25 août 2019
Traduction en anglais de la conférence donnée le 16 octobre 2016
“Paranoïa en protection de l’enfance”
Achilles: Do you hear the men’s terrible cries?
Clytemnestra: What are they shouting about?
Achilles: about your daughter.
Clytemnestra: That is a bad omen.
Achilles: They say she must be sacrificed.
Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis
Paranoia is «a place of quiet horror” that is one that nobody wants to listen to. Only a few professionals are brave enough to call it by its name: paranoia.
For if perversion helps bury one’s head in the sand, paranoia helps to lose it ; so professionals lose it quite unknowingly ; since paranoia defends the indefensible, inverts moral values and consists in a soul killing project, to use the words of famous paranoiac in psychopathology literature : the Schreber case.
This very pathology of paranoia is most unknown because dangerous and most dangerous because unknown.
It is overspread though, often confused with perversion, its best ally, and makes considerable mess in human groups through the effects of contagious delirium.
As a preamble, here is a small digest of what it’s all about:
Paranoia is a psychoses, sustained by interpretation delirium, projection and control. At the start of last century two psychiatrists Serieux and Capgras called it “reasoning madness”; this insanity is a trap: it sounds like reason, logics and articulated speech.
The paranoiac sets up a delirium of persecution based on the negative interpretation of signs, gestures, of everything that seems weird to him. “I am the victim of a plot” says the paranoiac. Consequently, he will persecute every one of those he will have pointed out as his own persecutors; on a background of mythomania and megalomania. Denying the past, alterity and sexual differences, paranoia points at scapegoats to be eliminated, divides the group, spies on everything and eradicates every right to privacy and subjectivity.
Paradoxically, paranoia is an enclosed system preaching it to be the best for the other’s own good, the latter no longer being able to protect himself and being psychically stunned. It feeds itself on hate and eroticised manipulation of institutions and, in particular, the legal one.
Everything is set up about the supposed plot of everyone against him, when, in reality, he’s the one who creates, nonstop, new plots whose origins will be attributed to others; justifying so called self-defence interventions.
Consequently, paranoia is the master pathology of totalitarianism and harassment.
Perversion is a narcissist pathology whose vocation is to instrumentalise others to his best advantage. It means, etymologically, what is diverted from its proper goal. It means, no more and no less, what diverts sex life from its goal, psychopathologically speaking.
For the pervert denies sexual life being a creative and fertile accomplishment, he denies the other its gender, its alterity and wholeness ; so that the other is being used as an instrument or an activity, fragmented into « foot » or « hair » (fetishism).
Denying alterity has also to do with sexual differences, the feminine gender being, most of the times, despised, crushed, humiliated, and belittled. Pleasure is neither shared nor creative for everyone: this pleasure is sadist and destructive. The perverse takes everything and does not share. He captures what is healthy and constructive, to deviate it, to invert it, to make it dirt and destroy it.
Perversion is the dedicated and clever handyman of the paranoiac madness. The paranoiac defines a strategy when the pervert deploys tactics.
While Hitler was a paranoiac, the industrialists and businessmen cooperating with the Nazi project were perverts. Paranoiac regimes are imperialistic, war mongers and untruthful. They deny the origin, they think themselves as self-generating; they mutilate knowledge by making some useful and some other not; they divide the people, they do not show respect towards the old ones and are based on a paranoiac sophistry. Active perverts help them accomplishing their business of conquest and destruction.
Face being masked, those pathologies find their way through institutions and families for on the one hand they excel in manipulating and, on the other, they infiltrate delusional ideologies which will be realised (when they will), by the people who have to put up with them, and only many years afterward, once it is out of their system…
It is the same principle in sects or varied fanaticisms: when you are immerged in them, you are not aware of what’s going on.
Professionals must know those delirious contagion mechanisms, knowing they do exist and try to contaminate the institutions all the more because the latter have to do with this kind of pathological profiles and, in particular, to the paranoiac psychoses; this being often the case when children must be protected. The child being at the same time idealised by the paranoiac, fetichised by the pervert and trespassed into, transgressed and ill-treated by both.
This sneaky contagion makes paranoia the place of quiet horror in human groups. That is what I have been studying for more than twenty years. This contagion is working only because “good people”, “honest people”, “normal” professionals are letting themselves being contaminated.
