 | Psychology of torture: Encyclopedia II - Psychology of torture - Psychology of torture
Psychology of torture - Psychology of torture
As normal developing human beings, people internalize certain concepts needed to support their ability to face life. For example, they come to understand there are people and authorities who will support them, they psychologically become independent and individual from their peer group (individuation), they believe they have validity purpose and "a place" simply by virtue of being a human being, that they are not simply an "object", they have many life-experiences which give them pride and self-confidence, and so on. These are a very profound platform for growth; remove or damage it and a person's entire ability to know what and who they are in relationship to the world, can be devastated.
Torture splinters these by guile and sheer force, using both psychological design and the impact of massive unavoidable sustained physical pain. In doing so, it shatters deep down narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability, and impenetrability which help sustain personality. Seeking an alternate means to comprehend the changed world, torture subjects grow into a fantasy of merger with an idealized and omnipotent (though not benign) other — the inflicter of agony. The twin processes of individuation and separation which sustain independent adulthood are reversed.
Beatrice Patsalides describes this transmogrification thus in "Ethics of the unspeakable: Torture survivors in psychoanalytic treatment":
"As the gap between the 'I' and the 'me' deepens, dissociation and alienation increase. The subject that, under torture, 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."
Psychology of torture - Psychology of pain
Spitz observes that:
"Pain is also unsharable in that it is resistant to language ... All our interior states of consciousness: emotional, perceptual, cognitive and somatic can be described as having an object in the external world ... This affirms our capacity to move beyond the boundaries of our body into the external, sharable world. This is the space in which we interact and communicate with our environment. But when we explore the interior state of physical pain we find that there is no object "out there" – no external, referential content. Pain is not of, or for, anything. Pain is. And it draws us away from the space of interaction, the sharable world, inwards. It draws us into the boundaries of our body."
Psychology of torture - Extending torture to family and friends
A common factor of psychological torture, at times the only factor, is to extend the activity to family, friends, and others for whom the subject has a deep concern (the "social body"). This further disrupts the individual's familiar expectations of their environment, their control over their circumstances, and the strength of (and ability to help and be helped by) their closest relationships and lifelong support network.
Psychology of torture - The perversion of intimacy
Torture is the ultimate act of perverted intimacy. The torturer invades the subject's body, pervades his psyche, and possesses his mind. Deprived of contact with others and starved for human interactions, the prey bonds with the predator. "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 torture cell.
The abuser or user becomes the black hole at the center of the victim's surrealistic galaxy, sucking in the sufferer's universal need for solace. The subject tries to "control" his tormentor by becoming one with her (introjecting her) and appealing in vain to the monster's presumably dormant humanity and empathy.
This bonding is especially strong when the torturer and the tortured form a dyad and "collaborate" in the rituals and acts of torture (for instance, when the victim is coerced into selecting the torture implements and the types of torment to be inflicted, or to be forced to choose between two evils named by the torturer).
The psychologist Shirley Spitz offers this powerful overview of the contradictory nature of torture in a seminar titled "The Psychology of Torture" (1989):
"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'.
Psychology of torture - Forced absorption of the torturer's perspective
Torture combines complete humiliating exposure with utter devastating isolation. The final products and outcome of torture are a scarred and often shattered subject and an empty display of the fiction of power and control. It is about reprogramming the subject to succumb to an alternative exegesis of the world, proffered by the abuser or user. It is an act of deep, indelible, traumatic indoctrination. The abused or used also swallows whole and assimilates the torturer's negative view of him and often, as a result, is rendered suicidal, self-destructive, or self-defeating.
Obsessed by endless agonized ruminations, demented by pain and a continuum of sleeplessness or sleepfulness, unable to stand back and see the past, present and future in neutral perspective, the subject regresses, shedding all but the most primitive defense mechanisms: splitting, narcissism, dissociation, projective identification, introjection, and cognitive dissonance. The subject constructs an alternative world, often suffering from depersonalization and derealization, hallucinations, ideas of reference, delusions, and psychotic episodes.
Sometimes the subject comes to crave pain — very much as self-mutilators do — because it is a proof and a reminder of her individuated existence otherwise blurred by the incessant torture. Pain shields the sufferer from disintegration and capitulation. It preserves the veracity of his unthinkable and unspeakable experiences.
This dual process of the subject's alienation and addiction to anguish complements the perpetrator's view of her quarry as "inhuman", or "subhuman". The torturer assumes the position of the sole authority, the exclusive fount of meaning and interpretation, the source of both evil and good.
Thus, torture seems forever. The sounds, the voices, the smells, the sensations reverberate long after the episode has ended — both in nightmares and in waking moments. The subject's ability to trust other people — i.e., to assume that their motives are at least rational, if not necessarily benign — has been irrevocably undermined. Social institutions are perceived as precariously poised on the verge of an ominous, Kafkaesque mutation. Nothing is either safe, or credible anymore.
Other related archives'Motivation to torture', 20th century, Auschwitz, Brainwashing, Depression, Eichmann, Jerusalem, K. Zetnik, Stockholm syndrome, Torture, animal experiments, anxiety, attention, better article, black hole, boundaries, brain, changing this notice to be more specific, cognitive processes, delusions, hallucinations, individuation, internalize, memory disorders, narcissistic, other, pain, phobias, physiological, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological, sanity, sexual dysfunction, superstitions, torture
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Psychology of torture", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
