comment that “matricide is our vital necessity” can be reinforced because it is seen as a way for the girl child to achieve individuation, autonomy, and dominance against the oppressive psychic forces of maternal omnipotence. It’s a psychic defence against the maternal order. It can be theorized, based on this psychoanalytic information, that most women do not seek a creative perversion to defend against these psychic forces, but that a small percent of women do, and here is where we can begin to discuss diverse outcomes like lesbian homosexuality, personality disorders like PPD, and other psychiatric disorders resulting from a complete foreclosure of the maternal object (anorexia and bulimia).
Secondly, the development of masculine male identity is a little different, but when contemplated upon, you begin to see how the two are connected, and so, how the two share similarities to the same psychic conflict, although, for the most part, the two genders express these conflicts differently. Freud described the little boy’s move away from the mother, in identification with the father, as the beginnings of the ‘Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex.’ “What follows the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is not the establishment of a parental couple but, on the contrary, its destruction. What follows is an idealized/castrating father ruling over a desexualized ego and a repressed maternal world. Ernest Jones, in opposition to Freud, saw the phallic phase as following the Oedipus complex (1927). He maintained that to save his penis the boy gives up mother and substitutes her by his penis. In this reading of the outcome of the Oedipus complex masculine narcissism incorporated in the penis replaces the longing for mother and the accompanying dread of castration. Whichever way we read it; however, the castration complex is central to the outcome of the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1924; Jones, 1927; Weiland, 1996).”
Chodorow on the other hand in ‘Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity,‘ studies the psychodynamics of violence in modern Western culture. She writes there are two points of diversion in men with regard to how they handle the introjection of mother and this is represented in the separation and loss of mother regarding the little boy’s masculinity. She writes, “The sense of gender in this context comes in only secondarily, at the language of ethnic or religious hatred and is often cast in gendered and sexualized terms (Chodorow, 2012).” That is to say, this supports the notion of a ever present “cultural hatred” towards women. And here it is interesting to see how the infantile anxieties in a dominant male patriarchy, one with access to an advancing technological culture is playing out with regard to a number of cyber violations and this includes the electronically “targeted individual” (TIs) suffering “electronic assaults” (EAs).
With that said, the first fracture in the fragilities and fault lines of masculinity within an advancing technological culture is the paranoid-schizoid splitting that results from felt threats to the self, and humiliation that reacts to narcissistic injury, and these felt threats and humiliations are experience by humanity in general (see Klein, 1946). National and religious ethnicity of peoplehood are experienced psychodynamically as a “cultural selfhood,” and one where threats to such identities are experienced as threats to the cultural-national self. I’ll come back to this discussion with an explanation of a “technological culture of selfhood” in just a moment, and this applies to both men and women alike. However, it is only a small group of women who carry out masculine defence mechanisms against Objects in their relational world through violent retaliation and physical violence (James Alan Fox, and Emma E. Fridel, 2017). Chodorow writes:
“This first psychic fault line of masculinity involves gender and selfhood in relation to women and femininity. Men’s relationships to women, forged originally in the relationships 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 [my bold, italics and underline added]. 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 (Freud, 1924; Horney, 1932; Stoller, 1965) …
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 (see Chodorow, 1978, 1979, 2012).”
Chodorow further writes, “the second psychic fault line of masculinity has to do with the superordinate-subordinate, male-to-male relationship is not reducible to male-to-female. We can find mythical developmental representation of this dilemma of humiliation and subordination to another man, but it is not Oedipus. (Chodorow, 212).” Here is where I feel she is wrong since a small group of women, like men, employ the same psychic fault line of masculinity thereby allowing for the possibility of male-to-female, female-to-female and also female-to-male superordinate-to-subordinate object relations. The reason for this failure is attributed to the fact psychoanalysts can’t find a “mythical developmental” representation with which to resolve this dilemma of hate, humiliation and subordination in terms of male-to-female, female-to-female, female-to-male. Although statistically, we know it occurs (see James Alan Fox, and Emma E. Fridel, 2017). Here Chodorow suggests that if we are interested in myths that capture the inevitable challenges, anxieties, and conflicts of two generations, two genders, power and powerlessness, and desire and its limits, then the story of Persephone in mythical development is more accurate for girls. But in terms of the mythical development to explain male-to-male, superordinate-subordinate object relations it is the “Achilles complex” found in the Iliad by Homer.
In order to capture the intense and driven power in male psychology of male-to-male/superordinate-subordinate conflict, the core development and psychodynamic narrative comes from Homer in the Iliad. In this account, 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 Achilles’ 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 scarified his daughter Iphigenia, who had been promised to Achilles) – but the attachment to her seems minor compared to Achilles’ passion about the affront dished out to him by Agamemnon.
As the invocation to Achilles would imply, the superordinate-subordinate male-to-male relationship may particularly underpin terrorism and other male political and ethnic violence. This surely does give us an accurate framing of the psychodynamics of violence in our culture. Another way to formulate this mythical 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.
In terms of the “technological culture of selfhood“, of which I spoke earlier, in an advancing technological culture, it is technology then that becomes the avenue with which the establishment of a masculine sense of selfhood (identity) is attained. Especially when we think about how “technology has its roots in the use of the object and in object mastery (Weiland, 1996).” The use of the object is, as we know from Winnicott, ruthless and only eventually, with the survival of the mother and with the emergence of externality, will the child develop ‘concern‘ and the ability to ‘make reparation‘. But what if reparation is not possible because the mother has not survived, or even worse because the mother has been murdered (Weiland, 1996)?
Since the “technological culture of selfhood” becomes an integral part of advancing technological cultural, and part of technological culture is Object mastery, technology becomes the avenue with which men seek to vindicate their injured narcissistic ego against the “Achilles complex”. And here in lies the charlatan act, the lie, the fraud carried out by doctors, scientists and those interested in how advancing technological culture can be employed to work for the dominant order by the mere sleight of hand in manufacturing a false reality through the manipulations of advancing modern technology and advances in modern medicine against the affronted bad objects. And here I am speaking of electronically targeted individuals (TIs) and electronic assaults (EAs). And since Western culture as well as the individual is interested in how advancing technological culture can be employed to work for their benefit by the mere sleight of hand (creations of illusions based in delusion) we are witnessing the manufacturing a false reality through the manipulations of advancing technology and advances in modern medicine against the affronted bad objects. Do we not hear a hint towards Klein’s “bad object”, and now the bad object has now become the frustrating ambivalent father whose lack of concern for the son becomes the roots with which we explain the psychodynamics of male patterned violence? Does this not accurately describe the events of January 6, 2021 when an angry mob of people stormed the US Capitol? And, too, does this psychodynamic not play out in the female psyche as well?
Chodorow writes:
“On the ground, my own historical reading is that both components of masculinity fuse in the Holocaust and in other genocides, where ethnic cleansing often includes the mass rape of women and the murder of helpless old men and boys, in the sexual humiliation and torture of men as well as women by right-wing dictatorships, and in those Islamic countries that restrict and terrorize women and punish severely those who violate sexual codes. Male sexual terrorism against women and men express ethnic, religious, and state power in reaction to national and ethnic humiliations through gendered and sexual psychic lenses …
We find similar dynamics in homophobia, which is often latent in terrorist ideology and direct in the torture and murder of gays, both in the United States and as we find homosexuality proscribed and brutally punished in other countries. In this context, homosexuality is figured both as submissiveness to other men and as challenging the male-to-female divide, making some men feminine [as I have theorized in the opening with the fear surrounding the symbolic imaginary of the female maternal body]. The particular dynamics that lead to homophobic violence are, of course, complex and varied, but I think it is worth stressing the regressive pull toward and fear of old libidinal and identificatory positions – in the case of men, schematically, to attachment to father and to a terrifying identification or fusion with mother (Chodorow, 2012).”
It is important to say that there is a small category of men who are turned into the submissive Object by their dominant abusive female spouses. Although, domestic violence (DV) and intimate partner violence (IPV) are carried out primarily by men against women, there are a small number of women who have been labeled “Deadly Women” because of the violence they employ with others. These women abuse their male spouses as well as others, both male or female, who stand in their way.
How the psychodynamics of violence are diffused in acts of sexual deviance
Body expansion (BE and B2E) fantasies are tied to these same roots of hostility toward the maternal/female body. Instead of binding the body with rope, tape, or some other ligature, this form of BDSM binds the body with its own flesh or a flesh substitute which is usually represented as a rubber inflatable suit (Gates, 2000). These psychic fantasies, when primarily used against females, may hint towards the complexity surrounding the introjection of mother and the absence of normal Oedipal growth, lacking a gradual working through of the loss and separation of mother that Kristeva speak of and which I referenced early in this paper (Kristeva, 1989). We can certainly make a connection here to Winnicott’s theory (1971) on object mastery:
“At this point of development that is under survey the subject is creating the object in the sense of finding externality itself, and it has to be added that this experience depends on the object’s capacity to survive.” (It is important that ‘survive’, in this context, means ‘not retaliate’.)