Paranoia works by way of projection, a central mechanism, and federates the group around a scapegoat who is supposed to persecute the group who is, in fact, persecuted.
Let’s take the example of “parental alienation”.
First I would like to precise that by questioning the validity of this concept, we do not question the fact that psychotic parents may do make their children insane. We question the concept definition, its metonymic usage (use a few symptoms to make a “syndrome” and confuse the symptom and the process) and mainly, projective, by institutions and paranoiac parents.
For the paranoiac is always accusing other people to do what he’s himself doing.
He will accuse the protective parent of “parental madness” and approved by all the institutions; the latter not having at their disposal any clinical tool or serious diagnosis to notice the psychotic and delusional processes.
The paranoiac is the creator of parental madness.
Creator of alienation because he integrates and alienates his child in his own madness.
Creator of the parental alienation syndrome in order to project into the other, inventing his own neologism – as always in psychoses, that is his own alienation towards his child.
Speaking clearly, he’s accusing the other parent of what he, himself, has been doing.
By the abusive usage of a fallacious and vague concept, he persecutes the protective parent and the child, his victim.
When this projective delirium is echoed by the institution which is itself alienated, we are in the paranoiac delirious contagion which works through diverse psychic mechanisms: terror and stunned behaviour contagion, representation and language deconstruction (I am working hard on “paranoiac sophistry” or in other words the effects of delirium in language that are to abrade reflexive thinking in the interlocutor’s mind and alienate him in the delirium), by perverses seducings etc.
Nowadays does exist a rampant “totalitarianism” which from now on doesn’t hid its desire to “swallow to the bone” the child with the complicity of many among the Righteous.
Too many a time we notice those situations when the parental paranoia starts infiltrating the teams.
The mere fact of demonization of victim children and the persecution of the protective parent are paranoia like. And more significant yet: this process being done in the “parental alienation syndrome’s name, delirious prediction itself. Used in a projective way.
The child is given back to its molester, the protective parent is sided off. Law is no longer respected.
It is being twisted to the paranoiac’s advantage. He thinks himself as the incarnation of Law. The problem is potentiated when Justice is in itself contaminated and agrees with the paranoiac; when tribunals help twisting Law which, in the circumstances, is no longer here to protect children but becomes another instrument to ill-treat childhood.
I’ve got clinic situations where the prime legal injunction: “criminal law has precedence over the civil law”, that is to say that complaint concerning criminal cases should be treated before the ones connected with civil law! Therefore, we could witness a patient being judged and sentenced because she did not present her child in due time when, at the same time, her complaint about her child having been raped has not been treated yet.
How did we arrive, in such a general denying, to such situations which :
1° Persecute children and protective parents?
2° Confirm the aggressors omnipotence?
3° Is not (or almost not) conveyed to the general population?
4° When it is pointed out by professionals this may trigger their persecution by institutional reprisals.
Here is, precisely, paranoia’s master work : through harassment of the population and institutions, propaganda and different ways of submitting psychically, to get the collective alienation to delirium ; that is to say a new reality which does not exist, in which the child as a victim is turned into an embarrassing voice to be shut up, in which protective parents and professionals are persecuted and, by opposition, many a paedophile, some of them widely known, are not sued and participate to the work of society without being hampered in the least.
All of this is to be thought on a totalitarian level. All my works tend to lighten those psychic mechanisms of delusional contagion in society.
For if “normal people” did not believe him, the paranoiac would have no power.
Delusion always corresponds to the creation of a new reality to replace the one already here.
Psychoanalysis saying is about the principle of reality, that is to say that of the table that is square it is not round. Reality principle could be defined as what against which we are knocking ourselves. Reality is always inspiring unpleasantness because it is limitative. I cannot fly with my own wings except figuratively.
And this is a fact, a reality which provokes frustration and unpleasantness. But in the delirium I can fly with my own wings.
Delirium is always an attempt to repair an injured narcissism that denies reality; that one being the cause of too much anxiety and too much pain being impossible to be represented. The delirious person doesn’t negotiate with reality : I cannot physically fly but am able to imagine that I could fly while knowing that I cannot ; he dictates his reality : I fly with my wings, reality does not exist to dictates its limits to me.
The paranoiac is being delirious about his own omnipotence.
He’s overpowering everything, he knows everything; he a man and a woman, he’s young and old: he is everything.
The paranoiac’s sin is what the Greek called immoderation.
Narcissistically, he thinks he is God.
