"To investigate the different paths that could allow me to understand what underlies this 'banality of evil', and after years of investigation devoted to totalitarian islets in companies, to the study of perversion as processes that pass through individuals, groups, organisations, peoples and states, I set out to create links between the disciplines that fascinated me and to explore a still virgin territory, which I called the 'psychopathology of totalitarianism'.

It was a question of resuming in my way the intellectual weaving of the work where Hannah Arendt had stopped it: on this impasse of the 'banality of evil'. What, then, would psychopathology—a discipline that studies the psychic processes at work, rather than relying on the stigmatization of labels, nosographic categories, or the essentialization of concepts—have to say about the totalitarian phenomenon? In doing so, I have spent years considerably deepening our psychological knowledge of this phenomenon, until then confined to sociopolitical analysis, the observation of submission to authority and the behavioral description of crowds.

This represents my intellectual contribution to the study of totalitarianism, following a path which, as far as I know, had not previously been explored in this way—through the systemic articulation of the individual and the group.

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I then created several concepts to refine this still virgin theoretical field, concepts that I put to the test of field observation and the clinic for years, to make them evolve gradually. From this point of view, the political pandemic of COVID has offered me a 'life-size' experimentation of this 'banality of evil', if I may say so. My original vision now imposes itself as an unavoidable approach, with a paradigm of past concepts in everyday language, such as 'totalitarian surge', 'delusional contagion', 'psychic regression', 'totalitarian drift', 'regressed group', etc.

Yet, nothing was less obvious than to conceive a psychopathology of totalitarianism, at the crossroads of psychopathology, political philosophy, the philosophy of Law and metaphysics.

In psychological observations, political philosophy had indeed stopped at the 'banality of evil' raised by Hannah Arendt at Eichmann’s trial. Psychoanalysis and the psychology of crowds, for their part, with some authors like Freud and Lebon, had issued diagnoses of mad tyrants and their hypnotic operation on the masses. There was the political ponerology of Andrew M. Lobaczewski on psychopathy.

None of these works explained totalitarianism from the perspective of a regressive system, where narcissistic pathologies (paranoia and perversion in the first place) are honored and create alliances, and even less how the totalitarian spider’s web is interwoven by different psychic processes, which it was necessary to identify, qualify, and list, to refine their definition and conceptualization.

My contribution above all is to have summoned this traditional psychopathology, by diagnosing totalitarianism as a collective paranoiac moment, to apply it to totalitarianism, to the masses.
 

That being said, it wasn’t enough for me either. I had to explain, and this is the point on which I have been working for years, the precise mechanisms of this 'delusional contagion'. uthors long before me had spoken of a 'virus' (H. Arendt), an 'infection' (V. Klemperer), and a totalitarian epidemic (A. Camus). Klemperer, the philologist who studied the language of the Nazis, was undoubtedly the one who came closest to the core of the problem, diagnosing the existence—without, however, being able to name its precise nature-of a general psychiatric condition affecting the population, which allowed itself to be overtaken by the Führer’s delusion, quite literally.

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Ariane Bilheran