The maternal body introjected in to the psyche when a sudden, violent, traumatic rupture occurs can develop into Freud’s Ego Ideal, that is, the narcissistic idealization of the paternal image born of the powerful father in the exaltation of the psychic murder of the mother. Weiland writes:
“Irigaray describes Clytemnestra’s murder as the archaic murder of the mother that established the right of the father. Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Oresteia, portrays the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and, subsequently, the murder of Clytemnestra, together with her lover Aegisthus, by their son Orestes. After the murder Orestes is persecuted by the Furies, maternal goddesses that seek revenge for the murder of the mother, and by Clytemnestra’s ghost. Exhausted he arrives in Athens and takes refuge in Athena’s temple. In the final part of the Oresteia Orestes is tried by the Athenian High Court presided over by Athena, with Apollo taking Orestes’ defence. In this trial Apollo argues that the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra is a bigger crime than the murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes because the child does not belong to mother but to father. Orestes’ duty was, therefore, to avenge his father’s death by murdering his mother. In Athena’s casting vote that declares Orestes innocent we have the final dictum that the child belongs to father, not to mother, and in Apollo’s passionate defence of Orestes we have the birth of the paternal superego. The paternal principle having thus been established, Orestes is exonerated and the Furies are rendered harmless – they are indeed invited to make Athens their residence and are offered a cavern on the Acropolis” (Weiland, 1996).
Weiland further writes:
“Technology is, of course, linked to the use of the object. As such it partakes in the struggle for the establishment of externality and involves attacks on the object, as well as the search for an object which, unlike the murdered mother, would survive the attacks. To the extent to which concern has not been established technology is ruthless. To the extent to which externality has not been established technology is a narcissistic extension of the self that relates more to faeces than to baby” (Weiland, 1996).
So, the introjection of mother as the “bad object” is a predominant theme that holds true for both little boys and little girls. But what happens when an adult bisexual female Object who, forced through electromagnetic frequency manipulation, that is clandestine, surreptitious electronic assaults and electronic attacks against the body via an electromagnetic tether is made to give up her paternal superego defence; active work outs and weight lifting which act as a defence AGAINST her internalized maternal bad object, and instead is abused through forced sedation/stimulation via an electromagnetic tether? Do we not have an unknown dominant phallic ego abusing a female bisexual subordinate Object into a further subordinate position of “silenced, muted sexuality” (Walker, 1998)? We can read the silence to this act of matricidal destruction through a projection onto the Object the repudiated cultural symbolic of the maternal body. This is exactly the matricidal destructiveness born out of infantile anxieties in an age of advancing technological culture! Let me reiterate, since the “technological culture of selfhood” becomes an integral part of advancing technological cultural, and part of technological culture is Object mastery, technology becomes the avenue with which men (and women) seek to vindicate their injured narcissistic egos against the “Achilles complex”. And here in lies the charlatan act, the lie, the fraud carried out by doctors, scientists and those interested in how advancing technological culture can be used to work for the dominant order by the mere sleight of hand in manufacturing a false reality through the manipulations of reality using advances in modern technology and advances in modern medicine against the affronted bad objects. And since Western culture as well as the individual is interested in how advancing technological culture can be employed to work for their benefit by the mere sleight of hand creating an illusion based in a delusion, the manufacturing of a false reality through advances in modern technological culture and medicine becomes the narcissistic egos solution in defence against their affronted bad objects. This is how the masculine ego shore’s up its wounded identity when there has been a psychical defeat. Do we not see Western cultures “Fort-da”; its compulsion to repeat by creating an illusion based in a delusion? Do we not hear a hint toward Klein’s “bad breast/object“, except the bad object can be worked out as belonging to both the frustrating ambivalent breast of the mother with a lack of concern for the infant and the frustrating ambivalent father whose lack of concern for the son becomes the roots with which we explain the psychodynamics of male patterned violence? Were these not what the Witch Trials were all about (Hill, 1995)? The Oresteian myth stands, next to the Oedipus myth, as does Homer’s Iliad with its “Achilles complex” as central Greek myths that express both a psychical and a cultural problem. They both can be used as tools to explain the psychodynamics of violence for both men and women because both men and women are raised by two gendered Objects; one paternal and one maternal. They therefore introject both objects in very diverse way but always some meaningful way, and since The Oresteia portrays vividly the violent event that brings about the death of the early powerful mother as well as the need for defence against the internal persecutors that such an attack on mother produces we can use them side-by-side along with the “Achilles complex” to help explain Western cultures phenomenon of violence and the electronically targeted individual.
Manufacturing the Monster
Weiland is most certainly correct to compare modern advancing technology to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as it portrays phallic omnipotence in the manufacturing of a monster in the image of the self. The manufacturing of a monster with an observable lack of concern for those involved. Like technology, Frankenstein’s monster was not a monster to start, but as the monster absorbs the projections of those with whom he is confronted he evolves. Technology, like Frankenstein’s monster, has become “the thing” that cannot feel empathy, concern, or pity for those that use it. Like money, it has become a vehicle for which men assuage their fears and mount their hopes for the future, for something better. Hopefully a better life. But like Dr. Frankenstein, technology cannot fill the empty void; the fracture in the soul of man. It becomes the band-aid for a wound that is too deep to fix without the work of mourning.
While writing this paper, the events in U.S. News on January 5 and January 6, 2021 transpired. First, on January 5, some unknown person hacked a “secure” radio frequency and several New York air traffic controllers heard an automated message “We are going to fly a plane into the Capitol on Wednesday. Soleimani’s death will be avenged.” Then on January 6, a large group of protesters dressed like Trump supports stormed the US Capitol, breaking through barricades, smashing the Capitol’s windows, and mounting a revolt in side the complex against the election of Joe Biden. I like to quote Adrienne Harris:
“Whether as a bludgeoning force or a subtle glance, “History comes to us,’ in the neo liberal state, as in the totalitarian. Intimacy is the contradictory site of freedom and regulation. Intimate life, particularly the intimate life of the body, of gendered experience, and of sexuality, however delicate, sensually rich, secretive, archaic, or primitive, is always already infused by regulation, by violence, and by power (Harris; 2017).”
Harris’ said one of her tasks in writing ‘Intimacy: The tank in the bedroom‘ was to speak about intimacies’ ties to and dependency on social and historic forces. I see it as my task to talk about the manufacturing of ‘monsters’ through the same very forces and the last four years of US politics and news seemed to be focused on just that, manufacturing the ‘monster’. For one might say that like Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster that stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a projection of Donald Trump’s own creation. And what further complicates these manipulations by political leaders are the actions by other players, who, with the interest to further manipulate the press, employ the tactic known as ‘spin’. I believe this is what Russia-Gate was about in the Facebook conspiracy that sought to create ‘spin’ surrounding a US president and a Russian leader. This tactic allowed for ‘kick-back’ to be analyzed. These manipulations further exacerbate the problem that creates distortions, delusions and illusions. Much like the manipulations of reality through the use of advancing technology and advancing medical technology to create a false reality with regard to the Targeted Individual (TIs) suffering electronic assaults (EAs). These actions are the result of matricidal drives which display a lack of ‘concern‘ and ‘reparation‘ toward objects which may be hidden unanalyzed, unconscious fantasy because there has been no working through mourning the loss and separation and rupture with the mother (Winnicott, 1971). And because the act of targeting certain individuals with electronic assault is part of “manufacturing the enemy“, ‘the monster‘ that is based in the sleight hand of an illusionist creating a mythical evil rooted in difference. __________________________________________________________
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Winnicott, D.W. (1971). “The use of the Object and relating through identifications.” In Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth. Penguin, 1980.
Wolf, Naomi. (2002). The Beauty Myth. New York. Harper Collins.
This paper explores the absence of a parental couple in Western culture and the human psyche and its substitution by masculine omnipotence. The inability of the Western psyche to work through the Oedipus complex is seen as the root of this. This inability is linked to the lack of a gradual working through of ambivalence, and to the reliance, instead, on a massive repression of the attachment to mother and on the conversion of the aggression towards father into the superego. This is equated to a psychic matricide. The myth that portrays this psychic event is the Oresteian myth as portrayed by Aeschylus in his trilogy, the Oresteia. Technological culture bears all the marks of a masculine omnipotent creation that includes the substitution of baby, created by the parental couple, by manufactured reality and entails all the destructiveness of an attack on mother and on life.
This is a discussion that should continue to be held if any hope of man’s continued progress is to be made. We, as a race of people, need to come to terms with these psychoanalytic truisms and further out philosophical understanding about them. With the advent of electronic targeting, the targeted individual (TI), electronic assaults (EAs), and the US state of affairs post 9/11 with the emergence of the surveillance state and turnkey technology it would behoove us to seriously contemplate what our future and the future of crime will look like.
