The Psychology of Torture

Spitz, S. (1989). The Psychology of Torture. Paper presented at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Seminar No. 3, 17 May.

 

Shirley Spitz is a psychologist.

Date: 17 May 1989

Venue: University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Torture is to be totally at the mercy of those whose job it is to have no mercy. (Amnesty International Report: Torture in the Eighties)

There is a great deal of evidence that torture has been used by South African prison authorities and members of the SAP, on political detainees, during the period from 1984 – 1986 (Foster, 1987). There have also been reports of physical torture arbitrarily committed on township residents (CIRR, 1988). More recently, there have been cases suggesting that members of the SAP use hooding and other forms of torture on individuals suspected of criminal acts.

Both a judge and a magistrate have questioned methods of interrogation used by the Brixton Murder & Robbery Squads (Star 21/3/89). The SAP say that allegations of torture made by prisoners, against members of this squad, are "not borne out by convictions of assault". Nevertheless, an out-of~court settlement to the tune of R40 000 was made to Mrs M. Maswanganye, who brought a civil case of torture against the Brixton Murder & Robbery Squad in March of this year.

In Natal, police took a Harding man to a nearby river, interrogated him, placed a bag over his head causing him to panic and vomit. They tried to revive him. "Then buried him". They were found guilty of culpable homicide (Sunday Star, 19/2/89). The police deny that they use torture and Brigadier Leon Mellet, spokesman for Mr Adriaan Vlok, claims the use of the "black bag" is not police policy. (Sunday Star 19/2/89).

The above cases reflect the treatment of individuals arrested on suspicion of criminal acts which may be openly reported by the press. State of Emergency legislation prohibits report and discussion of the treatment of political detainees. Nevertheless, we cannot be expected to believe that the fact of censorship has led to a cessation of the use of torture as a weapon of interrogation, intimidation and terror.

Because of the prohibitions regarding the reporting of acts of torture, this paper addresses the psychology of torture from an international perspective. The similarities to the South African situation will be obvious. The framework in which this topic will be situated, consists of the four definitional elements contained in the United Nations' definition of torture. A further section is offered identifying the historical, political and individual factors pertinent to the torturer himself.

Amnesty International's report titled Torture in the 80s, which was published in 1984 reports ill treatment and torture from 98 countries in the world. This illustrates the presence of a conscious decision to torture by some governments, and the lack of will to stop torture by many others. While governments universally and collectively condemn and deny torture, more than a third of the world's governments have used or tolerated torture or ill-treatment of detainees and prisoners in the 1980s and are still doing so.

Definition: Article 1 of the Declaration against Torture, adopted unanimously by the U.N. in December 1975 defines torture as:

A. … any act by which severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by, or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession; punishing him for an act he has committed; or intimidating him or other persons.

The main definitional elements contained in the term torture are:
1) the severity of physical or mental pain or suffering caused to the victim;
2) the deliberateness of the act;
3) the fact that the act has a purpose; and
4) the direct or indirect involvement of state officials in the act.

B. Torture constitutes an aggravated and deliberate form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The issue of how one regards "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment" has not been satisfactorily addressed by the General Assembly of the U.N. but the body suggested in 1979 that the definition be interpreted so as to extend the widest possible protection against abuses.

For example, detention without trial might not be regarded as torture. Although it is a deliberate act involving state officials and with the rationalised purpose of keeping activists off the street, the severity of mental pain, cruelty and inhuman treatment may not be regarded as sufficiently severe to warrant the title torture. Taking into account the intention of the General Assembly's definition, detention without trial is a form of torture.

Each definitional element will be discussed but it must be borne in mind that they can't be artificially divided in reality.

1. Severity of Physical or Mental Pain

Elaine Scarry, in the book The Body In Pain (1985), mentions a central vitally important aspect of pain and that is the duality of pain: "Pain comes unsharably into our midst, at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed." When you are in great pain you have certainty about your body and your existence – so pain brings certainty. When you hear of someone else's pain there is room for doubt. We cannot feel what is so real and certain to another person – their pain. This doubt amplifies the suffering of those in pain. Hearing details of another's painful experience, such as torture, often leads to the use of defences so that we avoid encouraging and facilitating the full expression of the humiliation and agony of that person's experience. We are at risk of increasing their suffering.

