Traditionally, and throughout humanity, there have been places where everyone could take refuge in a "neutral" zone of conflict, in protection, sheltered. With or without papers, with or without money, innocent or criminal, destitute, beggar, handicapped, old, whoever you are, whatever you have done, you could be welcomed and safe there.

This summer of 2021, I had the opportunity to visit France, a country I hadn't visited for several years. It was an opportunity for me to observe a serious deterioration in human relations and values, undoubtedly fertile ground for the ongoing paranoiac decompensation.

In the delusional hypochondria of paranoia, illness is everywhere, experienced as dangerous, mortal, the enemy of the living. The sick are opposed to the healthy, as the impure to the pure: the order is given to eliminate (and before that, to "evict" to use the words of Jean-Michel Blanquer, Minister of National Education in France, concerning unvaccinated children) the part of the social body designated as impure.

No great crime, no human tragedy has remained without witnesses. It is as if destiny, or the collective unconscious, assigns this role to certain privileged individuals, and grants them providential protection to accomplish their mission. This is true as much for the "great History" as for the intimate dramas of families and communities.

It is this very pretension to govern this bare life that has clearly emerged since the first quarter of 2020: restrictions on movement to the point of immobilization (lockdowns, isolation), the distance imposed between bodies ("social distancing"), the reduction of faces to the scopic impulse (the sole gaze), constrained breathing, etc.

power that loses its authority descends into violence. And this violence "from above" is mirrored by violence "from below", which will in turn be used by the "top" to legitimize its oppression. This is the phase some countries will enter, while others are already there. What is the possible way out of this vicious circle?

"We have pushed logic so far in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we have sent about ten million people to forced labor in the Arctic regions and the eastern forests, in conditions analogous to those of the galley slaves of antiquity. We have pushed logic so far that to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death."

To see a way out of totalitarianism, we need to understand how minds have been imprisoned in paranoiac madness. This implies making the phenomenon of delusional contagion[1] intelligible, and to bring to light the unconscious psychic interactions that combine to promote ideology.

The totalitarian regime aims at "total domination" (H. Arendt), that is to say, it interferes in the totality of social, private, and intimate spheres, even in the psyche of individuals.

Series in 3 episodes, published by L’Antipresse, n°286, 287 & 288 23 & 30 May 2021, 05 June 2021 - Translated by Thetranslationbridge.com Ariane Bilheran, normalienne (Ecole Normale Supérieure), philosopher, clinical psychologist, doctor in psychopathology, specialized in the study of manipulation, paranoia, perversion, harassment, and totalitarianism.

Before 1914 the earth belonged to all its inhabitants. Anyone went wherever he wanted and stayed as long as he wanted. There were no permissions, no authorizations, and it always amuses me to see the astonishment of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I traveled to India and America without a passport and never even saw one.

One of the most formidable weapons of the harassing powers is slander, that is to say the defamatory and mendacious attack ad personam against the messenger, so that his message is discredited, or even, so that he is designated as the person to be brought down, or "the bad person" whose message should absolutely not be listened to.

Since the beginning of this "pandemic", I had only written a brief article on "health totalitarianism", needing myself to see it clearly enough with hindsight to make a decision. Nevertheless, we can recognize, at a global level, with some nuances depending on the country, the mark of a delusional paranoiac contagion which shows its odious face more and more every day.

We could also say "the project is to save humanity, by killing humanity". Concretely, where I am in Colombia, the forced quarantine since the end of March is causing real hunger. No welfare, no income, no retirement, no social security, no unemployment. People are starving. Animals too. Really, is it the health of the people that we are concerned about?

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.

Paranoiac delusion has the particularity of being contagious... In this context, the psychological mechanisms at work are notably the collusion between the melancholic core of the paranoiac and the traces of unresolved pathological mourning in the "paranoee". One of the most essential mysteries to be solved in the field of the human psyche lies in the delusional contagion of paranoia. In fact, the only delusion capable of operating by contagion is paranoiac delusion...

Harassment in the workplace is a delicate subject to deal with. Moreover, company management and, more generally, all the social actors concerned, seem helpless when accusations of harassment emerge. Most often, it is panic, giving rise to inertia or, on the contrary, to escalation.

This letter is a response to the American Professor Judith Reisman who asked me some questions in relation to the very common beliefs in USA supposedly based on Freud about the “psychosexual development” of the child and justifying the precocious sexualization of the child.

The fanaticization of adolescents and young adults raises the question of what, in the psychic processes at work at the heart of our Western societies, incites them to this. Adolescence is a key initiatory moment, the one where the individual learns autonomy, that is to say the capacity to internalize universal moral laws within himself to make them his own, in order to free himself from the grip of his impulses. It is important to clarify that these moral laws are not relati

Faced with psychological suffering such that it causes intense distress, the person will try to resolve this conflict of loyalty, and this resolution can occur in two ways: a conflict of loyalty with a neurotic type of resolution, and a regressive conflict of loyalty, with a psychotic type of resolution.