In her book Black Sun Julia Kristeva writes:
For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine qua none of individuation, provided that it takes place under optimal circumstances and can be eroticized … The lesser or greater violence of matricidal drive, depending on individuals and the milieu’s tolerance entails, when it is hindered, its inversion on the self; the maternal object, having been introjected, the depressive or the melancholic putting to death of the self is what follows, instead matricide. (Kristeva 1989, pp. 27-8).
Kristeva makes quite a few points here. Firstly, she posits the existence of a matricidal drive. Secondly, she equates the loss of mother with matricide. Thirdly, she asserts that, if the mother is not killed in the service of individuation and development, melancholia and depression will be the result, in an attempt to turn the aggression against the self. In other words, one either kills/damages the object, or the self.This view seems to be in accordance with the theory of the death instinct and with Freud’s theory of melancholia and the superego. It does not examine ways in which aggression and destructiveness can be worked through or transformed. The choice is, basically, to turn the aggression either towards the object, or towards the self. I shall return to this point later on when I examine Winnicott’s concepts of the use of the object and the development of concern, as well as Bion’s theory of the alpha-function.
The issue here is the fundamental problem of loss of, and separation from, mother. Whether loss can be equated with matricide, or under which conditions it does, is a question I take on later in this paper. Separation from mother is, of course, the main developmental task that has to be accomplished if a secure sense of self is to be established, and loss is the inevitable price. The kind of loss, however – gradual, phase appropriate or traumatic – is very important here. Phase-appropriate loss results in the formation of ego structure whereas traumatic lossdoes not(Kohut 1971).
Thus, the issue of separation from mother is a very complex one and I think that Kristeva’s statement does not do justice to this complexity. If I understand it well Kristeva refers to the matricidal drive as the only way the ego has at its disposal to free itself from the tyranny of the maternal object. Her book Black Sun from which the above quotation is taken is about depression as the reversal, or the internalization, of the matricidal drive. It is as if she is saying that there is no other way of separating from the original object but through matricide. This is, of course, in line with the Lacanian theory which sees a violent rupture with mother as necessary for the establishment of the symbolic order.
British psychoanalysis, on the other hand, which is matricentric rather than phallocentric, points to a different way of separating from mother and of resolving ambivalence. The theories of Winnicott and Bion offer a different solution to the problem of separation and aggression. On the other hand, the quotation by Kristeva points to something very important – to the way our culture as a whole has attempted to solve the problem of separation from the mother and the aggression generated in this attempt. I think that what Kristeva calls the ‘necessity of matricide‘ is the culturally prescribed way of separating from mother. In other words, our culture, especially in its masculine model of development, has attempted to solve the problem of separation from mother and the loss that is entailed, through matricide. In this paper I shall try to engage at both levels, psychical and cultural, in order to explore this problem of loss of, and separation from, mother, the cultural solution given to it, as well as the consequences that follow from this cultural solution. This cultural solution is embodied in a particular psychic structure which I see as equivalent to a kind of psychic matricide. I argue that the way this comes about has been described by Freud in his portrayal of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, and in mythical terms in the Oresteian myth.
It is a truism to say that all our patients are engaged in an internal struggle with their objects, especially the mother. This struggle, hidden for some, open for others, seems to underlie the human condition.In this sense it constitutes a fundamental human problem – the solution to which is both an individual and a cultural one. This fundamental human condition has to do with an inadequate separation from the maternal object and the need to separate and individuate. Culture, as a space where the working through of fundamental human problems takes place, constitutes a container; culture, as an ideal and a prohibition, constitutes part of the superego. For the individual the solution to any particular psychic problem will depend on both his/her object relations as well as the cultural space. So, when I refer to matricide I do so on both levels – the individual and the cultural.
In her paper ‘The bodily encounter with the mother‘, Luce Irigaray writes:
… What is now becoming apparent is the most everyday things and in the whole of our society and our culture is that, at a primal level, they function on the basis of matricide. When Freud describes and theorizes, notably in Totem and Taboo, the murder of the father as founding the primal horde, he forgets a more archaic murder, that of the mother, necessitated by the establishment of certain order in the polls. Give or take a few additions and retractions, our imaginary still functions in accordance with the schema established through Greek mythologies and tragedies. (Irigaray 1991, p. 36)
Unlike Kristeva, Irigaray does not see the ‘murder of the mother’ as necessary for the establishment of a separate self. On the contrary, her critique of Western culture as based on matricide is very poignant. Since she is arguing, however, within a Lacanian framework, which sees a fundamental rupture with the maternal world as necessary for the development of the symbolic order and for mental health, she finds it difficult to describe convincingly any other course of development. She has been severely criticized by Lacanians for advocating a ‘return to mother’ and expelled from the Lacanian school.
Irigaray describes Clytemnestra’s murder as the archaic murder of the mother that established the right of the father. Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Oresteia, portrays the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and, subsequently, the murder of Clytemnestra, together with her lover Aegisthus, by their son Orestes. After the murder Orestes is persecuted by the Furies, maternal goddesses that seek revenge for the murder of the mother, and by Clytemnestra’s ghost. Exhausted he arrives in Athens and takes refuge in Athena’s temple. In the final part of the Oresteia Orestes is tried by the Athenian High Court presided over by Athena, with Apollo taking Orestes’ defence. In this trial Apollo argues that the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra is a bigger crime than the murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes because the child does not belong to mother but to father.Orestes’ duty was, therefore, to avenge his father’s death by murdering his mother. In Athena’s casting vote that declares Orestes innocent we have the final dictum that the child belongs to father, not to mother, and in Apollo’s passionate defence of Orestes we have the birth of the paternal superego. The paternal principle having thus been established, Orestes is exonerated and the Furies are rendered harmless – they are indeed invited to make Athens their residence and are offered a cavern on the Acropolis.
I think that the Oresteian myth stands, next to the Oedipus myth, as the central Greek myth that expresses both a psychical and a cultural problem – that of separating from mother. The myth of Clytemnestra’s murder by her son Orestes and his subsequent exoneration by the new paternal gods portrays a cultural advance that transformed an earlier, brutal patriarchy to the one based on the ‘law of the father‘. In this sense it marks the beginning of Western culture and of the legal state.At the level of psychic reality, it expresses the way the Oedipus complex comes to an end in our culture, and the genesis of the paternal superego as a protection needed to cope with the inner persecution by the damaged maternal object. This interpretation is in line with Fairbairn’s description of the superego as a defence against bad internalized objects.
In this sense The Oresteiaportrays vividly the violent event that brings about the death of the early powerful mother as well as the need for defence against the internal persecutors that such an attack on mother produces. We are witnessing here the birth of the paternal superego as a protection against persecuting objects as well as the birth of the modern masculine identity based on the protection of the superego.The idealization of the father and of the masculine has its origins in the defence against the omnipotent bad mother – omnipotent because she is needed, omnipotent because she is desired, omnipotent because she is identified with, omnipotent because she is hated, omnipotent because she is seen to have murdered the father. In an act of projection, the child’s possessive love for mother is seen as mother’s murder of the father. Her power results from infantile love, hate, greed, envy and need, and from the internalization of an identification with those bits of mother that correspond to these feelings. In this sense father provides an object untainted by these primitive feelings and ready to be used as the liberator, that is, as a defence.
Fairbairn (1943) spoke of the superego and of guilt as a ‘moral defence’. He saw the psyche being more able to bear the burden of what he called the ‘conditional badness’ of the superego, rather than face the ‘unconditional badness’ of early frustrating and ambivalent objects. Ernest Jones spoke of the same vein of guilt as a defence against what he called ‘aphanisis‘ (Jones 1927). Aphanisis is a term he used to describe the unthinkable state of annihilation of all desire. This fear, or rather dread (expressed later as castration anxiety or death thoughts), is the result of the state of privation of the child. An unfulfilled desire leads to the dread of aphanisis, similar, I believe, to Fairbairn’s fear of ‘loss of all libido’. The formation of the superego is a defensive manoeuvre that functions to protect the personality from privation, with its concomitant dread of aphanisis or of murderous aggression. The superego is, of course, based on the internalization of the father – mainly the castrating father. It has another function which is to protect the boy against feminine identification with mother: the wish, that is, to be like mother. When Freud describes the inverted Oedipus complex, he comes very close to postulating a primary identification with mother but she is away and declares that the boy’s first identification is with the father. This wish to be like mother, if it remains unworked through, or if the culture forbids any feminine identification, would be also a potent reason for matricide.
In The Ego and the Id Freud describes the internalization of both parents and comes very close to describing the internalization of a parental couple:
The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications in some way united with each other [my italics]. This modification of the ego retains its special position; it confronts the other contents of the ego as an ideal or super-ego. (Freud 1923, p. 373)
What is missing, however, from this passage, and from The Ego and the Id as a whole, is the castration complex. As a result, the above passage reads like the optimal development which would have been possible in the absence of the intense persecutory fears of the castration complex. The castration complex, by contrast, forms the main subject of Freud’s next paper on the subject, ‘The dissolution of the Oedipus complex’.