Pain is also unsharable in that it is resistant to language. (How would you explain the exact experience that you call "headache" to another person?). To clarify pain's resistance to being objectified in language, we need to look at the way in which other states of consciousness can be transformed into speech.

All our interior states of consciousness: emotional, perceptual, cognitive and somatic can be described as having an object in the external world. We don't just have feelings. We have feelings for someone or about something. We have thoughts on issues or about people. We see and hear things. We hunger and thirst for something. 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. Because pain has no object in the world, it can't be objectified in language. This resistance to language is an essential attribute of pain. There are of course times when other states of consciousness, if deprived of an object, may enter the area of pain eg: the wordless grief on the death of a loved one. Conversely, when some of the aversiveness of physical pain is transformed into an objectified state, it can almost be eliminated. E.g.: the relaxation and prenatal training of pregnant women aim at turning the pain of labour into an understanding of the muscular contractions of the uterus.

Not only is pain resistant to language, but it destroys language itself. As pain intensifies, language becomes simpler until it disappears: first our sentences shrink to single words; our words become whispers; then screams, cries, grunts. The process is a regression through all the stages of language development back to the state of being pre-verbal.

Pain cannot be shared. It is difficult to verbalize. In addition, acute pain destroys language. To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and whispers, is to witness the destruction of language. To be present when a person moves up out of the pre-verbal state to project the facts of the contents of her consciousness into speech is almost to be present at the birth of language itself. The torturer not only witnesses the death of language but is its murderer. Any individual willing to listen to the pain of the tortured may be not only privileged to witness the birth of language, but may well be the midwife.

The 1975 definition of torture included for the first time the aspect of mental pain and anguish. Just as physical torture destroys language through the creation of extreme physical pain, so mental torture destroys what one might term the central core of the individual, the Self. It is this Self that is the organising function of our psychological world. The organising structure of the psyche. Torture is thus not only a gross violation of the body, but also of the mind. Torture is a trauma that disturbs the adaptational functioning of the individual leading to pathological alteration in images of the Self and its interactions with the outside world. Torture is a gross violation of the Self.

Self psychologists Ullman & Brothers (1988), suggest a theory of trauma in which neither reality nor fantasy alone are regarded as causes of trauma. They refer to the unconscious meaning of real occurrences that shatter the central organising fantasies of ourselves in relation to our world as the cause of the experience of trauma.

Fantasies then can be thought of as meaning structures which unconsciously organise our experiences of ourselves. These meaning structures often reflect very early, archaic, narcissistic fantasies and as such are extremely vulnerable to traumatic shattering and defensive or faulty restoration. In our early development, narcissistic fantasies arise as we struggle towards a sense of individuation and separateness. These fantasies can be divided into 2 definite types. One entails illusions of our own omnipotent invulnerability and impenetrability. This can be termed the grandiose fantasy. The other entails the illusion of specialness and safety through merger with an idealised and omnipotent other. This is called the merger fantasy.

Narcissistic fantasies involve the original experiences of Self in relation to important people in the infant's life. A narcissistic fantasy is a representation of Self (mental & physical) in relation to the world. It consists of ideational content and affective valence. In modified form these fantasies consist of a tempered sense of one's own mental, physical & emotional capacities as well as the abilities of others as people with whom we can interact in safety.

Each of us will continue to have remnants of both types of fantasies, although there will of course be individual preferences and different intensities of unconscious impact on our daily lives. The complete transformation of archaic fantasies through our developmental stages is a theoretical ideal rarely achieved in reality. For this reason, each one of us is vulnerable to the psychological catastrophe of psychic trauma. We all have a point at which our sense of our self will disintegrate and our very Self will shatter, leaving us with unbearable anxiety. Torture disrupts the defences that function to protect us from the vicissitudes of life. Detention without trial is a deprivation of independence, autonomy, control and the ability to protect ourselves and those we love.

Detention without trial and torture bring constant reminders of the helplessness of the victim and can result in severe regression to emotionally pre-verbal vulnerability. In such a state mature defence mechanisms are lost and the victim has to resort to primitive mechanisms such as splitting, dissociation and introjection. Here we can mention the widely documented defence of identification with the aggressor. The torturer is introjected, or swallowed whole, as a psychic attempt to control an intolerable conflict situation. However, the victim also introjects the torturer's abusive and negative view of herself. This can often lead to self-destructive attitudes and behaviours.

