Stalking seems to be big news, it also seems to be part of popular culture, appearing as a regular motif in films such as "Fatal Attraction", which did for promiscuous men what "Jaws" did for swimmers, to novels such as "Enduring Love" by Ian McKewan. It never seems to be out of the press and does seem to be on the increase according to various reports emanating from America and the UK. The first reported incident of stalking originated from LA the capital of stalking crime in the 1980s, and since then there has been a huge increase in known cases. A court action by a victim of stalking eventually led to the Harassment Act (1989) so that victims can now have recourse to law. A recent case illustrating the problem, where a young woman separated from her boyfriend was subjected to three years of harassment by him, including loitering outside her house, following her, ringing her up at all times and basically bombarding her with his presence. Although she went to the police nothing could be proven. Eventually driven to distraction she emigrated. After six months of relative sanity she looked out of her window to see her persecutor standing outside. This harassment again continued over a long period. The Australian police were equally unable to prevent this harassment, this was before the Act came into being in either the UK or Australia. Eventually the victim returned to England to an unknown carefully protected address. A year later she investigated noises emanating from her attic to find that her ex-partner had been living up there for six months spying on her. He was prosecuted for illegal entry to her premises and the story came to an end, hopefully. This is clearly an extreme case but what motivates the stalker and what can we learn as clinicians to manage this behaviour, particularly as so many victims are often well intentioned professionals who, consciously or unconsciously, get drawn into a professional relationship with their clients or patients, only to find they are the recipient of intense delusional beliefs.
The stalker appears to live in a world where to occupy the object entirely, physically or psychologically, is the only way to avoid the other extreme of total loss and separation. It is as if there are only two positions in the mind of the stalker, any gradation is unthinkable and impossible. It can begin with a brief moment of contact or even a fantasy of a relationship which then leads to an ever increasing wish for the object whether the recipient of these attentions wishes to receive them or not.
These pre-occupations seem to be the extreme form of the end of a continuum beginning with the clinical entity known as the erotic transference (see Ronnie Doctor’s article in this issue). In all stages along this continuum we are dealing with states of mind that seem incapable of relatedness, their object relations have been felt to be dominated by extremes. Of the of stalking patients I have seen at the Portman Clinic, all have suffered severe losses in their early lives, often the mother. This early loss can give rise to the idealisation of another object imbuing it with everything, a reflection perhaps of the omnipotent defences that were employed to manage their early losses in the first place. These are then transferred onto the victim. This leaves the perpetrator feeling diminished, as with all projective identification, so that the fear of losing the object, particularly as it is unlikely the recipient will welcome these invasions, becomes a terrifying threat. Attempting to occupy and control the victim to prevent loss increases. The stalker often feels that their victim is suffering from the delusion that they do not love their persecutor and that they have to be cured of this conviction and see the light. Instead of the stalker feeling that they are creating a delusional world to fill up an empty void in their own psyche, they fill up another’s world in an attempt to cure the other of the delusion that they would prefer to be alone rather than at the constant attentions of their unwanted companion. This clearly is a dramatic use of projective identification and reversal causing enormous anxiety, fear and dread in the victim, the original loss that may have led to enormous and overwhelming anxiety in the stalker is now reversed. They are the creators of enormous paranoid anxiety in the other, putting them in control of their fears rather than at their mercy. In the clinical situation this can easily arise, particularly I feel with forensic patients, who might read an awful lot more into physical language than other patients who might be capable of more symbolic functioning. The inexperienced therapist might allow the development of an unanalysed idealising transference to develop, thus colluding with the patient’s wishes that they, the clinician, are the answer to their prayers, when of course the clinician cannot of course live up to these promises, i.e., they are in fact an ordinary human being, subject to all the limitations that this entails. They find themselves on the receiving end of a patient who undeterred continues to demand from the clinician what has been promised, either consciously or unconsciously. Clearly the lonely or vulnerable clinician is likely to be unaware of their problems and cover them up by projecting their needs into their patients so that at one level the patient might experience a clinician who gives the appearance of being able to look after the patient whilst communicating at an unconscious level something completely different. This leads to a folie á deux situation where therapist and patient are shoring up a delusion that both are unable to face. A recent clinical example of someone who asked for help in such a situation gives a good illustration. The patient was certain that the therapist was hiding from herself the extent of her feelings towards her patient. That her therapist is a lonely person who has little in her life and needs the patient. It became clear that the therapist had pathologised many of the patients problems from day one of the treatment and the patient had lapped this up. seemingly agreeing with the interpretations. This gratified the therapist feeling that she was on the right track. At no time did this therapist realise that the patient’s view of life was dominated by an all or nothing world and that if the therapist did not want to be aware of her limitations her patients was not going to disillusion her. The emptiness at this time, was in the object, in this case the therapist, the patients sees her role as to go along with the idea that it is her that is needing help with the problem and not the therapist. As in all psychotic patients the belief that it is the other who is mad and deluded often dominates and in the case of intense erotic or stalking cases this is also true. A full blown psychotic transference is likely to occur with all the similarities to the stalking situation if the therapist with these patients does not allow some exploration of the negative transference, i.e. the limitedness of the therapeutic endeavour and the incapacity of the treatment to prevent all loss and separation. In fact it is my belief that it is the capacity of the object to bear the knowledge of the unbearable nature of early loss, the terror of dying and annihilation that makes approaching these delusional beliefs possible. That we all face anxieties of living and dying and it is not something that has to be covered up by our own grandeur gives us the possibility of exploring the feasibility of bearing these things with another. However becoming clinicians is often a way of trying to circumvent these problems by placing them firmly in the patient a feat not unlike that of the stalker, albeit more on the side of reparation. It is this that might make it possible to discover an object that might bear this knowledge without deluding themselves that they are able to obviate them or be overwhelmed.
This is, I think, the underlying cause for the development of intense erotic or stalking like situations either within or outside the clinical setting. We are dealing with minds who have never felt able to experience the subtleties of involvement, they are locked in a world of extremes, of occupy or be lost. They see the world as being also possessed by such a limited spectrum. It is the intense anxiety and fear that victim feels invaded with, it is only in being able to think about this fear, a fear we all share, of total annihilation that can perhaps provide insight into this most frightening world. The stalker does not know that it is the sharing of these anxieties of living make them bearable. It is not occupation and control of the object that provides solace and joy in a world that also bears pain and suffering, but the comfort of another human being who shares in the same world. Not one who is above it and therefore enviable and covetable.
A fuller version of this paper was given at the Forensic psychotherapy conference at the Tavistock Clinic June 1999. It will be published with references and full text shortly I hope.