‘The dissolution of the Oedipus complex’ appeared a year after The Ego and the Id. In this paper Freud examines different ways in which the Oedipus complex may come to an end – through inevitable disappointment and hopeless longing, for instance, or that it will simply pass away because ‘time has come for its disintegration, just as the milk teeth fall out when the permanent ones begin to grow‘ (Freud 1924, p. 315). He rejects both, however, in favour of the castration complex, in favour, that is, of a massive traumatic event that centers on the fear of castration. In this sense the boy gives up his mother not gradually, that is, working through ambivalence and reality testing, but suddenly, with a bang, so to speak, due to the dread of castration. In order to save his penis – his masculinity – the boy gives up the mother and identifies with the castrating father. What follows the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is not the establishment of a parental couple but, on the contrary, its destruction.What follows is an idealized/castrating father ruling over a desexualized ego and a repressed maternal world.Ernest Jones, in opposition to Freud, saw the phallic phase as following the Oedipus complex (1927). He maintained that to save his penis the boy gives up mother and substitutes her by his penis. In this reading of the outcome of the Oedipus complex masculine narcissism incorporated in the penis replaces the longing for mother and the accompanying dread of castration. Whichever way we read it; however, the castration complex is central to the outcome of the Oedipus complex.
Thus, the girl’s, and the mother’s, lack of a penis becomes the prototype of castration fears for the boy. Therefore, remaining attached to mother, either in a narcissistic (identificatory) or in an anaclitic form, is very dangerous. Under the threat of castration, the boy is driven to give up mother and identify with the castrating father. The attainment of masculinity and of the superego require the giving up of mother both as a love object and as an identificatory figure. No working through of these feelings is allowed.
But how is this equated with matricide? Let us look more closely at what happens at the point of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex. ‘The object cathexes‘, Freud (1924, p. 319) writes, “are given up and are replaced by identifications.” Is this matricide? Far from it. On the contrary, Freud sees the formation of the ego in abandoned object cathexes. The loss of mother results in her being internalized. How can we square this with my claim that what happens with the dissolutionOedipus complex is a kind of psychic matricide?
I think that Freud’s description of what takes place in the psyche during this time is not a description of conditions conducive to the internalization of a good object that would form the core of the ego. On the contrary, I think that what Freud is describing in this paper is the traumatic loss of mother. In other words, Freud does not distinguish between different types of internalization and different kinds of loss. Does traumatic loss, for instance, result in the formation of ego structure? Far from it, as we know from cases of traumatic loss. In such a case the introjected object remains an undigested bad object that haunts the psyche as an alien presence. The attempt to kill it or evacuate it may take most of the person’s energy requiring the protection of a superior object (the superego) to establish some kind of stability in the psyche.
The question I am posing here is whether Freud’s description of the ending of the Oedipus complex, and the giving up of mother, in the case of the boy, is not a case of traumatic loss. It is striking, for instance, that Freud does not use the term ‘resolution’ of the Oedipus complex. He talks of the ‘dissolution’ (Untergang) of the Oedipus complex, or of its ‘destruction’ and ‘abolition’. The process he is describing is certainly not a resolution or a slow working through of feelings. The castration complex, based on sexual monism, is the prime mover. Thus terror, rather than pining for the object, is the state of the psyche. Persecutory fears rather than depressive anxieties predominate – narcissistic loss rather than loss of the object.
The terror of the castration complex cannot be divorced from the cultural absence of female sexuality and the female genitals and the presence of what Irigaray has called ‘the metaphysics of the same’ which Freud expressed as sexual monism. Thus, masculine anxieties, enshrined in culture, form the prime mover for the traumatic loss of the mother that ‘The dissolution of the Oedipus complex’ describes.
It is clear from the above that if somebody has to be killed, at the peak of the Oedipus complex, it should not be father. The boy’s dilemma at the oedipal stage cannot be resolved by parricide. The regression and psychic collapse that the murder of the father would precipitate for both boy and girl becomes obvious in the Oedipus tragedy. In other words, separation from mother has to take place if mental health is to follow and, if the culture does not allow for a slow, gradual separation based on a working through of feelings of loss and aggression, a violent separation like the one described in ‘The dissolution of the Oedipus complex‘ becomes the only alternative.
The father represents not only the third term but also the other sex – other to mother, that is. This is extremely important for the establishment of the reality principle and for the working through of omnipotence, but also for the establishment of gender identity for both boy and girl.In this sense the survival of the father is crucial.
I have suggested above that the cultural answer to the problem of separation from mother has been the murder of the mother together with her sexual partner and the idealization of a distant father. This is exemplified by the way the dissolution of the Oedipus complex takes place in Western culture – which is, not with a whimper but with a bang. This banishment of the early mother into the unconscious where she reigns as a bad object, and the elevation of the father into the superego leaves the Western psyche without a good parental couple and at the mercy/protection (whichever way one would like to see it) of the superego against bad objects. The possession of mother by father, on which patriarchal culture is based, does not constitute a parental couple. Possessions, as we know, are narcissistic extensions of the self. Thus, the boy’s inadequate separation from mother, the traumatic loss of her, as well as the internalization of her as a bad object come back as the inability of a culture to allow a full independent feminine/maternal ‘other’. In this sense the castrated mother becomes the only possible mother image. Freud’s description of repression as an absolute ban on forbidden impulses refers, I think, to this inability of the Western psyche to work through infantile anxieties but instead uses the superego as a defence against them. For if the child has not worked through infantile anxieties towards the maternal object, father and the paternal superego remain his only hope of defence against bad objects as Fairbairn (1943) has shown.
A Clinical Case Study Outlining Maternal Psychic Conflict
I shall now draw from clinical material to illustrate this. Peter exemplifies the man without a potent internal father figure and without a paternal superego, a man who remains unconsciously identified with his mother whom he dreams of killing. Peter is uncertain of his identity, of his values, of what is real and true. He does not know who he is and feels constantly like a fraud. He has a secret life of short-lived casual affairs which make him feel alive and desired but which cause him an enormous amount of guilt and persecution. He describes these affairs as his ‘drug’ – ‘they give me a temporary boost which I need to feel alive. But soon the effect is gone and I need another shot’.
Peter is fascinated by vampire stories. Vampires become his friends, his alter ego. The twilight world they inhabit feels like freedom. He knows that they are evil (rationally that is – ‘they suck blood, don’t they?’) but they do not feel evil to him. They feel sensitive and fragile – a world apart from the small-minded people around him whom he despises. The world of the vampires is the world of oral greed where the baby feels that his survival depends on sucking his mother dry. The life he gets is taken by devouring mother. The fear of exhausting the mother is only equal to the fear of being left hungry by a rejecting and depriving mother. In this phantasy Peter idealizes oral greed without dependence and without life or death. The dead mother is really undead – and has to be killed again and again. Thus, matricide is never complete as the mother refuses to die without the death of the self.
Peter has also a morbid fascination for Psycho, Hitchcock’s classic film. It is a cult film for him: the young psychopath who live with his mummified mother and who attacks and kills any woman who sexually excites him becomes for him a sensitive hero. The shy and ineffectual Perkins with his subversive lack of masculinity, so different from the macho heroes that Hollywood has celebrated, fascinates him.
For there is something feminine about both the vampire heroes and the young psychopath in Psycho. Their apparent sensitivity has to do, I dare say, with their unresolved identification with mother, a mother who is dead, or who refuses to either die or be fully alive. This ambiguous state of a sensitive psychopath betrays the ambivalence not only about mother, but also about masculinity and femininity, and the resistance towards moving on and resolving either the ambivalence or the ambiguity of bisexuality – and ambiguity that can acquire, as in Psycho, delusional traits if it includes a denial of father or an allegiance to a dead/damaged mother with whom the ego is identified.
Although Psycho points to an unresolved Oedipus complex and the vampire phantasies to an unresolved oral ambivalence, they both point to a state of mind where parts of the ego are absorbed in very primitive relationships with ambivalent objects.
But Peter is not a psychopath. He is not anti-social. He is not delinquent. He leads a normal, if slightly unstable life. He is an intelligent and sensitive young man who has an ordinary job and an ordinary relationship. But he feels unstable, always on the verge of losing either himself or the woman he loves. He gets into states of primitive rage where he feels as if he has been left to die of hunger and neglect. Alternatively, he feels suffocated in his relationship and want to leave, but in an act of projection he feels that his girlfriend cannot survive his abandonment. He has had a series of heterosexual relationships which he usually ends by finding somebody else to take the place of his partner at the time, always looking for an enduring object, an object he cannot spoil or kill.
Peter is engaged in a continuous struggle with his mortally damaged mother. He feels as if he has a dead object inside. The vampire phantasies and the Psycho obsession are only two of his phantasies. When he came to therapy, he brought with him a recurrent dream. In the dream he is walking along a street when he becomes aware of a female presence inside a house. He feels a deadly force drawing him towards the house and he usually wakes up in terror. He associated this deadly force with the dwarf at the end of the film Don’t Look Now. In this film the dwarf represents the man’s dead daughter and leads him eventually to his own death.
