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

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.

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.

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.

In everyday life, psychosocial risks are generally divided into stress, mental load, dysfunctional work organization, etc. The most serious consequences include burnout and attempted suicide. These two "highlights" of psychosocial disorders often, if not most of the time, have their origin in harassment and terror at work. Since then, I have encountered entire decimated collectives on several occasions during audit missions. The cause? Harassment through terror. Strange work