Under conditions of torture, where emotions and physical reactions have to be repressed, the victims sense of coherence and self-experience are shaken and she begins to lose a sense of familiarity with herself. Her identity begins to fragment. If we add at this point the experience of extreme physical pain where the contents of consciousness dissolve, she will experience a breakdown in her conviction about the very existence and reality of her external world and of her own reality self. All that may be left is physical pain and the internalised definition of herself as non-human, worthless and deserving of her torture. These unconscious, traumatic meanings that she attaches to her experience reflect the underlying shattering of archaic, narcissistic fantasies. She can no longer believe in her own invulnerability, nor in the safety of a benign other.

Victims are powerless to defend themselves against mental or physical abuse, and therefore, their vulnerable grandiose fantasies shatter. In addition their fantasies of idealised merger disintegrate because their imagoes cannot protect or rescue them and the new authority figures are brutal and assaultive.

The narcissistic fantasies which provide lasting support to their personality and sense of identity, have been destroyed so that they no longer feel familiar to themselves. The victims are left floundering in a sea of anxiety. A number of physical and psychological symptoms result. These have been categorised under the psychiatric heading of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

PTSD is a diagnosis often given to survivors of detention and torture. The major categories of symptoms are: re-experiencing, numbing, and increased arousal. These symptoms can be explained in the framework of Self-psychology as the visible signs of an individual's faulty efforts to restore his shattered, archaic, narcissistic fantasies, i.e.: to restore meaning structures with which to encounter his world.

Numbing and isolation could result from the process of narcissistic withdrawal to rebuild the shattered Self. The dissociative symptoms of de-realization and de-personalization even to psychotic proportions could result from the need to split/separate unacceptable self experiences of vulnerability and terror from the fantasy of grandiosity. Repetitive and intrusive re-experiencing and nightmares reflect efforts of defensive restoration that is faulty. The disruption of defences normally protecting the self from daily ups and downs is reflected in disturbed sleeping, eating and concentrating – increased arousal.

2&3. The Intentionality and Purpose of Torture

We will now be incorporating the definitional elements of deliberateness and purpose with regard to torture. Torture consists of:

• the intentional infliction of pain – which can be regarded as a primary physical act in the case of physical torture, or a primary verbal act in the case of mental torture; and
• the interrogation which is a verbal act.

There is no doubt about the intentions or the deliberateness of acts of torture. Physical or mental pain is consciously inflicted on the victim, often in a carefully planned and calculated manner aimed at achieving the goals of the torturer, his superiors and the regime at large. These goals, the purpose of torture, bring us into an area of some disagreement.

Torture uses isolation, humiliation, psychological pressure and physical pain to break down the victim, to intimidate those close to him, and to discourage other dissidents from further political activity. The U.N. and Amnesty International both identify the interrogation, or what is euphemistically called information-gathering, as an important rationale for torture. Elaine Scarry disagrees. She believes that the interrogation "does not stand outside an episode of torture as its motive or justification: it is internal to the structure of torture". It is an excuse, not the reason. The content of the victim's answers to questions is only rarely important to the regime. (Usually they already have the information they claim to seek. Often, the questions are irrelevant. E.g.; why were you born in El Salvador?) It is the fact of answering, rather than the content, that is always crucial. The fact of answering is taken as proof of the power of the torturer and through him, the power of the regime. The paper has now introduced the fourth definitional element of torture. In introducing the torturer and the regime, the part played by state officials will be introduced.

4. State involvement

A further purpose of torture is to enhance the apparent power and invincibility of the regime. The physical pain of torture is so incontestably real that it seems to confer this quality of undeniable reality onto the power that was responsible for creating the pain, torture increases the illusion of the invulnerability of the regime. But if we think for a moment we will realise that such a power would have no need to use torture. It is precisely because the reality of the regime's power is so highly contestable, that dissidents need to be tortured into apathy. There are many aspects in the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction or fantasy of absolute power. An important one for our interest is what one may call the display of "agency". In many torture chambers throughout the world, terror is instilled in the victim at the sight of the numerous weapons obviously on display. The agents of torture involve, not only whips, guns and electrodes, but also simple every day items, obscene in their familiarity. Victims are often forced to crouch over a broomstick with their hands and feet, handcuffed, they are then suspended upside down between two chairs. Individuals are forced to stand with arms at shoulder-height holding a plastic bucket filled with sand.