This woman in the house haunts his dreams and becomes the undead mother whom he tries to get rid of in vain. Like a corpse that surfaces from the depths of the sea exactly when the murderer had thought that he had got rid of it, the ‘woman in the house’ surfaces in every woman he has a lasting relationship with. That is perhaps one reason why casual relationships are so attractive for him. For in any lasting relationship the vampires are awakened. The relationship becomes then a mutual orgy of devouring or sucking dry.
Early in his therapy Peter had the following dream:
He was at a party. The hostess was a very boring woman and Peter felt a deep contempt for her. A man who looked like an artist entertained a few people who had gathered around him with clever stories and anecdotes. Peter admired him for his intelligence and lack of conformity. All of a sudden, the man picked up an axe and attacked the boring hostess. He first cut off one arm, then the other, then one leg and then the other. At the end he cut of her head. Peter woke up in absolute terror feeling the resistance of the mutilated body against the axe.
Peter recognized his identification with the man/artist and his hate and aggression against the boring hostess – the depriving mother to whom he remained attached.
The oedipal drama is evident here, but much more is evidence is the parasitic identification with the mother who haunts him through the women he meets, and whom he wants to castrate and reduce to a powerless torso which he can then possess. The absence of the father, either as a real or as an idealized figure is all too evident – the young artis in the dream being the idealized, omnipotent part of himself.
Peter’s personal myth is that he was an unwanted child due to his parents having had to marry because his mother was pregnant with him. Whatever the reality was Peter did not feel that he ever got enough love and attention from his mother so that he could allow either his father or his siblings to exist. He was a very compliant child, never as allowing any overt aggression and reality testing to usher him into the real world. In a strange way Peter has triumphed with his repressed aggression over both mother and father and in this way has not internalized a good enough object. His attachment to an early, depriving mother puts him in a continuous state of ambivalence towards his love objects.
Peter lives in an uncertain world where self and other are not only confused but are always in danger of being attacked, devoured, undermined, deceived, defrauded. His non-separation from the maternal attacked object puts him in continuous danger. The dangers are many: to his body integrity, to his ‘true self’, to his identity, to his masculinity, to his ability to enjoy life, to his ability to live without guilt. His life is a constant attack on himself in identification with his objects [in his relational world], as in a true melancholic position. As his identification with father and with the paternal superego is tenuous, he remains in the hands of his bad objects.
Here we are back to Freud and to the opening quotation from Kristeva. But does the solution lie in matricide as Kristeva seems to be advocating or is another solution possible? In fact, the question is: has Peter already committed matricide as well as parricide? Is his life more in accordance with persecutory guilt, without the moral defence of a paternal superego? Or to put it even more clearly: does matricide, like any murder and any attack, tie the perpetrator irrevocably to his/her victim, with the only hope of redemption in an idealized father? And is the idealized father, i.e. patriarchy, the only solution to the problem of separation from mother?
The formation of the superego, i.e. the internalization of the castrating/idealized father, is certainly the solution on which patriarchy is resting. It is a solution that is resting on the creation of a repression barrier that separates the world of the father – the Freudian superego – from the world of the mother with all the oedipal and pre-oedipal passions, hates and attacks on objects and the self.It creates a rational world resting on a volcano of irrationality and destructiveness. It creates the world of Western culture as we have known it since Aeschylus and as Freud has illuminated it. In this light The Oresteia, more than Oedipus Rex, becomes the central myth of Western culture and matricide its pivotal crime.
Is this, however, the only possible solution to early anxieties?With this question in mind, I would like now to turn to Winnicott and Bion in search of an answer. In his paper ‘The use of an object and relating through identifications’ Winnicott (1971) talks about the child’s emerging sense of externality as dependent on the change from ‘relating’ to ‘using’ objects:
“(The) change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys the object … A new feature thus arrives in the theory of object-relating. The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you’, and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hello, object!’ ‘I you’. ‘While I am loving you, I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’ Here fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived. It is important to note that it is not only that the subject destroys the object because the object is placed outside the area of omnipotent control. It is equally significant to state this the other way around and say that it is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control.'” (Winnicott 1971, pp. 105-6)
In this passage Winnicott makes the important link between destructive attacks on the object, the survival of the object, and the sense of externality created in the child. In other words, separation from mother begins here.
Further down Winnicott says:
“At this point of development that is under survey the subject is creating the object in the sense of finding externality itself, and it has to be added that this experience depends on the object’s capacity to survive.” (It is important that ‘survive’, in this context, means ‘not retaliate’.) (p. 107)
Note
With regard to electronic targeting, targeted individuals (TIs), and electronic assaults (EAs) against the body, it should be with this above passage one can begin to understand the omnipotent control taken by the controller using electromagnetic frequency stimulation/assaults on its OBJECT. To ensure that the Subject, in this case the person performing the electronic targeting, creates the scenario where the OBJECT does in fact survive (the victim/target), because the victim/target’s ability to retaliate or defend itself against the attacks becomes compromised by the assault. Electronic assaults can not be perceived in reality because these forms of attack are invisible, unseen, and unannounced.
The survival and non-retaliation of the object are essential here otherwise the subject will confuse the object for his own omnipotent phantasy of destructiveness. What is achieved by the survival of the object is the sense of externality which puts an end to the child’s omnipotence and to the narcissistic identification with mother. Aggression is used here in the service of development, but only if the mother ‘survives’ (doesn’t retaliate).
But what do we mean when we talk about the ‘survival of the object’? If the child attacks mother and mother simply does not retaliate, what happens to the child’s aggression? Does it come back to him? Does it simply disappear? I think that two sets of concepts are relevant here: Bion’s concept of the alpha function and mother’s reverie and Winnicott’s concept of concern. {I think it’s important to note that when we speak of “the child” attacking “the mother”, we are speaking of “the Subject” attacking “the OBJECT”.}
Bion’s concept of alpha function has to do with the transformation of an emotional experience. This function, which he likens to digestion, transforms sensory and emotional experience into alpha elements capable of being stored and dreamed of. Mother’s reverie is part of mother’s capacity for alpha function. Bion defines reverie as ‘that state of mind which is open to the reception of any “objects” from the loved object and is therefore capable of reception of the infant’s projective identifications whether they are felt by the infant to be good or bad’ (Bion 1962, p. 36)
So, for Bion any emotional experience, good or bad, has to be ‘digested’ and transformed into elements that can be used for thinking and dreaming, i.e., into alpha elements. If the baby, due to excessive frustration, cannot do it, mother’s reverie is essential:
“An infant capable of tolerating frustration can permit itself to have a sense of reality, to be dominated by the reality principle. If its intolerance of frustration reaches beyond a certain degree omnipotent mechanism come into operations, notably projective identification. This might still be regarded as realistic; in that it suggests awareness of the value of a capacity for thought as a means of softening the frustration when the reality principle is dominant. But it depends for its efficacy on the existence of the mother’s capacity for reverie. If the mother fails, then a further burden is thrown on the infant’s capacity for toleration of frustration …” (p. 37)
In this sense the infant’s tolerance of frustration, the mother’s capacity for reverie and the development of the reality principle are closely connected. I suggest here that Winnicott’s ‘survival of the object’ is connected with the mother’s capacity for reverie. In other words, a non-retaliatory mother ‘does’ something more than non-retaliating. She receives the child’s projective identifications and transforms them into alpha elements, in this way lessening omnipotent control and helping the child to differentiate between internal and external reality.
The other concept I mentioned above is Winnicott’s ‘capacity for concern‘. For Winnicott:
“The word ‘concern’ is used to cover in a positive way a phenomenon that is covered in a negative way by the word ‘guilt’. A sense of guilt is anxiety linked with the concept of ambivalence, and implies a degree of integration in the individual ego that allows for the retention of a good object – imago along with the idea of a destruction of it. Concern implies further integration, and further growth, and relates in a positive way to the individual’s sense of responsibility, especially in respect of relationships into which the instinctual drives have entered.” (Winnicott 1963, p. 73)
For concern to be achieved, however, there has to be a reliable presence of a mother who can receive the child’s reparation. In other words, the reliable presence of the mother has to be taken for granted if the child is to achieve confidence in this ‘benign cycle’ of attack on the object, guilt over the attack, opportunity for reparation with mother present to receive the child’s reparation, and modification of guilt into concern. ‘The infant is now becoming able to be concerned’, Winnicott writes, ‘to take responsibility for his own instinctual impulses and the functions that belong to them’ (1963, p. 77). The development of the alpha function also presupposes the presence of a mother able to act as a container for the child’s anxieties and attacks.
