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PSYCHOANALYSIS IS TOO ACCURATE A SCIENCE TO IGNORE One Story: The Gabriela Rico Jiménez Crisis, Torture in Pornography, and the Conversion of Prisons

Daniel Izzo · 3 Oct 2026

Abstract

This paper joins three arguments that are usually kept apart. Psychoanalysis is mental analysis, the science of why people do what they do. Human action turns on three motives that hold survival value: power, sexual gratification, and security from death. Beneath them sits an older root. The root of all evil is the need for food. When that need, or the sexual drive tied to it, is unchecked, other people are used as means. The use of a person as a means is where torture begins. The night of 3 August 2009, outside the Fiesta Inn hotel in Monterrey, is the case that makes the root visible. Gabriela Rico Jiménez, then 21, was filmed in a manic crisis screaming that they ate humans. This paper does not treat that cry as courtroom proof of a rite, and it does not treat it as empty noise. It reads the cry as the emotional truth of a young woman who had lost an empowered child culture, who did not have the resources for incorruptible caregivers or a secure home, and who was on the mean streets and afraid. The same logic then governs two public reforms. Torture in pornography must be banned, because filmed severe pain inflicted for sexual gratification is consumption of a person. Prisons, for violent law violators, must stop being punishment-as-torture and become psychoanalysis reform schools that still keep people off the street when a court requires it. 1. The three motives Psychoanalysis is too accurate a science to ignore. It asks why people do what they do, not only what they say they are doing. The three main motivations of every human action concern power, sexual gratification, and security from death. These issues hold survival value. A person seeks power so as not to be used. A person seeks sexual gratification because the species continues that way. A person seeks security from death because the organism knows it can end. Civilization is sane only when it meets the third motive without licensing the first two to consume other people. Security from death is not a side interest. It is one of the three motives because it has survival value. A civilization that gives people a real sense of security against death reduces the panic that turns into predation. The contrary condition is the mean street: no secure home, no reliable caregiver, no future that cannot be eaten. That is the condition this paper assigns to Gabriela Rico Jiménez, and to most of humanity when resources fail. 2. The root of all evil is the need for food Food is prior to the three motives and feeds all of them. Hunger is the first taking-in. In the unconscious, food and sex are close, because both are forms of taking or of being taken. Cannibalism is the taboo that names the worst case: another person used up so that someone else can go on. Power is the ability to decide who is eaten. Sexual gratification without a limit is the same taking, moved from the mouth to the body. Security from death is the wish not to be the one consumed. This is why a ban on torture cannot be confined to the police cell. Torture is severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, inflicted on purpose. The United Nations Convention against Torture defines it, for the purposes of that treaty, as such an act done to obtain a confession, to punish, to intimidate, to coerce, or for a reason based on discrimination, when inflicted by or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or a person acting in an official capacity. It excludes pain arising only from lawful sanctions. That definition was written for state violence. It is not a permission slip for the same acts once they are filmed and sold, and it is not a moral warrant for using a prison as a machine for pain. The treaty marks the floor. It does not mark the ceiling. 3. The case: Gabriela Rico Jiménez, Monterrey, 2009 What the record supports On the night of 3 August 2009, in Monterrey, Nuevo León, a 21-year-old woman, Gabriela Rico Jiménez, was filmed outside the Fiesta Inn hotel in acute distress. She wore a torn shirt. She pleaded for her freedom. She said she had wanted her freedom, that Monterrey had freed her at great cost, that she had been in Mexico City for a year and four months, and that it had begun in mid-2001. She accused young and powerful people of killings. She named Carlos Slim as a man who knew of her situation. She shouted that they had killed Juan Camilo Mouriño, the Mexican official who died in a plane crash in 2008. She screamed that they ate humans, that it was disgusting, that they smelled of human flesh. She spoke of queens, of the Queen of England, of princesses, and of Mickey Mouse, in a rush that listeners have tied to child-taking. Police intervened when she became aggressive. She was arrested. What followed is thinner than the video, and that thinness is part of the sadness. She was taken to a police station. An anonymous account, attributed to