Masterpiece of paranoia, harassment

Bilheran, A. 2019. "Chef d'oeuvre de la paranoïa, le harcèlement", in Santé Mentale, N°243.

Not only is bullying the masterpiece of the paranoiac, but the delusional contagion acting under its impulse degrades the mental health of all members of the bullying group.

Harassment is a political phenomenon linked to the history of humanity. It "aims at the progressive destruction of an individual or group by another individual or group, by means of repeated pressures intended to forcefully obtain from the individual something against his will and, in doing so, to arouse and maintain in the individual a state of terror." (Bilheran, 2006).

A mode of expression of the abuse of power, authoritarianism, tyranny, it opposes authority as unjust power opposes just power. It is the perfect method of enslavement used by the paranoiacs of whom I often say that it is the "masterpiece".

How do paranoia and harassment relate to each other? To answer this question, I will first recall what harassment is, its precise definition and the conditions necessary for its implementation. Then I will demonstrate how the paranoid profile is by nature harassing, before studying its role in the pathological scene deployed by the harassing collective.

Harassment: what are we talking about?

The etymology of harass comes from "harseler/herseler" in old French, diminutive term of "herser", to use the "herse". In the agricultural field, the harrow is a tool equipped with short spikes close to each other to work the surface of the earth in preparation for sowing. On the military level, the harrow is a sliding iron grid, armed with spikes at its lower part, which is lowered to prevent access to a fortified castle. From the attackers' point of view, "herseler" is to subject the harrow to repeated assaults. By analogy, the term means to torment constantly with small but frequent attacks. On the military level, it evokes the idea of besieging constantly, without giving any respite. As for the agricultural register, it is a matter of cutting off everything that protrudes through a repetitive gesture of equalization (a practice known to certain tyrants in Antiquity, such as Dionysius of Syracuse, who used this metaphor to describe his political action). The analogy linked to this metaphor can be extended to the group level: to harass is to cut off everything that protrudes from the group (1).

In no case can harassment be reduced to mistreatment, incivility or other forms of unintentional violence.

We can identify several characteristics :

– A totalitarian process. Harassment involves power and group logics that are part of totalitarianism : of thought where the subject is eradicated in his moral conscience and his freedom ; of instrumentalized action; of human interchangeability, of denunciation, of absolute control. Harassment is the instrument of power that is not legitimate and must therefore, in order to lead to obedience, impose itself by force and violence, the suppression of social ties, the surveillance of all against all. In harassment, there is a harasser and a harassed. The relationship is asymmetrical, one is guilty, the other a victim. In "simple" psychological violence, this is not necessarily the case.

– Intent to harm and introjection. At a minimum, harassment is distinguished by the intention to harm (presented as " self-defense") and the traumatic burden it inflicts. However, the traumatic burden implies the notion of introjection. It is in introjection that the deadly process resides, strictly speaking: it involves internalizing the violence suffered, turning it against oneself, and assuming the aggressor's feelings of guilt and shame. The introjection of guilt and shame is the supreme tool of harassment, the one by which the process of destruction reaches its peak : leading others to self-destruction (introjection of the harasser's murderous intention).

– Duration and repetition. Harassment occurs over time, and includes repetition, thus destroying "slowly". It is not a single or exceptional act: a single act of torture does not, in itself, constitute harassment. On the other hand, repeated acts of torture over time constitute harassment (moral and physical).

To summarize, harassment is an attitude aimed at leading others to self-destruction (even suicide [Bilheran, 2012]), through repeated moral (or even physical and sexual) pressure, in the interest of harming them, over time.

Harassment in the couple: Henri feels spied on…

Henri has a paranoiac profile: he feels spied on, persecuted, and is suspicious of everyone, but especially of his partner, Marie. He goes to her workplace, sneaks in by hiding in a cupboard, then when the company empties, takes the opportunity to get into his wife's office computer (a computer she shares with other people). He installs spyware. Then, when he retrieves the history, he sees a Google search for "fellatio AIDS". In a delusional interpretation, Henri convinces himself that the search was issued by Marie, and he then carries out an HIV serology, which is negative. He then tampers to mark "positive", and sequesters his wife for a whole night, the tests in front of her, so that she "confesses" with whom she could have cheated on him, something impossible since there was no adultery.

