Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Media COVID Torture Chamber (Cognitive Death)

Source: mentalhealthMATTERS

The Body as a Torture Chamber

By Sam Vaknin | May 20, 2010

There is one place in which one's privacy, intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed: one's body, a unique temple and a familiar territory of sensa and personal history. The process of chronic disease invades, defiles and desecrates this shrine. It does so publicly, enhancing the sufferer's sense of helplessness and utter humiliation. Hence the all-pervasive, long-lasting, and, frequently, irreversible effects and outcomes of long-term, intractable illness.

In a way, the torture victim's own body is rendered his worst enemy. It is corporeal agony that compels the patient to mutate, his identity to fragment, his ideals and principles to crumble. The body becomes an accomplice of the affliction, an uninterruptible channel of communication, a treasonous, poisoned territory.

It fosters a humiliating dependency of the abused on medicines, doctors, and bureaucracies. The impersonal character of modern healthcare objectifies the patient, further adding to his or her alienation. Bodily needs denied in the course of the ailment – sleep, toilet, food, water – are wrongly perceived by the victim as the direct causes of his degradation and dehumanization. As he sees it, he is rendered bestial not by the inadequacies of society and medicine but by his own flesh.

The concept of "body" can easily be extended to "family", or "home". One's sickness often affects kin and kith, compatriots, or colleagues. The inexorable processes of degeneration and decrepitude disrupt the continuity of "surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others", as the CIA put it in one of its torture manuals. A sense of cohesive self-identity depends crucially on the familiar and the continuous. By attacking both one's biological body and one's "social body", the patient's psyche is strained to the point of dissociation.

Beatrice Patsalides describes this transmogrification thus in "Ethics of the Unspeakable: Torture Survivors in Psychoanalytic Treatment" (it applies equally well to hospital settings, for instance, or to the patient's death-bed):

"As the gap between the 'I' and the 'me' deepens, dissociation and alienation increase. The subject that, under torture (read: disease – SV), was forced into the position of pure object has lost his or her sense of interiority, intimacy, and privacy. Time is experienced now, in the present only, and perspective – that which allows for a sense of relativity – is foreclosed. Thoughts and dreams attack the mind and invade the body as if the protective skin that normally contains our thoughts, gives us space to breathe in between the thought and the thing being thought about, and separates between inside and outside, past and present, me and you, was lost."

Illness robs the patient of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, is the equivalent of cognitive death. Space and time are warped by sleep deprivation. The self ("I") is shattered. The chronically sick have nothing familiar to hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. Gradually, they lose their mental resilience and sense of freedom. They feel alien: unable to communicate, relate, attach, or empathize with others.

Terminal or debilitating illness splinters early childhood grandiose narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability, and impenetrability. But it enhances the fantasy of merger with an idealized and omnipotent (though not benign) other: the medical doctor, often the inflictor of agony. The twin processes of individuation and separation are reversed.

Being treated for an illness is the ultimate act of perverted intimacy. The medical professional invades the victim’s body, or probes his psyche (if he is a psychiatrist). Bed-ridden, deprived of contact with others and starved for human interactions, the patient bonds with his caregiver (hence pathological phenomena such as the Munchhausen Syndrome). "Traumatic bonding", akin to the Stockholm Syndrome, is about hope and the search for meaning in the brutal and indifferent and nightmarish universe of the hospital or the outpatient clinic.

The medical doctor becomes the black hole at the centre of the victim's surrealistic galaxy, sucking in the sufferer's universal need for solace. The victim tries to "control" his caregiver by becoming one with him (introjecting him) and by appealing to the practitioner's presumably merely desensitized humanity and empathy.

This bonding is especially strong when the doctor and the patient form a dyad and "collaborate" in the rituals and acts of treatment (for instance, when the victim is asked to select the implements and the types of surgery to be inflicted or to choose between two equally vile and agonizing "cures").

The psychologist Shirley Spitz offers this powerful overview of the contradictory nature of torture in a seminar titled "The Psychology of Torture" (1989). Substitute the words "chronic and terminal illness" for "torture" in the following text:

"Torture is an obscenity in that it joins what is most private with what is most public. Torture entails all the isolation and extreme solitude of privacy with none of the usual security embodied therein… Torture entails at the same time all the self-exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibilities for camaraderie or shared experience. (The presence of an all powerful other with whom to merge, without the security of the other’s benign intentions.)

A further obscenity of torture is the inversion it makes of intimate human relationships. The interrogation is a form of social encounter in which the normal rules of communicating, of relating, of intimacy are manipulated. Dependency needs are elicited by the interrogator, but not so they may be met as in close relationships, but to weaken and confuse. Independence that is offered in return for 'betrayal' is a lie. Silence is intentionally misinterpreted either as confirmation of information or as guilt for 'complicity'.

Torture combines complete humiliating exposure with utter devastating isolation. The final products and outcome of torture are a scarred and often shattered victim and an empty display of the fiction of power."

Obsessed by endless ruminations, demented by pain and a continuum of sleeplessness, the patient regresses, shedding all but the most primitive defence mechanisms: splitting, narcissism, dissociation, Projective Identification, introjection, and cognitive dissonance. The sick person constructs an alternative world, suffering in extremis from depersonalization and derealisation, hallucinations, ideas of reference, delusions, and psychotic episodes.

Please go to mentalhealthMATTERS to read the entire article then take precautions to end your torture.
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Liberate yourselves from this torture. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 8 June 1977 contain a number of provisions that absolutely prohibit torture and other cruel or inhuman treatment and outrages upon individual dignity.

International Bans on Torture

Hydroxychloroquine, COVID, FDA; and Pharma and all its whores around the world


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