Psychology of torture

Psychology of torture

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Psychology of torture

This article studies the psychological dynamics associated with torture or the threat of torture. Torture, whether physical or psychological or both, depends on complicated interpersonal relationships between those who torture, those tortured, bystanders and others. Torture also involves deeply personal processes in those tortured, in those who torture and in others. These interacting psychological relationships, processes and dynamics form the basis for the psychology of torture.

Introduction
Psychological stress
The torture process
Immediate psychological aspects of torture

Psychological effects of pain
Extending torture to family and friends
The perversion of intimacy

Post-torture psychological effects of torture

Interpersonal effects
Social effects

The torture process to the torturer

Motivation to torture

References
Further reading
External links

Introduction

Those who torture have an interest in applying torture so as to most effectively attain their goals. These goals may include following orders, acquiring information, reaping revenge or retribution, profit as paid 'professionals', patriotic pride, and/or merely satisfying sadistic personal urges. To attain these goals, those who torture determine where the victim is most physically and psychologically vulnerable, what torture methods (physical and/or psychological) can be used to cause the most suffering, and what conditions (physical and/or psychological) are most likely to amplify the torture applied. The intent is destroy, diminish and/or undermine the victim's ability to respond to repeated violations, his/her human dignity, and his/her willingness to resist so that attainment of the torturer(s) goals is possible. The effectiveness of torture depends on how well those who torture can correctly target the psychological vulnerabilities of their victims with tactics that cause pain and suffering consistent with the torturer's goals.

Those tortured have an interest in resisting torture so as to most effectively attain their goals. Those goals may include reducing pain and suffering, withholding information, resisting revenge or retribution, holding onto personal ideals or human dignity and retaining the will to resist. To attain these goals, torture victims often rely on their inner resources, develop interpersonal or psuedo-personal support relationships with beneficial individuals or entities. Where possible, potential torture victims often study likely torturers to anticipate, to train for, and to better resist torture before-hand. Those who resist torture most effectively correctly anticipate the torturer's goals/tactics and develop countermeasures that render the torture ineffective or in some cases moot.

This article also studies the psychology of other people who have close associations with torture. These include family members and close friends of those associated those tortured as well as those who torture. This group may also include those in the medical, psychological and other professions who work with those tortured or those who torture. It may also include authorities who order torture as well as individuals who blow the whistle on torture. This indirect class of people can choose supportive or oppositional stances to torture depending on their personal interests, group goals, and professional aspirations.

Bystanders who are knowledgeable about torture take on various roles depending on their interests and depending on coercive conditions within which they live. Some bystanders support torture, some oppose torture and some are indifferent to torture. In cases where torture is sanctioned by church, state or other institutions, bystanders often, but not always, support the authorities in charge. Public opinion, law and religion also determine the trend toward supporting or opposing official (and unofficial) forms of torture by bystanders.

Members from each of the group(s) listed above contribute to the complicated group psycho-dymanics of torture. In addition, individual pyscho-dynamics occur within those who torture and those tortured. Finally, interpersonal psychological phenomenom occur between those directly (and indirectly) involved in torture. Together, these interrelated psychodyamics create the complex fabric that is the psychology of torture.

Psychological stress

Psychological pain is suffering caused by psychological stress and by psychological trauma rather than stimuli that activates physical-pain sensitive nociceptors and nociception. The practice of torture induces psychological pain through various acts that often involve both physiological torture and psychological torture to achieve the torturer's goal(s).

Examples of psychological stress include: paralyzing fear of death or pain, uncertainty, unfulfilled anticipation, fear for (and of) others and desire for (and of) others. But torture also creates other extreme dynamics, and can disrupt usual cognitive processes to such an extent that the subject is unable to retain the usual sense of personal boundaries, friends and enemies, love and hate, and other major human psychological dynamics. It is necessary that the torturer empathize with their victim, as they cannot reliably effect the torture without understanding the utility of the pain being inflicted. For example, animals cannot literally torture each other because they cannot understand the utility of the pain itself. Thus they must first be made to understand the consequences of the intended pain.

The torture process

Although torture induces both physiological and psychological effects, the psychological impact is often greater and tends to remain with the subject long after the actual activity is discontinued.

The process of torture is designed to invade and destroy the belief of the subjects in their independence as a human being, to destroy presumptions of privacy, intimacy, and inviolability assumed by the subjects, and to destroy their unspoken trust that society as a whole cares, or can save them. Beyond merely invading the subjects' mental, physical independence on a one-to-one level, such acts can be made more damaging via public humiliation, incessant repetition, depersonalization, and sadistic glee, and, on occasion, their opposites, false public praise, insidious pandering, false personalization, and masochistic manipulation.

Beatrice M. Patsalides, Ph.D describes this process in "Ethics of the unspeakable: Torture survivors in psychoanalytic treatment":^[1]

"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."

The CIA^[2] summed up the theory of coercion thus:

"The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the subject regresses, his learned personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. He begins to lose the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, or to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships or repeated frustrations."

Psychologically, torture often creates a state where the mind works against the best interests of the individual, due to the inducement of such emotions as shame, worthlessness, dependency, and a feeling of lacking uniqueness. Cunning torturers often induce pandered pride, specious worthiness, false favoritism, and grandiose specialness to further fool the subject. These and other responses can lead to a mutated, fragmented, or discredited personality and belief structure. Even the subject's normal bodily needs and functions (e.g., sleep, sustenance, excretion, etc.) can be changed and made to be construed as self-degrading, animalistic, and dehumanizing.