We can clearly see that the distinction with mistreatment is the intention to harm (the acts are premeditated, she must "suffer" as he suffers at the idea that she is cheating on him), the feeling of persecution and the delusional interpretation, leading to criminal acts (breaking into the company and computer equipment, kidnapping) that the paranoiac considers "legitimate" (and presents as such).

Harasser by nature

Paranoia is above all a psychosis, based on the denial of reality, interpretative delusions, splitting, projection and control. Called "reasoning madness" by psychiatrists Sérieux and Capgras at the beginning of the 20th century, this madness is a trap: paranoiac delusions are characterized by the diversion of the rules of logical reasoning to interpret the world from the angle of persecution. In short, "The delusion of interpretation is a system of errors" (Sérieux and Capgras, 1909). Systematized, the delusion presents an essential theme to which several delusional elaborations are articulated, in an apparently coherent and ordered development. In reality, it is a false reasoning based on sophisms. The delusion then changes very little in its themes and certainties. The paranoiac personality is characterized by egocentrism, hypertrophy of the ego, mistrust, psychorigidity and false judgment. Each event, each fact and gesture, each word and each silence are passed through the sieve of a delusional interpretation.

The paranoiac therefore persecutes those he has designated as his own persecutors, against a backdrop of mythomania and megalomania. Denying the past, otherness, sexual difference, paranoia designates scapegoats to be killed, divides the collective, spies and suppresses any right to intimacy and subjectivity.

It is a closed system which paradoxically preaches that it is for the good of the other, thus preventing him from defending himself and staggering him psychologically. Everything is organized around the supposed plot of others against him, when in reality, it is the paranoid who constantly creates new plots whose origin he will attribute to others, which will justify supposed interventions of "self-defense". Paranoiac psychosis is the master pathology of harassment. She makes it a masterpiece, since in paranoia, harassing the other is a form of survival: killing the other before the other kills.

If we take the characteristic criteria of harassment, we realize that they correspond in every way to the paranoid profile. Persecution alone is not sufficient, it must act with an intention to harm, in repetition and over time, with totalitarian-type processes generating traumas likely to trigger defense mechanisms within the group. All this, only the paranoiac profile is in fact capable of putting it into action, in the nosography of pathologies. Of course, other pathological profiles can help him in the realization of his deadly project (see below).

• A deadly and totalitarian project

Paranoia carries within it a project of death and for this, it uses terror, the totalitarianism of single thought, that of human interchangeability, of absolute control. The dominant word is propaganda, in which the victims of terror are designated as guilty, and those resisting submission as traitors. Paranoia wants to create a "new man", by denying roots, origins, traditions, history and any form of otherness.

All sects whose ambition is to cut the individual off from his roots and his bearings, as well as to psychologically abuse him, have a paranoiac type of functioning instilled by the guru who demands submission to the delusional dogma. Each time, we find the same cocktail: delusional reconstruction of the world (neo-reality of delirium), megalomania (the "chosen ones") , cult of the personality of the guru ("Christ reincarnated", "Angel incarnate", "Master of the Heavens", "Isis mother goddess"...), sexual transgressions (in particular on minors) and other acts out up to murder, idealization (the "divine mission"), financial frauds and various types of scams (abuse), aggressive proselytism (warlike expansion). If the guru is denounced, he will be supported by a whole bunch of fanatic people screaming about a "conspiracy" against him.

