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The psychological effects associated with torture, or the threat of torture, can be severe. The psychological suffering coupled with physical pain affects the torture subject and serves the torturer's (conscious) interests. The torturer can also suffer from psychological effects.

Introduction

Psychological torture is less well known than physical torture and tends to be subtle and much easier to conceal. In practice the distinctions between physical and psychological torture are often blurred. Physical torture is the inflicting of severe pain or suffering on a person. In contrast, psychological torture is directed at the psyche with calculated violations of psychological needs, along with deep damage to psychological structures and the breakage of beliefs underpinning normal sanity. Torturers often inflict both types of torture in combination to compound the associated effects.

Psychological torture also includes deliberate use of extreme stressors and situations such as mock execution, shunning, violation of deep-seated social or sexual norms and taboos, or extended solitary confinement. Because psychological torture needs no physical violence to be effective, it is possible to induce severe psychological pain, suffering, and trauma with no externally visible effects. Torture also induces associated psychological effects on those who inflict it. To understand the full psychological effects of torture it is essential that its impact on the torturer be studied as well.

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 these things (or indeed 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":

"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 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:

"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:

"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:

"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. Disbelief of torture survivors’ stories may make it difficult for them to get adequate therapeutic help.

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.'"

References

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this article. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Psychology of torture" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

1. ^ Patsalides, Beatrice M. Ph.D Ethics of the Unspeakable: Torture Survivors in Analytic Treatment The Journal of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. V, No. 1, 1999
2. Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983 (reprinted in the April 1997 issue of Harper's Magazine)
3. ^ Spitz, Shirley, The Psychology of Torture, Seminar, 1989
4. Becker, T (2008). "The extreme abuse surveys: Preliminary findings regarding dissociative identity disorder". Forensic aspects of dissociative identity disorder. London: Karnac Books. pp. 32–49. ISBN 1-855-75596-3. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |editors= ignored (|editor= suggested) (help)
5. Rutz, C. Becker, T., Overkamp, B. & Karriker, W. (2008). Exploring Commonalities Reported by Adult Survivors of Extreme Abuse: Preliminary Empirical Findings pp. 31- 84 in Noblitt, J.R. (2008). Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations. Bandor, OR: Robert Reed. p. 552. ISBN 1-934759-12-0. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
6. Extreme Abuse Survey results
7. Ritual abuse torture research
8. The Canadian panel on violence against women: (1993). Changing the landscape: Ending Violence - Achieving equality: (p. 45 - 47) Ottawa: Minister of supply and service - Canada
9. Weblog: The Religious Side of the Abu Ghraib Scandal | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

Further reading

• McCoy, Alfred, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Hardcover)
• Conroy, John, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
• Glasser, William, WARNING: Psychiatry Can be Dangerous to Your Health, (?), 2004.
• Millet, Kate, The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment, W. W. Norton, 1994.
• Peters, Edward, Torture, Basil Blackwell, 1985.
• Levine Peter, and Frederick, Ann, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, North Atlantic, 1997.
• Stover, Eric and Nightingale, Elena, The Breaking of Bodies and Minds: Torture, Psychiatric Abuse and the Health Professions, W.H. Freeman, 1985.
• CIA, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, July 1963

External links

• Torture, Psychology and Literature
• The Dark Art of Interrogation
• Understanding Shame and Humiliation in Torture
• http://www.vaonline.org/trauma.html
• http://www.torturecare.org.uk/
• http://kspope.com/torvic/torture.php
• http://www.cvt.org/main.php
• http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/projects/eidhr/themes-torture_en.htm
• http://www.ccvt.org/about.html
• Everyone Is a Potential torturer, New Scientist, 25 November 2004, reporting on
  • Fiske et al., SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: Why Ordinary People Torture Enemy Prisoners, Science 2004 306: 1482-1483

• Psychological abuse
• Torture