But external objects are not the only agents of torture. Perhaps the most treacherous form of agency is the victim's body itself. There are 2 ways in which the body becomes the enemy. Firstly, when we are in pain our bodies don't simply hurt, our bodies hurt us. A person in great pain experiences her body as the source and agent of her own agony. This unseen sense of self-betrayal in pain is secondly objectified through forced exercise, forced physical movements that cause the muscles in the body to become active agents of pain.

In such physical pain it is as if murder and suicide converge. The individual feels acted upon and annihilated from both the torturer in the external world and forces from within the body. Excruciating pain not only destroys language and therefore the person's means of extending herself into the world, but it also destroys perception. Scarry says of pain that it is "the equivalent in felt experience of what is unfeelable in death, i.e. the destruction of the contents of consciousness. Physical pain caused by torture always mimes death – the infliction of that pain through torture is always a mock execution" (1985). In severe pain the claims of the body nullify the claims of the mind and of the world.

The process of destroying the victim's world follows a path something like this: as the pain increases, the victim's language simplifies and disappears as she is increasingly drawn inwards to the boundaries of the torture room, the boundaries of her own body and finally to the central fire of the pain itself. The external world outside the jail, which includes the victim's family and friends, crumbles first. Next the four walls around her and the people in it including the torturer fade from consciousness as the body becomes the arena of activity. When the body is turned into the enemy even its boundaries leak from consciousness, and only pain remains. If the victim isfortunate not only will she lose the contents of consciousness but consciousness itself might be lost. The ability of intense pain to be world destroying brings us to a very important issue: confession and betrayal.

Many of us, if we're honest with ourselves have a covert disdain for confession and betrayal. Such disdain is simply another example of how inaccessible the reality of another's physical pain is to those of us not immediately experiencing it. The word betrayal is used to increase the victim's suffering by introducing a sense of responsibility and therefore extreme guilt. But the word betrayal is a misnomer. How can one betray or be false to something that has ceased to exist in one's own consciousness? Under intense pain the world of thought and emotions, of psychological and mental content that constitute oneself and one's world have been destroyed. The overwhelming fact of her agony will remove the significance of any question that may be asked; will remove, in fact, the significance of the world to which the question refers. There can be no betrayal in a living death. In a living death the very Self has been shattered. Physical torture always has mental sequelae. There can be however, forms of pure psychological torture. This torture is aimed at the destruction of the individuals identity and sense of self.

When psychological forms of torture are used, the aim is to instill a sense of the interrogator's total control. Even over life itself. Mock executions by firing squads are held. Shots are fired past a victim's head. Victims are forced to watch others being tortured. Their own screams are tape recorded and played back to them in the dark. Threats about family and children outside the jail are made and cannot be verified. In the Evin jail in Iran, children were forced to watch their parents being tortured. One woman signed a false confession when she could no longer stand the pain in her three-year old daughter's eyes. (AI, 1984).

A sophisticated and subtle form of mental torture is being used on released detainees in South Africa today. Severe restrictions ensure that the detention is still continuing – often only the cell has been changed. As the body becomes the agent of pain with physical torture, so the detainee in this instance becomes her own jailer. She is constantly aware of time; of having to report to a police station twice daily; of being confronted in her home at night by policemen (often one who was present during traumatic experiences in detention). Her recovery is prevented because of the prohibitions against reporting her detention experiences; because of the consistently intense levels of anxiety; because of the continuing threats to personal safety – the car cruising past the house late at night, the stranger following her, the memory of more brutal threats of the dangers of "freedom".

We have covered the definitional elements of torture and found that: torture consists of the infliction of pain which destroys language and the contents of consciousness, while focusing so exclusively on the body in pain that the body itself mimics the torturer. This creates a split between the mind (experienced as absent) and the body (which is overwhelmingly present).

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. (Imagine the fantasy of omnipotence without its element of invulnerability). 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.