In this register, let us cite Gilbert Bourdin, guru of the Mandarom sect (built near the Verdon Gorges, in Provence), who claimed to be a "cosmoplanetary" messiah delivering a "final battle against negative entities" (Lemurians, Atlanteans, etc.) ready to attack the Earth. In the city of Mandarom, the statues were colossal, up to 33 meters (the latter obviously represented Gilbert Bourdin). In this sect, family breakups, physical endangerment, as always sexual abuse, psychological harassment were practiced. Gilbert Bourdin also claimed to be the protector of humanity, and to have defeated "550 billion demons from the seven planes of the Universe". He appeared publicly wearing the tiara of the "Grand Pontiff of the Order of the Cosmic Diamond." (Fenech, 2012). In the early 1990s, more than a thousand people believed that he was the only one who could save the Earth by establishing "the Golden Age"…

• Intent to harm

Paranoiac psychosis is the only psychosis that, in my opinion, questions the existence of criminal responsibility, because it presupposes the intention to harm, through aggressive impulses and premeditated homicides. This is why Lacan had a preference for the application of criminal sanctions (Bilheran, 2019). It is necessary to neutralize the other, in the delusional fear that the other will crush you first. This intention to harm is often coupled with sadistic pleasure; it is constitutive of the harassment wielded by paranoia.

• Cleavage, projection, interpretation

Paranoia triggers a number of pathological defense mechanisms that spread throughout the stalking collective (2). With paranoia, what is it that we are defending ourselves against? Massive anxiety, of a psychotic type, that descends upon the individual, where the world becomes one of generalized surveillance of all against all. The defense mechanisms present are of a psychotic nature, because they all cause a loss of contact with reality.

– First of all, there is the cleavage , a mechanism of inverted partition of the world between "good guys" (the harassers and those who support them) and "bad guys" (those who resist submission).

– The result of splitting, projection consists of attributing one's own intentions and emotions to others, to avoid having to endure a poor representation of oneself. An internal representation is repressed; its content will reach the conscious in the form of a projection, coming from the outside, with a reversal of affect. For example, victimization (the act of unduly playing the role of victim) is the prerogative of harassers, who do not hesitate to make their target responsible by accusing them of being their persecutor. Projection works in the mode of accusatory inversion, a specialty of paranoid profiles.

– The wild interpretation ("he didn't shake my hand, it's because he's plotting against me") feeds the paranoid psychosis of harassment.

"He who is not with me is against me" is the motto that underlies the paranoiac's delusional interpretation. In paranoia, discernment is not abolished, it is distorted by interpretation.

• Duration and repetition

Paranoia has the ability to fixate on an object for a long time, that is to say, to "elect" a person as a target over time and in a chronic manner, whom it will subject to repeated behavior, which characterizes harassment and distinguishes it from simple aggression. Conversely, the paranoid delusion of the schizophrenic hardly concerns harassment because, as clinicians know, the "object of fixation" (the "targeted" person) of the schizophrenic is mostly fluctuating, malleable, changing.

Distribution of roles

To understand harassment, it is fundamental to think of it as a group phenomenon where roles are distributed. It is a real pathological system.

• Harassment as a group phenomenon

In harassment, there is a distribution of roles between pathological profiles, between the tormentors, the accomplices, the victims and the resisters (who become scapegoats) as well as psychological logics of psychic alienation of the group. Among the pathological profiles leading the dance, the paranoid is the "chief" harasser, even in the shadows, while the perverse profiles present themselves as adjuvants according to their own interest (the psychopathic profiles will carry out the "dirty works": slashing tires, torturing, practicing extortion, etc.). Perversion is the conscientious and skillful executor of paranoid madness. On the chessboard, the paranoid defines the strategy, while the pervert deploys the tactics by manipulating others like pawns, and the psychopath serves as a henchman (he liquidates the elements that are too disturbing). Hitler was paranoid, but the industrialists and financiers collaborating with the Nazi project in its enterprise of conquest and destruction were perverse. Perversion, which is a tool of paranoid psychosis to instrumentalize others in the service of abusive power, is used to overturn values, wield paradoxical injunctions, manipulate, designate the guilty party as the victim, and the guilty party as the victim.

