Abuse, Trauma, and Torture - Their Consequences and Effects (9 page)

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The
Psychology of Torture

There is one place in which one's privacy,
intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed – one's body,
a unique temple and a familiar territory of sensa and personal
history. The torturer invades, defiles and desecrates this shrine.
He does so publicly, deliberately, repeatedly and, often,
sadistically and sexually, with undisguised pleasure. Hence the
all-pervasive, long-lasting, and, frequently, irreversible effects
and outcomes of torture.

In a way, the torture victim's own body is
rendered his worse enemy. It is corporeal agony that compels the
sufferer to mutate, his identity to fragment, his ideals and
principles to crumble. The body becomes an accomplice of the
tormentor, an uninterruptible channel of communication, a
treasonous, poisoned territory.

It fosters a humiliating dependency of the
abused on the perpetrator. Bodily needs denied – sleep, toilet,
food, water – are wrongly perceived by the victim as the direct
causes of his degradation and dehumanization. As he sees it, he is
rendered bestial not by the sadistic bullies around him but by his
own flesh.

The concept of "body" can easily be extended
to "family", or "home". Torture is often applied to kin and kith,
compatriots, or colleagues. This intends to disrupt the continuity
of "surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others", as
the CIA put it in one of its manuals. A sense of cohesive
self-identity depends crucially on the familiar and the continuous.
By attacking both one's biological body and one's "social body",
the victim's psyche is strained to the point of
dissociation.

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."

Torture robs the victim of the most basic
modes of relating to reality and, thus, is the equivalent of
cognitive death. Space and time are warped by sleep deprivation.
The self ("I") is shattered. The tortured have nothing familiar to
hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones,
language, name. Gradually, they lose their mental resilience and
sense of freedom. They feel alien – unable to communicate, relate,
attach, or empathize with others.

Torture splinters early childhood grandiose
narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability,
and impenetrability. But it enhances the fantasy of merger with an
idealized and omnipotent (though not benign) other – the inflicter
of agony. The twin processes of individuation and separation are
reversed.

Torture is the ultimate act of perverted
intimacy. The torturer invades the victim'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 becomes the black hole at the
center of the victim's surrealistic galaxy, sucking in the
sufferer's universal need for solace. The victim tries to "control"
his tormentor by becoming one with him (introjecting him) and by
appealing 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 choose between two
evils).

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'.

Torture combines complete humiliating exposure
with utter devastating isolation. The final products and outcome of
torture are a scarred and often shattered victim and an empty
display of the fiction of power."

Obsessed by endless ruminations, demented by
pain and a continuum of sleeplessness – the victim regresses,
shedding all but the most primitive defense mechanisms: splitting,
narcissism, dissociation, Projective Identification, introjection,
and cognitive dissonance. The victim constructs an alternative
world, often suffering from depersonalization and derealization,
hallucinations, ideas of reference, delusions, and psychotic
episodes.

Sometimes the victim comes to crave pain –
very much as self-mutilators do – because it is a proof and a
reminder of his 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 victim's alienation
and addiction to anguish complements the perpetrator's view of his
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.

Torture is about reprogramming the victim to
succumb to an alternative exegesis of the world, proffered by the
abuser. It is an act of deep, indelible, traumatic indoctrination.
The abused 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.

Thus, torture has no cut-off date. The sounds,
the voices, the smells, the sensations reverberate long after the
episode has ended – both in nightmares and in waking moments. The
victim'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.

Victims typically react by undulating between
emotional numbing and increased arousal: insomnia, irritability,
restlessness, and attention deficits. Recollections of the
traumatic events intrude in the form of dreams, night terrors,
flashbacks, and distressing associations.

The tortured develop compulsive rituals to
fend off obsessive thoughts. Other psychological sequelae reported
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 emotional flatness.

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

In a nutshell, torture victims suffer from a
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Their strong feelings of
anxiety, guilt, and shame are also typical of victims of childhood
abuse, domestic violence, and rape. They feel anxious because the
perpetrator's behavior is seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable –
or mechanically and inhumanly regular.

They feel guilty and disgraced because, to
restore a semblance of order to their shattered world and a modicum
of dominion over their chaotic life, they need to transform
themselves into the cause of their own degradation and the
accomplices of their tormentors.

The CIA, in its "Human Resource Exploitation
Training Manual – 1983" (reprinted in the April 1997 issue of
Harper's Magazine), 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."

Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, its
victims 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 victims 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.

Spitz makes the following
observation:

"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."

Bystanders resent the tortured because they
make them feel guilty and ashamed for having done nothing to
prevent the atrocity. The victims threaten their sense of security
and their much-needed belief in predictability, justice, and rule
of law. The victims, on their part, do not believe that it is
possible to effectively communicate to "outsiders" what they have
been through. The torture chambers are "another galaxy". This is
how Auschwitz was described by the author K. Zetnik in his
testimony in 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: