Insights into Psychological Torture ...
A good summation of what has been/is being directed towards myself for a period going back to two years prior to divorce, twelve years ago. Coached by senior lawyers, my ex-wife began this process, widened it with defamations wherever she could, and with unjustifiable attorney assistance elevated it to others at professional and governmental levels of interference. This is the true face of ‘family law’ and the abuse of public governmental institutions and ‘intelligence’ agencies --
© Copyright 2006 Dean Levinson
(from Wikipedia, and the referenced sources):
Torture is the intentional infliction of severe physical or psychological torment as an expression of cruelty, a means of intimidation, deterrent, revenge or punishment, or as a tool for the extraction of information or confessions ... Torture is common in situations where disparities in interpersonal power and control occur... Torture can be both physical and/or psychological. Physical torture is well-known, tends to be brutal, and is hard to hide. Psychological torture is not well-known, tends to be subtle and is much easier to conceal...
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... Because psychological torture needs no physical violence to be effective, it is possible to induce severe psychological pain, sufferring, and trauma with no externally visible effects...
The process of torture is designed to invade and destroy the belief of the subject in their independence as a human being, to destroy presumptions of privacy, intimacy, and inviolability assumed by the subject, and to destroy their unspoken trust that these things can save them. Beyond merely invading the subject's mental, physical independence on a one-to-one level, such acts can be made further damaging via public humiliation, incessant repetition, depersonalization, and [attempts toward inducing] masochistic manipulation...
The CIA, in its "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual - 1983"... 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 behavior 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 [attempted] inducement of such emotions of shame, worthlessness, dependency, and a feeling of a lack of uniqueness... These and other responses can lead to a mutated, fragmented, or discredited personality and belief structure...
Torture can rob the subject of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, can be the equivalent of cognitive death. The self ("I") can be shattered. The tortured often have nothing familiar to hang on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. They can lose their resilience and sense of freedom. They can feel alienated - unable to communicate, relate, attach…
Psychological pain is pain caused by psychological stress and by psychological trauma ... the practice of torture induces psychological pain through various acts...to achieve a tactical goal … Examples of psychological stress include: ...uncertainty, unfulfilled anticipation, fear for (and of) others and desire for (and of) others. But torture also creates further extremes of dynamic … Some well-known animal experiements performed in the 20th century show that in addition to these, the subject's own strengths and weaknesses can be enhanced by psychological stress to the point … where certain critical faculties in the brain shut down under overload... Torture...shatters deep down narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability, and impenetrability which help sustain personality...
Beatrice Patsalides describes this transmogrification thus in "Ethics of the unspeakable: Torture survivors in psychoanalystic 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..."
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 the 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..." 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, profferred by the abuser or user. 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...
Subjects typically oscillate between emotional numbing and highly sensitive arousal...other psychological consequences include cognitive impairment, reduced capacity to learn, memory disorders, sexual dysfunction, social withdrawal...emotional flatness... The sufferer rages at their own suffering...their sense of self-worth and self-esteem are crippled... Torture subjects often suffer from... strong feelings of hate, rage, terror...sorrow...
Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, its subjects feel helpless and powerless...often exacerbated by the disbelief many torture subjects encounter, especially if they are unable to produce scars, or other "objective" proof of their ordeal …
A good summation of what has been/is being directed towards myself for a period going back to two years prior to divorce, twelve years ago. Coached by senior lawyers, my ex-wife began this process, widened it with defamations wherever she could, and with unjustifiable attorney assistance elevated it to others at professional and governmental levels of interference. This is the true face of ‘family law’ and the abuse of public governmental institutions and ‘intelligence’ agencies --
© Copyright 2006 Dean Levinson
(from Wikipedia, and the referenced sources):
Torture is the intentional infliction of severe physical or psychological torment as an expression of cruelty, a means of intimidation, deterrent, revenge or punishment, or as a tool for the extraction of information or confessions ... Torture is common in situations where disparities in interpersonal power and control occur... Torture can be both physical and/or psychological. Physical torture is well-known, tends to be brutal, and is hard to hide. Psychological torture is not well-known, tends to be subtle and is much easier to conceal...
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... Because psychological torture needs no physical violence to be effective, it is possible to induce severe psychological pain, sufferring, and trauma with no externally visible effects...
The process of torture is designed to invade and destroy the belief of the subject in their independence as a human being, to destroy presumptions of privacy, intimacy, and inviolability assumed by the subject, and to destroy their unspoken trust that these things can save them. Beyond merely invading the subject's mental, physical independence on a one-to-one level, such acts can be made further damaging via public humiliation, incessant repetition, depersonalization, and [attempts toward inducing] masochistic manipulation...
The CIA, in its "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual - 1983"... 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 behavior 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 [attempted] inducement of such emotions of shame, worthlessness, dependency, and a feeling of a lack of uniqueness... These and other responses can lead to a mutated, fragmented, or discredited personality and belief structure...
Torture can rob the subject of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, can be the equivalent of cognitive death. The self ("I") can be shattered. The tortured often have nothing familiar to hang on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. They can lose their resilience and sense of freedom. They can feel alienated - unable to communicate, relate, attach…
Psychological pain is pain caused by psychological stress and by psychological trauma ... the practice of torture induces psychological pain through various acts...to achieve a tactical goal … Examples of psychological stress include: ...uncertainty, unfulfilled anticipation, fear for (and of) others and desire for (and of) others. But torture also creates further extremes of dynamic … Some well-known animal experiements performed in the 20th century show that in addition to these, the subject's own strengths and weaknesses can be enhanced by psychological stress to the point … where certain critical faculties in the brain shut down under overload... Torture...shatters deep down narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability, and impenetrability which help sustain personality...
Beatrice Patsalides describes this transmogrification thus in "Ethics of the unspeakable: Torture survivors in psychoanalystic 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..."
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 the 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..." 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, profferred by the abuser or user. 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...
Subjects typically oscillate between emotional numbing and highly sensitive arousal...other psychological consequences include cognitive impairment, reduced capacity to learn, memory disorders, sexual dysfunction, social withdrawal...emotional flatness... The sufferer rages at their own suffering...their sense of self-worth and self-esteem are crippled... Torture subjects often suffer from... strong feelings of hate, rage, terror...sorrow...
Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, its subjects feel helpless and powerless...often exacerbated by the disbelief many torture subjects encounter, especially if they are unable to produce scars, or other "objective" proof of their ordeal …
posted by Dov Levinson at 5:57 AM
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