We have seen how physical pain destroys language, voice, world and the contents of consciousness. We have seen the effects of mental torture as a violation of the self resulting in symptoms of PTSD. We have also briefly explored the use of torture to create the fantasy of an invincible regime. Furthermore, the interrogator/torturer/victim intimacy inverts human interaction so that the holding space in which to relate becomes an imprisoning trap, an area of torment from which there is no escape.

We need now to explore the other individual who forms part of this relationship. The one individual whose role is paramount in any discussion of the brutality of torture. The torturer himself.

The Torturer

The difficulty in objectifying pain allows the torturer to be blind to its presence; to deny its presence and its influence. The torturer is thus enabled to translate those denied elements of pain into the insignia of the invulnerability and power of the regime.

For a moment then lets return to an earlier point. Torture consists of a physical act – the infliction of pain and a verbal act – the interrogation. The verbal act in its turn consists of:

• the question, which is mistakenly understood to be the motive; and
• the answer which is mistakenly understood to be the betrayal.

The mistaken idea of question as motive provides the torturer with a justification and an explanation for his cruelty. The second mistaken belief in "betrayal" discredits the victim rather than the torturer. The victim's voice and words rather than her pain are identified as the cause of her loss of world and self. These misunderstandings are not accidental. They turn the moral reality of torture upside down. They shift the focus from the physical, repugnant act of torture, to the verbal arena of confession thereby accommodating and crediting the torturers. It is the victim's steadily shrinking ground that wins for the torturer his swelling sense of territory and power. As the victim's voice diminishes that of the torturer and regime double. "The larger the prisoner's pain the larger, by comparison, is the torturer's world." (Scarry, 1985).

This extension of the torturer's power and the insignia of the regime attempts to explain how one human being can, not only be in the presence of another's excruciating pain and appear oblivious to it but, be the cause of the existence and the continuation of this pain. We have already seen that pain in one person, which is certainty, creates doubt in an observer. But it is not only this or other individual personality issues that are pertinent in our explanation. The view of a torturer as "a sadistic sociopath harnessed by the state", is too simplistic a conceptualisation. We get closer to an answer when we begin to explore the history and culture of societies that value certain types of aggressive behaviour; that differentiate destructively between groups of people; that so alienates one group from another that it becomes easy, even acceptable to regard "them" as less than "us", to regard "them" as subhuman. These are the conditions universally present in a society which practices and benefits from torture.

Accumulated evidence internationally gives a clear picture of the preconditions in a country which set the stage for the use of torture. Legal issues are a major aspect of this arena. The danger of torture is enhanced when there is a suspension of habeas corpus and when other legal remedies such as the lack of independent examinations of victims are prohibited. In addition, torture is facilitated when trial procedures allow as evidence, statements extracted under duress or during long periods of incommunicado detention; when a government denies that torture occurs in spite of mounting evidence of deaths in custody; when independent domestic investigations are obstructed; and when there is censorship of publishing or verbal reporting of information about torture and the treatment of those in detention (A.I. 1988, 1984.)

Naturally, states of emergency and other special legislations allowing wide powers of arrest and detention also facilitate torture. An additional scenario supporting the continuation of the use of torture is what Ruthven refers to as The Grand Conspiracy (Ruthven, 1978). The authorities have in mind a fantasy of the existence of some grand externally created conspiracy aimed at the destruction of their valued system. This fantasy is borne of a paranoid response to the increasing dissidence around them. They appear unable to accept that individual citizens could, of their own accord, motivate strongly and actively for change in what they experience as an unacceptable system of government.

The political torturer works in the name of the society, the group, the army or the "interest of the nation". Unfortunately he is not simply an isolated pathological individual that our conscience might wish to believe. A torturer is a professional – trained in the "art" of torturing.

This training process incorporates the following aspects identified by Amnesty International from evidence gained during trials of torturers in Greece in the mid-70s (A.I., 1984) and elaborated on by Bendfeldt-Zachrisson (1985).

• The external and economic circumstances of his background must be such that it is easy for him to accommodate a violent occupation. In addition, the distinction of membership of a torture elite, often carries privileges which are extremely seductive such as higher wages, the use of a car, housing subsidies.