He knows.
He feels.
He intuits.
He manages.
He decides.
He is the LAW
He knows for the other what’s good for him.
He is God.
Anybody who disobeys him, disobeys God.
Paranoiac delirium, orchestrated by denial, is to spread over.
This is a converting delirium. The very same we find at the start of religious fanaticism.
And this is a projective delirium. The paranoiac ill-treats, insults, and humiliates everything which is perceived as different. The majority of paranoiacs are men who deny the prime alterity: women.
As Dr Eugénie Izard will develop the paranoiac is the « whole » with no emptiness, no absence, no castration, and no limits in time and space. He thinks he’s been self-generated, born out of nowhere, with no ancestors and no descendants either (his lineage is no other than himself or whoever, among them disobeys him will be severely chastised) and do not put up with any resistance.
In the sphere of the protection of children there are many violent acts inflicted by paranoiacs.
The general clinical case is one of a paranoiac father who, narcissistically unable to mourn properly after a separation (even if he is at the origin of it) and thinks it as a “treason” from his spouse. So he persecutes his ex-wife, harasses her and takes the children as hostages: turning them mad; ill-treating them and sexually abusing them.
The paranoiac is a very procedural person. He will sue or will do in such ways that the other will have to make complaints.
He is looking for allies against whoever resists him and, of course, watch specifically for them among professionals working in institutions. He will meet perverse allies; occasionally he tries to cure his delirium by living in reality through sadism and, in particular, in paedophilia.
I am not developing here and now the whole pathology. That would last days of teaching and I advise those who wish to deepen the notions to read my book : “Psychopathology of paranoia” published in July 2016 by Armand Colin.
The paranoiac says “with me or against me” “if you are against, I shall kill you”, and “with me, we are going to kill together for the Good”. Good becomes “respect for law”, the latter is in itself instrumental to correspond to the mad ideology of the paranoiac.
I am definitely talking here about delirium and not only stranglehold.
Holding is what the pervert does. He will enjoys taking charge of institutions and people in order to play them as puppets to please his good wishes and to his best advantage at that time.
The pervert will often make an instrument of the institution to be used against the victim and the institution will be an accomplice of the victim’s execution. The institution, not realising it, is being played with to fulfil the paranoiac’s main goals: omnipotence and control.
The craft of perversion is to maintain a hold upon people. It consists in capturing, through manipulation, the psychic energy of the others in order to feed on their vital substances.
Do not forget that the manipulator is one who has no power and has to influence other people’s decision to get what he wants.
The paranoiac is not really holding on people because doing so is admitjing the reality of the other, if your ambition is to dominate him.
He is in alienation: the other must alienate himself to the paranoiac’s way of re-reading and recreating reality in his delirium.
Paranoia is more serious than perversion and it is important to know the distinction.
Perversion opens the door to paranoiac transgression, this one being total.
Holding, stranglehold on people is a perverse additive of delirious contagion which aims is to deny every king of subjectivity and all differentiated existences.
Let’s keep in mind that in the totalitarian system:
Perverts are always paranoiac allies
Children are always chosen preys
Authority does not exist anymore. Father figures of authority are no longer working or are deviated (the third party, law, educators, managers etc.). People, who have no longer any more protection embodied by an authority, consider themselves as children confronted to a greedy omnipotence that nothing can stop.
From now on delirious contagion roots in defence mechanisms that everyone are made to use, just in order to survive from the paranoiac delirium which spread on and on up to a complete society… And I would advise you to Dr Izard’s intervention about this subject.
Conclusion:
Of course, damages caused by paranoia upon children are very serious, I would even say that’s precisely hoped for by those (paranoiacs and perverts) who find it useful for themselves to alienate, at a tender age, living strengths of the future.
At all ages, totalitarianisms have used propaganda and ideology upon children.
Let’s consider that nowadays we have to confront a new totalitarianism, a “rampant totalitarianism”, which is not named, but is very powerful in the ideologies it propagates in order to disorganise children from the start ; and that makes it all the more strong and dangerous in deliriums.
Let everyone, at his own level, not to agree with it and clarify his mind.
Your presence here demonstrates your desire of clarity and knowledge. Getting information, in those time when our theory is branded, is proof of conscience.
Thank you very much for having listened to me and I wish you the best for future.
Santa Marta (Colombia), October 8th 2016
Ariane Bilheran
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