• The alienated group

For harassment to occur, the group must already be, in whole or in part, alienated (or "regressed"). Harassment is trivialized, and the people in the group no longer know how to distinguish respect from disrespect, the healthy from the pathological, the norm from the exception. The exercise of power is sick, this time based on a logic of constraint and submission. Harassment then appears as the only remaining possibility of uniting the group, by electing a scapegoat, internal or external, who becomes the target on which to attack. This demonization occurs at the same time as the confiscation of the speech of the slandered person. Only one version of the facts (that of the paranoiac dogma) will be imposed on the group. This exclusion will concern all those who, directly or indirectly, are experienced as a danger (real or supposed) by the paranoiac.

To put it briefly, harassment is a process that calls for hatred of others and the breaking of social ties. The group relies on paranoid delusions to define what is good and what is bad. Victims of this pathological power, people present increasingly significant symptoms of suffering: loss of bearings, psychological confusion, feeling of helplessness, stupor, trivialization of violence, somatization, addictions, etc. They do not understand what is happening to them, in this mass manipulation and paranoiac sophistry (Bilheran, 2015).

From then on, the collective organizes itself in a pathological way in a paranoid psychosis, and goes through psychic processes of a delusional type: persecution, euphoria, personality cult, delusional idealizations, delusional interpretations, projections, splits, pseudo-operative ideals (truth, justice, etc.), but whose meaning is systematically distorted.

In his work on sects, magistrate G. Fenech (2012), president of the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and the Fight against Sectarian Abuses from 2002 to 2008, writes this:

"In the 1980s, [Robert Le Dinh, known as Tang], a smooth talker, gathered around him a group of about twenty young followers who settled in the same neighborhood, or even in the same house as him. Paradoxically, when questioned, he did not deny being a guru. (…) What Tang forgets to say is that for twenty-two years, he managed to convince his followers that the end of time was imminent and that the Earth would be destroyed, except for those who would make enough sacrifices to be saved by extraterrestrials. In this way, he created an atmosphere of terror. Up at 4 a.m., his followers had to kneel, face down, while he predicted a catastrophe and exhorted them in an unrecognizable voice to ever more sacrifices to push back the deadline."

• Traumatic loads in the collective

One of the very effective tools of harassment (with the systematic handling of paradox in language) is the transmission of traumatic charges in the collective, which is grafted onto a creeping harassment, "on a slow fire", with shocks on individuals intended to stun them, to weaken them emotionally, and to obtain a "brainwashing", which leads to the establishment of defense mechanisms. This can be very violent speeches stigmatizing a certain person in the collective ("Muslims", "Jews" ...), or even collective humiliations, often based on well-chosen amalgams. These traumatic charges, depending on their duration, their intensity and their chronicity, result in a contagion of the destructive processes at work. From then on, speech is released only with difficulty, the points of reference are lost, sometimes even in forms of derealization and group depersonalization. The harasser is experienced as "all-powerful", beyond justice, social laws and the laws of the world, when other members of the group experience themselves as totally (and unreasonably) powerless, which, again, can lead to suicidal action in the mode of "I am useless, I am of no use" or even "I sacrifice myself for the leader".

• Denial, isolation, psychological suffering…

To protect themselves from the psychic violence at work with splitting, projection and interpretation, people avoid psychic confrontation with the paradox, to the point of denial, and it is through denial that the loss of vital contact with reality occurs, constituting collective psychosis. It should be noted that this psychic process concerns those who do not have sufficient internal resources to resist such an interpretative distortion of the world. Only a few rare people (of extraordinary psychic strength) will preserve healthy reasoning in a world that is going mad, where benchmarks are reversed, truth disguised as lies, and the "good guys" are designated as "bad guys", while the " bad guys" exercise a transgressive power while pretending that it is for the good of people and that it is in the name of beautiful principles to which everyone can only subscribe.

