We can think of Ajax who, disappointed at having been deprived of Achilles' weapons in favor of Ulysses, descends into furious madness and massacres a flock of sheep, believing them to be the leaders of the Greek army, before committing suicide when he regains his senses.

By applying a psychopathological key to the phenomenon of totalitarianism, Ariane Bilheran has undertaken pioneering work and considerably deepened our knowledge of this phenomenon, which until now had been confined to sociopolitical analysis. As her original vision gradually established itself as an essential approach, it seemed useful to her to return to the origins and inspirations of her idea.

A specialist in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ariane Bilheran helps us understand the idea of "comfort health" through an observation she makes about the crisis we are experiencing today: "so many people agree to give up their freedom under the cover of a lie, without having a knife to their throat, far from it. Quite simply because many of them aspire to the preservation of their comfort and their privileges, and because they have been chained to them little by little.

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.