The reliable presence of the mother is also stressed by Klein (1959) in her paper ‘Our adult world and its roots in infancy’ where she writes:
“Freud has postulated the process of working through as an essential part of psychoanalytic procedure … There is, however, a working through occurring to some extent in normal individual development. Adaptation to external reality increases and with it the infant achieves a less phantastic picture of the world around him. The recurring experience of the mother going away and coming back to him makes her absence less frightening and therefore his suspicion of her leaving him diminishes.” (Klein 1959, pp. 255-6)
Now both Winnicott and Bion, as well as Klein, talk about a slow process that involves a mother who is available or a mother who goes away and comes back. This matrifocal slow process of a working through contrasts starkly with Freud’s model of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex where the boy, under the threat of castration, represses his love for his mother and internalizes a castrating father. In Freud’s model the repression is massive and forms the basis of the tripartite division of the psyche where the paternal (basically castrating superego) becomes the measure of all things leading and directing the ego.
In other words, we have two very different models of development here: the one implies a slow, gradual development of illusion/disillusionment, or attack and reparation, or anxiety and containment; the other implies a decisive moment of discontinuity when the repression barrier descends on the psyche as a result of intolerable castration anxiety. As we have seen, Feud has considered other ways in which the Oedipus complex comes to an end – more gradual ways in which reality testing plays a more prominent role but he rejects them. For Freud only the threat of castration is a strong enough motive for the boy to give up mother.
It seems to me that what is missing from Freud’s description of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is the cultural demand that the child should sever its early relation with mother at a certain age, and that no transformation is possible short of this brutal severing exemplified in The Oresteia, as well as in Kristeva’s opening quotation, as ‘the murder of the mother’. What follows the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is the latency phase, i.e., a phase where the force of repression through the paternal superego is evident and which makes the child able to be moulded according to cultural expectations. It is, of course, evident that our education system has traditionally relied on the power of repression during latency – something which is becoming very problematical today as the force of repression is weakening and latency is not to be taken for granted.
But to come back to The Oresteia and to the patriarchal principles that it entails: Clytemnestra’s murder was ordered by Apollo, a misogynist god who stood for the paternal principle. Orestes has no desire to kill his mother but responds to the demands of a new cultural superego – the new order of a paternal god.
It is as if no internalization of the idealized father can take place before the mother is dead. It is as if the paternal superego has to be born out of the death of the powerful mother. This is a curious command that does not include the internalization of a parental couple but of an idealized father born out of the death of the mother. It creates a split, rather than integration, in the psyche. This is also close to Freud’s formulation which describes the genesis of the paternal superego out of the abandoned cathexis of the mother, which runs counter to his theory of identification with the lost loved object.
As I have discussed earlier Freud came very close to postulation the internalization of a parental couple in The Ego and the Id but recoils as he discovers the asymmetrical development of boys and girls, in other words as he becomes aware of the denigratory state of the maternal object in the internal world. In his subsequent papers ‘The dissolution of the Oedipus complex’ and the papers on female sexuality he does not mention the ‘dual identification of mother and father united’ but goes on instead to postulate female castration and the denigration of the mother as castrated. This is not to say that Freud was a misogynist, as he has very often been accused, but that he became more and more aware of the bias towards the paternal principle in the psyche of his patients – a bias he shared as a of his culture.
To make a parallel with The Oresteia I think that The Oresteia portrays the dissolution of the Oedipus complex as prescribed by Greek, and since then, Western culture. By this I mean that the dissolution of the Oedipus complex does not include the establishment of a parental couple in the psyche, and the establishment of an idealized paternal figure. God the father is thus being born out of the murder of the mother. This also seems to be in accordance with historical data to do with the destruction of the early cult of the Great Mother by monotheistic religions.
Monotheism has been praised by Freud, among others, for representing the abstract principle over the concrete. This has been taken, since the establishment of Christianity, as a sign of intellectual and spiritual superiority of Western culture over other cultures. The violence and destructiveness involved in the establishment of this principle have been hidden in the unconscious only to erupt from time to time in unspeakable fits of destructive frenzy.
The absence of a parental couple in Judaeo-Christian religions, culture and psyche leads to denigration not only of woman but of nature. Nature, in Western culture, became not only unreliable but also inferior – a mere object in the hands of a spiritual being whose spirituality came not from nature but from a Creator. This Creator used simple technology – pottery whose invention is usually ascribed to women – to create the universe and the human species. This usurping of women’s generative, as well as creative, ability and the demolition of the parental couple by a male God marks the beginning of a masculine culture based on phallic omnipotence. This phallic omnipotence is best exemplified in The Oresteia by Apollo’s famous dictum:
“The mother is not the true parent of the child
Which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth of
young seed planted by its true parent, the male.” (Aeschylus 1986, p. 169)
One could say that the beginning of the end of this patriarchal omnipotent creation came with Darwin’s discovery of the evolutionary process. Although Darwin couched his theory in masculine terms of the ‘survival of the fittest’, the blow to the masculine myth of the Creation as an act of a spiritual force separated from, and ruling over, nature was decisive. But cultures do not change with one theory however pervasive this might be. Contradictions can be tolerated for a long time and a culture, like ours, that accepts the theory of human beings evolving out of primate cousins does not find it contradictory to treat nature as a mere passive object to be used, abused and discarded.
Technology has its roots in the use of the object and in object mastery. The use of the object is, as we know from Winnicott, ruthless and only eventually, with the survival of the mother and with the emergence of externality, will the child develop ‘concern’ and the ability to make reparation. But what if reparation is not possible because the mother has not survived, or even worse because the mother has been murdered?
Two avenues are then possible which have been followed traditionally by the two sexes: either depression will descend on the child who is unable to make reparation, or manic reparation in the name of the father will take place. In the first instance of a depressive reaction the use of the object will be inhibited and the child will become compliant. This is the path followed by woman, on the whole, in identification with the object. In the second instance a split develops between a damaged/murdered mother and a powerful/idealized father who will protect against depression – the superego.The identification here is with a powerful father who can allow the use of the object without concern since the object is totally separated and has become dead and passive in the hand of an active subject. In this sense technology is a manic defence that attempts to restore the dead object – or create it from nothing again and again. This manic defence, part of which is the split between an active subject and a passive object, protects against depression but does not allow a genuine working through of infantile anxieties to take place. It relies on phallic omnipotence which confuses the part for the whole.
I suggest here that the dissolution of the Oedipus complex in Western culture follows along the lines delineated above. Feud, of course, did not think that the dissolution of the Oedipus complex marked the need of psychic development. He saw in it only the interruption of sexual development and saw puberty as the time when the discovery of the vagina and, therefore, the end to phallic monism would take place. The end of phallic monism brings with it the hope of a parental couple. But, as infantile anxieties which have not been worked through but only interrupted by the dissolution of the Oedipus complex come to the fore, the hope of a parental couple increasingly recedes. In the place of a parental couple, we have woman as a possession, i.e., as a narcissistic extension of the self, once again reversing the fear of being possessed by the mother.
The absence of a parental couple in Western psyche, of which psychoanalytic theory is only a reflection, means that reproduction of life, as an act of the parental couple, is denied. God the potter or God the spirit is ultimately the creator. In this sense idealism and materialism, or spirituality (at least as we know it in the West) and technology are part of the same coin – the underside of each other – and closely connected with the murder of the mother.In a godless world technology becomes the new religion endowed by the phallic omnipotence that had been projected onto God the father. In this sense Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein takes on an archetypal significance as the central myth of our times that relates technological achievement to masculine omnipotence and the creation of a substitute world that would replace both nature and mother as well as the parental couple. It is, in other words, a story about matricide.
Technology is, of course, linked to the use of the object.As such it partakes in the struggle for the establishment of externality and involves attacks on the object, as well as the search for an object which, unlike the murdered mother, would survive the attacks.To the extent to which concern has not been established technology is ruthless.To the extent to which externality has not been established technology is a narcissistic extension of the self that relates more to faeces than to baby.
Technology, then, which under circumstances of psychical integration would be a tool for enhancing the quality of life becomes a deadly tool in the hands of a phallocentric culture which has not allowed the establishment of a parental couple in the psyche, nor the development of concern nor the integration of the good and bad objects to take place.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein portrays phallic omnipotence and the lack of concern as part of the same process which is the manufacturing of a monster in the image of the self and in disowning the monster as something alien. Dr. Frankenstein’s creation is not a monster to start with – he becomes a monster as he absorbs the projections of the good citizens around him and of Frankenstein himself who can feel no empathy, no concern, no pity for the desolate creature he has created. Modelled on Frankenstein’s repressed world the monster faces him as an alien and is thus totally denounced by him.
Part of a technological culture is, of course, the idealization of manufactured reality.A technological culture does not merely use technology to make life easier, but technology itself becomes part of the ego ideal – a self-bigger, more enduring and immortal in identification with the created object. It represents the new God to whom the self-bows. Technology substitutes the creator himself. In a further split between the creator and his creation, the creator disappears under his own creation and the creation is worshipped as god, or alternatively faces us as a monster out of control. The inversion of subject and object takes place in a perverse way as the subject disappears under his own unreality. The confusion of good and bad and of subject and object that has been glossed over by the manic defencerepressed by the omnipotent Father appears once again as religion and the paternal superego weakens.