Torture can rob the subject of the most basic modes of relating to reality, and thus can be the equivalent of cognitive death. A person's sense of self can be shattered. The tortured often have nothing familiar to hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. They can lose their mental resilience and sense of freedom. They can feel alienated—unable to communicate, relate, attach, or empathize with others.

Immediate psychological aspects 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 that 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 and that they are not simply an "object". They have many life-experiences which give them pride and self-confidence, and so on. These are profound platforms for growth and, if removed or damaged, can change a person's entire ability to know what and who they are in relationship to the world. They 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 merging 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 process:^[1]

"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."

Psychological effects of pain

Psychologist, Shirley Spitz observes:^[3]

"Pain is also unshareable 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."

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. Shunning, a form of social/sexual torture used by some groups against former members, is one example of the systemic extension of psychological torture to spouses, family and friends.

The perversion of intimacy

The psychologist Shirley Spitz offers this powerful overview of the contradictory nature of torture:^[3]

"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.)

Post-torture psychological effects of torture

Torture subjects often suffer from a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their strong feelings of hate, rage, terror, guilt, shame, and sorrow are also typical of subjects of mobbing, childhood abuse, domestic violence, domestic vice, rape and incest. They feel anxious because the perpetrator's behavior is seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable—or mechanically and inhumanly regular.

Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, its subjects feel helpless and powerless. This loss of control over one's life and body is manifested physically in impotence, attention deficits, and insomnia. This is often exacerbated by the disbelief many torture subjects encounter, especially if they are unable to produce scars, or other "objective" proof of their ordeal. Language cannot communicate such an intensely private experience as pain.

Severe torture can cause dissociative identity disorder, sleep problems, painful body memories, posttraumatic stress disorder, unusual fears and other debilitating after-effects.^[4]^[5]^[6] Disbelief of torture survivors? stories may make it difficult for them to get adequate therapeutic help.^[7]^[8]

Interpersonal effects

Subjects typically oscillate between emotional numbing and highly sensitive arousal: insomnia, irritability, restlessness, and attention deficits. Recollections of the traumatic events intrude in the form of dreams, night terrors, flashbacks, and distressing associations.

Long-term coping mechanisms include the development of compulsive rituals to fend off obsessive thoughts. Other psychological consequences include cognitive impairment, reduced capacity to learn, memory disorders, sexual dysfunction, social withdrawal, inability to maintain long-term relationships, or even mere intimacy, phobias, ideas of reference and superstitions, delusions, hallucinations, psychotic microepisodes, and flat affect.

Depression and anxiety are very common. These are forms and manifestations of self-directed aggression. The sufferer rages at their own suffering and resulting multiple dysfunction. They feel shamed by their new disabilities and responsible, or even guilty, somehow, for their predicament and the dire consequences borne by their nearest and dearest. Their sense of self-worth and self-esteem are crippled.

Social effects

Torturers and bystanders resent the tortured because the tortured make the perpetrators and bystanders who collude with the torture feel guilty and ashamed for having tortured and/or for having done nothing to prevent the atrocity. The sufferers threaten their sense of security and their much-needed belief in predictability, justice, and rule of law. The sufferers, on their part, do not believe that it is possible to effectively communicate to "outsiders" what they have been through. Author K. Zetnik is on record calling the Auschwitz torture chambers "another galaxy", during his testimony at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961.

Kenneth Pope, in "Torture," a chapter he wrote for the "Encyclopedia of Women and Gender: Sex Similarities and Differences and the Impact of Society on Gender," quotes Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman:

"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering."

The torture process to the torturer

Motivation to torture

It was long thought that "good" people would not torture and only "bad" ones would, under normal circumstances. Research over the past 50 years suggests a disquieting alternative view, that under the right circumstances and with the appropriate encouragement and setting, most people can be encouraged to actively torture others. Stages of torture mentality include:

Reluctant or peripheral participation
Official encouragement: As the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram experiment show, many people will follow the direction of an authority figure (such as a superior officer) in an official setting (especially if presented as mandatory), even if they have personal uncertainty. The main motivations for this appear to be fear of loss of status or respect, and the desire to be seen as a "good citizen" or "good subordinate".
Peer encouragement: to accept torture as necessary, acceptable or deserved, or to comply from a wish to not reject peer group beliefs. This may potentially lead to torture gangs roaming the streets seeking dominant torture status.
Dehumanization: seeing victims as objects of curiosity and experimentation, where pain becomes just another test to see how it affects the victim.
Disinhibition: socio-cultural and situational pressures may cause torturers to undergo a lessening of moral inhibitions and as a result act in ways not normally countenanced by law, custom and conscience.
Organisationally, like many other procedures, once torture becomes established as part of internally acceptable norms under certain circumstances, its use often becomes institutionalised and self-perpetuating over time, as what was once used exceptionally for perceived necessity finds more reasons claimed to justify wider use.

One of the apparent ringleaders of the Abu Ghraib prison torture incident, Charles Graner Jr., exemplified some of these when he was reported to have said, "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'"^[9]