Denial is in fact the higher form of avoidance, insofar as it concerns the very impossibility of representing reality, and above all, that the collective has become a world without faith or law, where the one who exercises effective power has nothing of a "kind protective dad". (3)

However, escape strategies (avoidance, denial) have very serious consequences on mental health, because they lead to distorting the representation of the reality experienced, in order to avoid confronting the massive anxiety that this sordid reality triggers. This is how we see honorable people who, in a group where harassment is rife, adopt an attitude consisting of not wanting to see, hear or know the violence exercised against others (or even participate in it). Isolation is a defense mechanism defined by Freud, which allows us to separate representation from affect. The latter finds itself "free" to fixate on another representation. Isolation allows, among other things, the unconscious to carry out a kind of affective anesthesia. In short, to resist psychological violence , the person sees, but does not feel (and is therefore incapable of acting). From then on, the "emotional charge" will move onto other objects, which become pretexts (for example triggering phobias), without identifying the true origin of the disorder. The person cannot therefore act in a fair and adequate way to find solutions to the problem and remedy it. Some people put themselves "in a bubble", and no longer feel concerned by the social life of the group where harassment is rife. The direct consequence of the isolation mechanism is disinvestment. The person has given up, with a strong feeling of helplessness.

Conclusion

Not only is harassment the masterpiece of the paranoiac, but the delusional contagion acting under its impulse degrades the mental health of all members of the harasser group. Everyone is in danger of losing their relationship with reality, their values, their dignity, a gratifying representation of themselves, up to more serious mechanisms such as identification with the aggressor and Stockholm syndrome (4).

Everything converges towards the reinforcement of a psychologically untenable situation, where power is exercised in a pathological, omnipotent way, in an inverted law of the world, where honest people are persecuted while those who submit are valued. In such a collective, the Law is arbitrarily diverted, and there is no longer any regulatory counter-power.

The solution can only come from the explosion of the whole, the psychic mechanisms at work being much too powerful and crazy to be able to regulate themselves. Clearly, paranoid psychosis pursues its warlike ambition of spatial expansion until the destruction of the collective which has become delirious.

Those whose mental health has not yet been too impaired must imperatively be extracted from the "regressed group", to regain their minds, clear ideas and escape from alienation.

Ariane BILHERAN, clinical psychologist, doctor in psychopathology and clinical psychology, master in moral and political philosophy, graduate of the École Normale Supérieure.

Notes

1 – Another perspective, Gleichschaltung is a process implemented by the Nazi regime from 1933 to August 1934, often translated as "bringing into line", with the aim of eliminating any real or potential opposition to power, through techniques of harassment of civil society. The German term strictly means "equalization" (gleich meaning "equal"), and refers to the etymology of harassment: cutting off what is protruding, leveling the field.

2 – Let us recall that "Defense mechanisms are unconscious psychic processes aimed at reducing or canceling the unpleasant effects of real or imaginary dangers, by reworking internal and/or external realities and whose manifestations – behavior, ideas or affects – can be unconscious or conscious", in Ionescu, S., Jacquet, M.-M., Lhote, C. 1997. Les mécanismes de défense: théorie et clinique, Armand Colin.

3 – To read: Déni, Santé mentale, n° 240, September 2019.

4 – Created in 1973, following a hostage-taking in a bank in Stockholm, this syndrome refers to the fact that the victims develop a kind of empathy and understanding for the aggressors, according to complex mechanisms of identification and survival.

Bibliography

– Bilheran, A. 2006. Le harcèlement moral, Paris, Armand Colin (3e éd. 2013).

– Bilheran, A. 2012 «Harcèlement et suicide au travail: psychopathologie», in Bilan du Grand Forum de la Prévention du Suicide, Association Québecoise de Prévention du Suicide.

– Bilheran, A. 2015. «Des mécanismes de défense dans un collectif de travail en situation de harcèlement», in Psychologues & Psychologies, n° 239, juin 2015.

– Bilheran, A. 2019. Psychopathologie de la paranoïa, Paris, Armand Colin, 2e éd.

– Capgras, J., Sérieux, P. Les folies raisonnantes, Paris, Alcan, 1909 (Ouvrage en accès libre sur le site de la BIUM).

– Fenech, G. 2012. Apocalypse menace imminente: les sectes en ébullition, Paris, Calmann-Lévy.