Ours is an age of the return of the repressed.Monsters, androids, aliens, mutated creatures, robots, robocops, terminators, as well as vampires, dinosaurs reborn, devils, spirits and ghosts of all kinds, poltergeists and warlocks are in abundance. Monsters and machines out of control proliferate in popular imagination while our air is poisoned and our resources depleted. As we lose the protection of the paternal superego our technological achievements reveal their roots in uncontrolled and uncontrolled destructiveness and their origin in the murder of the mother and of the parental couple.
The absence of a parental couple in our founding myths and its substitute by male omnipotence – spiritual or technological – is ultimately based on an attack on mother and on life as the source of life. When life as the source of life is denied the death instinct reigns unabated.
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References
Aeschylus The Oresteian Trilogy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Maresfield Library, 1991.
Fairbairn, W. R.D. (1943) The repression and the return of bad objects (with special reference to “War neuroses”.In Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Routledge, 1986.
Fairbairn, W. R.D. (1944) Endopsychic structure considered in terms of object relationship. In Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Routledge, 1986.
Freud, S. (1923) The Ego and the Id. In Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 11.
Freud, S. (1924) The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. In Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 7.
Irigaray, L. (1981) The bodily encounter with the mother. In The Irigaray Reader. Oxford: BAsil Blackwell, 1991.
Jones, E. (1927) The early development of female sexuality. In Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Maresfield Reprints.
Kohut, H. (1971) The Analysis of the Self. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, 1987.
Klein, M. (1959) Our adult world and its roots in infancy. In TheWritings of Melanie Klein, Vol. III. London: Hogarth Press, 1984.
Kristeva, J. (1989) Black Sun. New York: Columbia University Press.
Stoller, R. (1968) Sex and Gender. London: Maresfield Reprints, 1984.
Winnicott, D.W. (1963) The development of the capacity for concern. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press, 1985.
Winnicott, D.W. (1971) The use of the object and relating through identifications. In Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
New advances in Artificial Intelligence. The humanoid robot Pepper (shown above) can interpret human body language and read emotion to respond accordingly to the user, evolving as it learns the person. It can also be programmed to fit an environment.
“The formation of the superego, i.e. the internalization of the castrating/idealized father, is certainly the solution on which patriarchy is resting. It is a solution that is resting on the creation of a repression barrier that separates the world of the father – the Freudian superego – from the world of the mother with all the oedipal and pre-oedipal passions, hates and attacks on objects and the self. It creates a rational world resting on a volcano of irrationality and destructiveness. It creates the world of Western culture as we have known it since Aeschylus and as Freud has illuminated it. In this light, The Oresteia, more than Oedipus Rex, becomes the central myth of Western culture and matricide its pivotal crime (Weiland, 1996).”
After discovering a new phrase, “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” I believe the phenomenon of targeted individuals suffering electronic assaults may be part of this phase in human development. The fourth phase of the industrial revolution emphasizes advancements in communication and connectivity as well as merging advances in technologies in such fields as biotechnology, implantable devices, smartphones and android systems, (cyber-physical systems), global positioning, artificial intelligence, and robotics. New continuous glucose monitoring systems allow diabetic patients to wear a sensor on the outside or the inside of their bodies. These sensors deliver blood glucose readings to a handheld device and/or their smartphones. The compiled data of daily readings and daily averages can be shared remotely with others, like medical doctors, via their smartphones. The data can also be sent to their doctors’ offices where the information can be printed and placed in the patient’s file. Please refer to the Eversense Continuous Glucose Monitoring System https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/recently-approved-devices/eversense-continuous-glucose-monitoring-system-p160048s006 Our smartphones run on Google Play Services. Google Play Services grants permission to sensors, calendar, camera, contacts, microphone, phone, SMS, and storage. If you turn the Google Play Services feature off, you can’t access Facebook, Twitter, and many other social media interactive sites. Another words, if you want your AI to play the social internet game, you have to turn on Google Play Services or your dead in the technological waters so to speak. At least that is how my smartphone has worked.
“The phrase Fourth Industrial Revolution was first introduced by Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, in a 2015 article in Foreign Affairs, “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution” was the theme of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2016 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. On October 10, 2016, the Forum announced the opening of its Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco. This was also subject and title of Schwab’s 2016 book. Schwab includes in this fourth era technologies that combine hardware, software, and biology (cyber-physical systems), and emphasizes advances in communication and connectivity. Schwab expects this era to be marked by breakthroughs in emerging technologies in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the internet of things, the industrial internet of things (IIoT), decentralized consensus, fifth-generation wireless technologies (5G), 3D printing and fully autonomous vehicles.” (1)
After reading this, I made the connection between phases of the industrial revolution and the analysis of historical time periods. Michel Foucault analyzed mental illness in three different time periods in human history in his book “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.” I’ll come back to this point in just a few moments.
“Monotheism has been praised by Freud, among others, for representing the abstract principle over the concrete. This has been taken, since the establishment of Christianity, as a sign of intellectual and spiritual superiority of Western culture over other cultures. The violence and destructiveness involved in the establishment of this principle have been hidden in the unconscious only to erupt from time to time in unspeakable fits of destructive frenzy(Weiland, 1996).“
Optogenetics and the Future of Experimental Medicine
“…modern man no longer communicates with the madman … There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence .” That is, through the language of silence.”(2)
One of the most notable advancement in research combining biotechnology (implantable devices) and the use of electromagnetic frequency in Hertz has been seen in the advancements put in place by optogenetics. Optogenetics uses neuromodulation techniques to stimulate the brains of mice. Since stimulation represents a pathway, similar to a door you enter and exit, the pathway can be stimulated one way to stimulate and excite, then shut off, and then stimulated the other way, to depress and sedate neural brain activity, then shut off again. That is, optogenetics has found a way to stimulate or sedate a mouse simply by turning on or off a switch. (3)
Researchers studying intimate partner violence (IPV) and the roots of human aggression and violent behavior in men have discovered that men who use violence as a means to settle disputes or acquire resources (such as females) may be stimulating the part of their brain that activates the pleasure and reward center of the brain. If the use of physical violence brings a satisfactory outcome, thus rewarding the behavior, the male will consistently return to the same modes of behavior and reinforce learning ( Kwiatkowski, Robison, Zeoli, 2018). (4) Interestingly, the same area that is stimulated in violent men to reward them for their behavior, is the same area stimulated in people suffering from addiction. That is, the same pleasure and reward center of the brain are stimulated in people using cocaine, heroine, or opioids. Thus, advances in treatment stemming from this discovery may be multiple. One, violently aggressive men might have a method of treatment available to them, and two, those suffering from a multitude of disorders like addiction, obsessive compulsive, hysteria, and chronic depression might also have a non-oral, non-pharmaceutical based treatment available to them. It is important to note that these types of treatments are experimental and are only used when traditional pharmaceutical do not work.
Interrupting or facilitating communication between the neurons is not the only type of experimental medicine being investigated. Scientists in Switzerland have partially severed the spinal cord of a mouse in order to better understand chronic paralysis. By partially severing the spinal cord of a mouse and using synthetic neurotransmitters, electrical stimulus, and a little motivation (a delicious swiss chocolate and pastry), it was discovered that the damaged spinal cord can be repaired. Here we see the use of electromagnetic stimulation with an injection of a cocktail of synthetic neurotransmitters in experimental medicine. We also see the use of an implanted brain stimulator that activates the mouse’s legs to walk, free of brain activity. (5)
It is important to note that cyber-system technologies used to facilitate communication and connectivity on the outside world of speech, voice, and language, it is also part of the inside human world of biological signaling between neurons and organ systems which represents another form of communication and connectivity. The brain and the spinal cord is the body’s information super highway.
Aspects of Crime in the Technological Revolution
In June 14, 2018 the Justice Department published a press release charging three orthopedic surgeons who were guilty of a multi-million kick-back scheme in which they referred patients for spinal cord surgeries to the Pacific Hospital of Long Beach California. The result of these surgeries was $580 million dollars worth of fraudulent bills and workmen’s compensation claims. (6)
In February 6, 2015 the Justice Department published a press release charging Meditronics, Inc. with promoting a device that was not approved by the FDA. Medtronic’s spinal cord stimulation devices were placed just beneath the skin near an area of pain, most often in the lower back, where the devices could provide electrical impulses to create a “tingling” sensation intended to alleviate chronic pain. The Justice Department said, “Patients should be able to trust that their health care providers only use…..medical procedures that have been shown to be safe and effective.” (7)
Back to Michel Foucault and his book “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,” Foucault traces the evolution of the concept of madness (mental illness) through three phases: the Renaissance, the “Classical Age” (the later seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries) and the modern experience.
