Victor Klemperer's study of the rhetoric of Nazism is a text of universal scope that allows us to understand the inner logic of all totalitarian phenomena. Ariane Bilheran undertakes here a detailed portrait of this great witness of the 20th century.

Let's continue our analysis of the political marketing deployed on citizens. Omnipresent today, across various crucial issues, social engineering distributes ritualistic codes that signify membership in a particular game, which people choose to be the one designated by those in power. In doing so, they gamble on having a greater chance of "winning".

What do you call a regime that makes lawyers complicit in the crimes their clients are accused of? A regime that criminalizes the expression of dissenting opinions, that sends its special services to arrest dissidents in the early hours, that "cooks" them incommunicado and arbitrarily confiscates their documents?

How can we explain mass adherence to ideologies in totalitarian systems, and the irrational actions they command? More than ten years ago, in my business consulting work, I coined the notion of "delusional contagion" [1] for the literature on psychosocial risks and suffering at work.

The mark of genius is to enlighten us, even post-mortem, when times become confusing and dark. However, the most powerful stars are not always easily recognizable at first glance. We must learn to put on the right glasses to distinguish their enlightenment. Immense French author of the first half of the twentieth century, normalien, great traveler, pianist, poet, playwright, thinker, philosopher, André Suarès, through his commitments against totalitarian ugliness and in favor

Currently living in Colombia, she was one of the first to point out, in March 2020, at the beginning of the lockdown linked to the emergence of the famous Covid, that from the point of view of political philosophy, we were facing a totalitarian drift and, from the psychopathological point of view, a paranoiac delusion.

Interview with Ariane Bilheran, PhD - Part 2: the Desmet/Breggin controversy; the question of responsibility; the concept of delusional contagion, and more.   We are living a "war" against the human being, against our human rights, against the population... we have no choice but to resist and protect the sacred dimension of the human being.   This is the second part of our interview with Ariane Bilheran, PhD, philosopher, clinical psychologist, doctor in psychopathology a

The totalitarian drift since 2020 by Ariane Bilheran

The silhouettes of an occult sect run through all of contemporary history. Are we really sure that we defeated Nazism and closed the file at Nuremberg? How then could we have allowed the personnel, techniques, and ideas of this movement to be sheltered and then recycled in post-war Europe? And why does it arouse so much fascination and denial today?

For Ariane Bilheran, clinical psychologist, author of Psychopathologie de la paranoïa (Psychopathology of Paranoia) and Psychopathologie de l'autorité (Psychopathology of Authority) (Dunod), our societies are sinking into totalitarianism.

International Symposium of Mental Health organized in Portugal by Aliança Saúde Portugal, about the current pandemic of fear propagated in the humanity.

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.

All totalitarian islets create their own "newspeak", for example within companies that operate by terrorizing, harassing and persecuting their employees. All totalitarianism lives off the conquest of "ideological pretension" (Hannah Arendt) and the "rectification of thought" (Mao). To overcome these ideological levels, which are increasingly moving away from the search for truth and knowledge, and to persecute opponents, the instrumentalization of language is necessary.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Today, there is a trend, a divide, an ideology: that of "conspiracy theorists" and "anti-conspiracy theorists". Conspiracy theorists are "those who see conspiracies everywhere", and anti-conspiracy theorists are those who denounce conspiracy theorists. This is yet another way to shut down all debate and, above all, to prevent people from thinking about the obvious.