a law student interning there, describes a short encounter in which she was full of despair, fear, and anguish, and said that everyone was dead, with talk of underground bases and stolen children. The same account says well-dressed men arrived and that officials later denied she had been there. Reports then place her in a psychiatric facility in Colonia Buenos Aires, in Monterrey, to be held for treatment. Public updates fade after the early 2010s. Some later claims say she was seen alive years afterward, still under care or living privately. Viral posts say she vanished that night and was never seen again, often after calling her a supermodel who had been inside an exclusive elite party and who knew too much. The supermodel label does not hold up. No agency record, runway history, or cover confirms a career of that kind. The elite-party frame is an inference from her own words and from the hotel, not an established fact. Claims that she was killed on a billionaire’s property, moved to a foreign facility, or silenced for naming a rite are not supported by a public record. Mexican mental-health privacy can explain missing updates without proving a disappearance. This paper will not build on those claims. The psychoanalytic reading The reading begins from the scream the video actually centers. Her main attention was cannibalism. They ate humans. That cry works on two levels, and both are required. On the surface she is naming the primal taboo. Cannibalism is the extreme violation of a body, tied to the earliest survival instinct, the acquisition of food. That matches the proposition that the root of all evil is the need for food. On the symbolic level, being eaten is a regression to oral-stage anxiety: total engulfment by a hostile caregiver or a hostile world. In object-relations terms, she places the bad object outside herself, the devouring elite, and yearns for the good object she did not have. That good object, in this framework, is a celibate empowered child culture with robotic parents: caregivers who do not hunger, do not lust, and do not neglect, because they are not corruptible in the human way. Her crisis is therefore not first a lecture on secret societies. It is the loss of an empowered child culture. She did not have the resources for robotic parents and a secure home. Like most of humanity in that condition, she was on the mean streets, and she was afraid. The manic rant about evil is the form the fear took when the ego could no longer hold it. Projection put hunger and predation into queens, billionaires, and cartoon figures of innocence, so that the intolerable fact of her own exposure did not have to be borne alone. Regression returned her to a child calling for rescue. Splitting divided the world into an absolute good, the uncorrupted child culture, and an absolute evil, the people who eat. Sexual encroachment belongs in the same picture, as a layer rather than as a proven charge. Encroachment of that kind is common in hotels and in the circles that use young women as access. Psychoanalysis does not need a verdict to notice the link. Food and sex are both taking-in and being-taken. If the hotel added a sexual threat to the primal one, the cannibalism imagery can carry that threat by displacement. The scream is then also a refusal of sex gratification taken from her body. Her deeper plea is to go back to a celibate empowered child culture, with the future robotic parents she would have had if the resources had existed. The video is a call for help. Whether the threat was real, imagined, or both, the emotional truth is the same. She was signaling, in the only language left at that point, that she wanted to escape predation entirely. A clinical diagnosis is not offered here. The public picture is consistent with a psychotic or manic crisis, possibly worsened by trauma, drugs, or an untreated illness. Psychoanalysis does not have to settle the medical name in order to hear the wish. The wish is safety without consumption. 4. Torture in pornography is the same consumption, sold Gabriela’s scream names the act. Pornography that tortures performs it and distributes it. Severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, is inflicted on purpose so that a viewer can be gratified and a producer can be paid. That is sexual gratification using a person as food. Payment, addiction, trafficking, or fear does not convert the suffering into a neutral product. Consent extracted under those conditions is not the opposite of consumption. It is one of the ways consumption is arranged. People whose motive is unchecked sexual gratification, or power over others, are the least likely to champion a ban. That is not an argument against the ban. It is the reason the ban has to be law rather than a request. The Convention against Torture already refuses state torture. A society that accepts that refusal has no coherent reason to exempt the same severe intentional pain because a camera is running and the motive is sex. Ban torture in pornography. The ban is the point at which the drive for sexual gratification meets the refusal t