Clarissa's Blog

I’ve been asked to explain the connection between the negative father complex and the IRS scam described in one of today’s linked articles. Let’s look at the following quote from the person who bought into the scam:

“Throughout my hour-long ordeal I was very aware that it could be a scam, and that there were many things that didn’t make sense. Yet I was also deeply afraid that it could be true — that I could have made a mistake on my tax forms; that IRS forms could have been sent but never arrived; and that events could get out of control and go terribly wrong. And this combination of plausibility, fear and confusion soon drove most rational thoughts from my head.”

The negative father complex engenders fears of authority, fears of societal strictures, feelings that one doesn’t fully know how to engage with mechanisms of power and representatives of state-sanctioned violence. The word “IRS” has the power to bring such people back to the state of a terrified child who didn’t know if Daddy was going to be in a good mood / come home / yell / beat Mommy, etc. today. When encountering such figures of institutions of authority, these people tend to get dazed, confused, and angry.

Here is another example from an article in today’s collection:

He writes affectingly of his parents’ harsh discipline, of watching his father prepare to beat him with a belt ‘in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offence’. . . Coates writes of watching the World Trade Center smoulder on 9/11. His tone is what’s notable as he recalls feeling no pity for the police officers or even firefighters who died trying to save lives in the burning buildings: ‘They were not human to me,’ he writes. ‘Black, white or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could – with no justification – shatter my body.’”

The incapacity to break the patriarchal prohibition and condemn the abusive father translates into the need to denounce the “paternal” authorities that stand in lieu of the father figure. Police is the prime example of such authority. The menace of nature that was – with no justification – shattering the child’s body is his father but the child needs to displace that threat towards the policemen he sees at a distance because that makes the pain more tolerable.

To put it bluntly, an intensely negative and emotional reaction to agents of state-sanctioned violence (police, the IRS, the court system, the military) – especially in the absence of personal negative experiences with these agents – is not about them but about one’s father. Obviously, people who were tortured by the military during the Dirty War in Argentina will have a negative response to police forces. But when that same response is exhibited by people who never had anything even remotely resembling that experience, that’s reason to ask where the response comes from.