To understand injustice in the treatment of psychiatric patients one must first understand how power and control operates in segments of society. By its sheer accredited manifestation in the last years of the 1800s, modern medicine set up for itself a new way of wielding power, control and dominion over men. It is not far fetched to conceive of the idea or scenario that a paranoid personality (PPD) can combine with other actors to stigmatize an otherwise innocent individual through manufactured reality, since part of a technological culture is, of course, the idealization of manufactured reality. It is also not far fetched to think that a clandestine orchestration committed by conscienceless people could take place when historically the conceptual distinction between the mad (mentally ill) and the rational was in a sense a product of this physical separation into confinement: confinement made the mad (mentally ill) conveniently available to medical doctors who began to view madness as a natural object worthy of study and then as an illness to be cured. In short, manipulation and exploitation of the human body and mind. After all, did we not witness the mistreatment of gays and homosexuals during the onset of modern psychiatry? Did we not witness the historical maltreatment of the negro population with the Alabama Tuskegee Syphilis Study? (8) Did we not witness the maltreatment of Jews and other minority groups through Nazi persecution during the second World War? (9) It is far too easy to casually call a man “mad” simply because he is different.
In the Department of Justice press releases I have cited above we see a few different elements. One, a violation of trust. Two, power to rule over the subject (medical knowledge and a license to do so). And three, control over the human body through the implanted medical device (spinal cord stimulator).
As new implantable medical devices are developed, it is likely that we may see an increase in violations of public and private trust, more kick-back schemes involving mass payouts, and the use of devices that may have not been approved by the FDA.
Mind Control and Grooming
“The condition of these outcasts was seen as one of moral error. They were viewed as having freely chosen prostitution, vagrancy, blasphemy, unreason, [homosexuality] etc. and the regimes of these new rational institutions were meticulous programs of punishment and reward aimed at causing them to reverse those choices.”(2)
On college campuses, researchers have found that young men use drugs and alcohol to groom young girls for sex (Brunt, Murphy, Pescara-Kovach, Crance, 2019). (10) If oral drugs and alcohol can be used as a means to commandeer a young girls mind, than the use of these new, non-oral, non-pharmaceutical based electronic technologies may be used to sedate or excite women in order to acquire sex from them and/or brain wash them. In short, control and manipulate not only their behavior, including sexual behavior, but their minds through force manipulation.
“Part of a technological culture is, of course, the idealization of manufactured reality (Weiland, 1996).”
There have been reports that suggest Targeted Individuals (TIs) suffering Electronic Assaults (EAs) are mentally ill (“mad”) and in need of psychiatric treatment. I have read reports that claim these individuals are suffering from hallucinations, are drug and alcohol addicted, or paranoid schizophrenics. If this is the case, these individuals represent a marginalized group of people that deserve more protection under the law than an ordinary citizen simply because these groups have been targeted in the past and have become containers for violent aggression as well as guinea pigs in experimental inhumane, unethical, medical experiments (Perper & Cina, 2010). (11)(12) These individuals have a history of being preyed upon by other psychopathic/sociopathic people interested in stealing their disability checks, food stamps, and other resources belonging to them. Much like Theranos robbed the trust of the American public, misleading us into believing a drop of blood could be enough to satisfy the requirement for hundreds of tests. Now, the medical industry may be interested in violating the trust of the mentally ill. During the Renaissance, madmen (mentally ill) were portrayed in literature as revealing the distinction between what men actually are and what they pretend to be.
In a paper written by Christina Weiland, Matricide and Destructiveness: Infantile Anxieties and Technological Culture, which I am going to quote from extensively, she writes:
“‘The dissolution of the Oedipus complex’ … Freud[‘s] … favour of the castration complex … a massive traumatic event that centers on the fear of castration. In this sense the boy gives up his mother not gradually, that is, working through ambivalence and reality testing, but suddenly, with a bang, so to speak, due to the dread of castration. In order to save his penis – his masculinity – the boy gives up the mother and identifies with the castrating father. What follows the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is not the establishment of a parental couple but, on the contrary, its destruction.What follows is an idealized/castrating father ruling over a desexualized ego and a repressed maternal world.Ernest Jones, in opposition to Freud, saw the phallic phase as following the Oedipus complex (1927). He maintained that to save his penis the boy gives up mother and substitutes her by his penis. In this reading of the outcome of the Oedipus complex masculine narcissism incorporated in the penis replaces the longing for mother and the accompanying dread of castration. Whichever way we read it; however, the castration complex is central to the outcome of the Oedipus complex.” (13)
Weiland’s paper is very provocative and intriguing because she takes into account Donald W. Winnicott’s theory in ‘The use of an object and relating through identifications’ (1971) where he talks about the child’s emerging sense of externality as dependent on the change from ‘relating‘ to ‘using‘ objects. He writes:
“(The) change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys the object … A new feature thus arrives in the theory of object-relating. The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you’, and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hello, object!’ ‘I you’. ‘While I am loving you, I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’ Here fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived. It is important to note that it is not only that the subject destroys the object because the object is placed outside the area of omnipotent control. It is equally significant to state this the other way around and say that it is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control.'”(14)
Weiland further goes on to make the connection between our technological culture and Winnicott’s theory on the use of objects. She writes:
“Technology is, of course, linked to the use of the object.As such it partakes in the struggle for the establishment of externality and involves attacks on the object, as well as the search for an object which, unlike the murdered mother, would survive the attacks.To the extent to which concern has not been established technology is ruthless.To the extent to which externality has not been established technology is a narcissistic extension of the self that relates more to faeces than to baby.”
It is important to note that in order for the establishment of patriarchy to take place, that is, the superego based in the ‘law of the father‘, the murder of the mother must take place. This is not an actual murder but rather a psychic matricide according to Weiland and according to Julia Kristeva:
“Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine qua none of individuation, provided that it takes place under optimal circumstances and can be eroticized … The lesser or greater violence of matricidal drive, depending on individuals and the milieu’s tolerance entails, when it is hindered, its inversion on the self; the maternal object, having been introjected, the depressive or the melancholic putting to death of the self is what follows, instead matricide. (15)
And since technology has its roots in the use of the object and in object mastery, in a culture like ours, one that accepts the theory human beings evolved from their primate cousins does not find it contradictory that man treat nature as a mere passive object to be used, abused and discarded. Is this not what humanity has called ‘progress‘?
Technology, then, becomes a deadly tool in the hands of a phallocentric culture which has not allowed the establishment of a parental couple in the psyche. A psyche that has not allowed for the father and the mother to co-exist together without the death of either.
Weiland goes on to compare our technological culture with the creation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein:
“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein portrays phallic omnipotence and the lack of concern as part of the same process which is the manufacturing of a monster in the image of the self and in disowning the monster as something alien. Dr. Frankenstein’s creation is not a monster to start with – he becomes a monster as he absorbs the projections of the good citizens around him and of Frankenstein himself who can feel no empathy, no concern, no pity for the desolate creature he has created. Modelled on Frankenstein’s repressed world the monster faces him as an alien and is thus totally denounced by him.”
In our technological culture, with its advancing age and surmounting technologies should it be no surprise we have a group phenomenon called Targeted Individuals (TIs)? Is it not surprising that 118,000 American citizens are complaining they are being electronically attacked by clandestine surreptitious electromagnetic frequency (i.e., technology)?
Weiland wrote, “Ours is an age of the return of the repressed.”And age filled with monsters, androids, aliens, mutated creatures, robots, robocops, roboroaches, backyard brains experiments, terminators, vampires, dinosaurs reborn, devils, spirits, ghosts of all kinds, poltergeists, warlocks, and zombies where they are all in abundance. All the while our air is being poisoned and our resources depleted, our technological achievements have revealed their roots in the lack of control, uncontrolled destructiveness rooted in the murder of the mother and of the parental couple.
“The absence of a parental couple in our founding myths and its substitute by male omnipotence – spiritual or technological – is ultimately based on an attack on mother and on life as the source of life. When life as the source of life is denied the death instinct reigns unabated.”
(4) Christine C. Kwiatkowski, Alfred J. Robison, and April M. Zeoli. “Brain Health and the Batterer.” Violence and Gender. Vol. 5, No. 4. Published Online December 3, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1089/vio.2018.0010
(10) Brian Van Brunt, Amy Murphy, Lisa Pescara-Kovach, and Gina-Lyn Crance. “Early Identification of Grooming and Targeting in Predatory Sexual Behavior on College Campuses.” Violence and Gender. Vol. 6, No.1. March 11, 2019.
(11) Joshua A. Perper, Stephen J. Cina (2010). “When Doctors Kill: Who, Why, and How.” New York. Copernicus Books.
(12) Fitzgerald PB, de Castella AR, Filia KM, Filia SL, Benitez J, Kulkarni J. Victimization of patients with schizophrenia and related disorders. Aust N Z J Psychiatry. 2005 Mar;39(3):169-74. doi: 10.1080/j.1440-1614.2005.01539.x. PMID: 15701066. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15701066
(13) Christina Wieland. Matricide and Destructiveness: Infantile Anxieties and Technological Culture. British Journal of Psychotherapy Vol. 12. No.3. (1996): 300-313.
(14)Winnicott, D.W. (1971) The use of the object and relating through identifications. In Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
(15)Kristeva, J. (1989) Black Sun. New York: Columbia University Press.
Proclivities' Principle Wisdom 