Perspecticide and percepticide: effects of psychological terror

The primary goal of anyone trapped in an abusive situation is survival. When you feel like you aren’t in charge of your life, and you see no way out, how do you survive? This can happen to people who are being coercively controlled in an intimate relationship, are stuck in a cult, or are living in a region of declared or undeclared war. Sometimes the situation is so threatening that the mind can’t deal with it. Psychological solutions include perspecticide and percepticide — the inability to see what is really happening.

I first encountered the term “perspecticide” in a Business Insider article from 2017 entitled, Manipulative people brainwash their partners using something called ‘perspecticide’ — here are signs that it’s happening to you. The article was an interview with Lisa Aronson Fontes, who said the term meant “the incapacity to know what you know.”

The term was first used in reference to brainwashed prisoners of war, Fontes said, and people in cults. She explained it also applied to people in abusive or controlling relationships. Business Insider wrote:

“In an abusive or controlling relationship, over time the dominating partner changes how the victim thinks,” Fontes said. “The abuser defines what love is. The abuser defines what it appropriate in terms of monitoring the partner. The abuser defines what is wrong with the victim, and what she needs to do to change it.”

Over time, the victim — or survivor, if that is your preferred term — loses sense of what their own ideas, goals, and thoughts were. Instead, they start taking on those of their dominating partner.

“Through perspecticide, people give up their own opinions, religious affiliations, views of friends, goals in life, etc,” Fontes said. “I am not talking about the natural mutual influencing that occurs in all intimate relationships — this is much more nefarious and one-sided.”

I like to check the original sources of research and terminology, and in this case it yielded an interesting transformation of the concept.

Fontes and perspecticide

Fontes wrote an article in Psychology Today called, Erased by Your Partner: Stories of ‘perspeticide.’  She defined perspecticide as, “the abuse-related incapacity to know what you know.”

She described typical abuser techniques that led to victims giving up their own viewpoints, desires and opinions, such as:

• Deciding how you should spend your time — abusers make their partners narrow their worlds
• Micromanaging — controlling minute aspects of their partners’ lives.
• Defining you — abusers make their partners feel badly about themselves
• Setting terms of life in a couple — abusers demand certain acts of proof of love

All of these abusive behaviors are typical of coercive control in an intimate relationship, which was the subject of a book by the renowned expert on domestic violence, Evan Stark.

Evan Stark and perspecticide

Fontes attributed the term “perspecticide” to Stark’s classic 2007 book, Coercive Control. I read the book many years ago and went looking for my copy.

Stark’s reference to “perspecticide” is on page 267. Here’s what he wrote: “One of the most devastating psychological effects of isolation is the abuse-related incapacity to ‘know what you know,’ called ‘perspecticide.’”

Read more: Coercive persuasion, mind control and brainwashing

That’s all he said. However, the statement was followed by stories of women who suffered significant abuse, and threats of more abuse. Then they found themselves caught up in police investigations of their husbands’ lawbreaking. They claimed to have no knowledge that their husbands were selling drugs or filing false tax returns. Although the authorities were incredulous, Stark thought they were telling the truth. He believed the women censored their own “dangerous thoughts,” such as the awareness of their husbands’ activities, as a survival mechanism.

In his book, Stark credited the term “perspecticide” to a 1990 paper. And that’s where I discovered that Stark mischaracterized both the spelling and the concept.

Suarez-Orozco and percepticide

Stark’s citation was for the essay, Speaking of the Unspeakable: Toward psychosocial understanding of responses to terror. It was written by Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, and published by Ethos in 1990.

Suarez-Orozco researched the responses to terrorist activities in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. This was the time of “dirty wars” in places like Nicaragua, El Salvado, Guatemala and Argentina, when thousands of people were killed, forced to join guerilla groups, or “disappeared.” He wrote about “percepticide” — note the different spelling. He defined percepticide as, “the importance of knowing what not to know.” Suarez-Orozco wrote (citations omitted):

There is widespread evidence that during 1976 and 1977, at a time when hundreds of people were disappearing on a daily basis, Argentines largely refused to believe the extent of the atrocities committed in their country. Carlos Waisman has rightly observed that at the peak of the terror most Argentines coped “by practicing denial … and rationalizations on a large scale.” Indeed, as the psychoanalyst Juan Carlos Kusnetzoff brilliantly put it, the terror produced widespread “percepticide” in Argentina: The perceptual organs, too, soon became a casualty of the engulfing terror. I call this period the phase of shared denials, the epoch when knowing what not to know was the major coping response to terror.

Why was denial the first coping strategy? Denial has been singled out as a common first response to death and terror. In its most primitive form, denial affects perception in the service of internal needs for security. The ego’s reality-testing capacities are affected. There is a “failure to recognize” certain aspects of the environment and of the self.

Eventually, Suarez-Orozco wrote, denial gave way to rationalization — the disappeared persons “must have been involved in something.” It was a classic blame-the-victim approach, which gave some people a sense of security — if they didn’t engage in subversive activities, they were safe. The rationalization ignored the fact that many of the disappeared had not, in fact, done anything wrong.

Perspecticide and percepticide

Perspecticide and percepticide, therefore, are two different words meaning two different, although similar, psychological phenomena.

Learn more: Start your recovery from emotional and psychological abuse

• Perspecticide means losing your agency, meaning your ability to think for yourself and make choices in your life, because of the abuse you have suffered.
• Percepticide means refusing to believe what you know, deep down, to be true.

They are both psychological defenses against the effects of trauma. They are both caused by terror, either in an intimate relationship or in a society. And they both show the power of the human mind to ignore or distort reality in order to survive.