• The society around him must support both his beliefs of superiority of his group over others, and a belief in the importance of aggression and outward displays of power. A society offering elite employment in a vast system that would protect his beliefs and support his yearnings for power and status would cultivate and reward his willingness to violence. There is a further factor of importance in the creation of a violent society. This has to do with the broad nature of child-rearing. A society that is authoritarian and paternalistic, in which corporal punishment is regarded as an appropriate-form of discipline, facilitates the externalisation of inner aggression. Alice Miller (1980), describes how obedience as an undisputed, supreme principle of both child-rearing and religious education lead to the development of an individual inclined to allow himself to be manipulated and controlled by various forms of propaganda. In addition, such blind obedience prevents the child from recognizing the physical and mental exploitation that were involved in his authoritarian upbringing. However, he cannot suppress the memories and conflicts created by the need to believe that his parents were not only all powerful, but all good. He would then use the psychological defence mechanisms of splitting, projection and externalisation i.e.: a target person or group would be experienced as the "enemy" and attacked as a way of externalising the individual's extremely uncomfortable and intense aggressive fantasies towards the parents. He could then maintain a feeling of calm, justification and loyalty. He has projected the victim part of himself onto another and destroyed it, by mentally or physically abusing his target person.

• Such an individual can then be trained in torture. Not only is he provided with techniques and agents for torment but he is psychologically and ideologically prepared. The non-humanness of the target group is emphasised, the victim is perceived as a "thing" – maintained through the use of derogatory names, and humiliating experiences. The torturer is conditioned to believe in the "good of the nation", the power and irrefutable right of the regime. There is an emphasis on loyalty to the system that will protect him and maintain secrecy of his actions – subordinating individual will to that of the organisation and removing residues of the sense of personal responsibility for immoral actions. Physical force may even be used on the trainee torturer through which an unconscious perception of the brutality of the regime maintains the unspoken threat of personal harm for the refusal to obey orders.

• Instructors simulate an aura of specialness and mysticism which increases the status of the group and encourages cohesiveness and long term commitment.

In spite of this training and the accommodating personality traits, the torturer probably still experiences some mental stress through tormenting victims and through the subtle realisation that he too is being exploited by the system (Bendfeldt-Zachrisson, 1985). These officials who conduct the more brutal aspects of physical torture are usually members lower down in the interrogation team and must be aware that the more subtle forms of psychological torture are often conducted by superiors with higher status. So that although the system protects the torturer through secrecy, there is often the fear that the superiors will be vindicated and the physical torturer will be left to carry the brunt of responsibility should there be any official or international investigation. To counteract the discomfort arising from this ambivalence in the torturer, victims are treated in various ways.

• hooding, while a torture in itself, protects the torturer from eye contact with his victim; eye contact through which he may be touched by the pain and humanity of the victim. In addition, hooding prevents future identification of the torturer.
• stripping and making the victim sit in an exposed position is so dehumanising that it makes it easier for the torturer to dissociate his feelings from the situation.
• the process whereby the victim becomes a so-called "betrayer" of his cause and the rationalisation of "the interrogation" confirm for the torturer that it is the victim who is at fault; the victim who is the cause of his own suffering.
• torture develops its own sardonic slang through which to further distance the torturer from the effects of his actions. The parrot.. suspension head down from a broom-handle suspended between two chairs; the telephone.. blows with the palms of the hands to both ears at once; the bath..a euphemism for holding the victim's head under water filled with excrement and vomit.
• the greater the victim's pain and the smaller her world, the larger is the area of power of both torturer and system. The greater this illusion of the right and power of the regime, the more comfortable the torturer is with his use of rationalizations in the execution of his brutality. This once again, expresses the importance of the issue of interrogation and "betrayal". The fact of human agony is made invisible to the torturer, and the moral fact of inflicting that agony is neutralised by the misinterpretation of the urgency and significance of the question.

This is in no way an apology for the torturer or an excuse for him to abdicate his moral responsibility. It is simply to include the historical and societal dimensions in which torturers operate so that we do not forget who pays for and benefits from their actions.

Conclusion

Many countries practice torture or at least do not attempt to discourage it. The more threatened the regime by dissent and fears of a Grand Conspiracy, the more prevalent the occurrence of torture. The greater the outrage against the violence, the more Draconian the repressive legislation.

Torture destroys the voice of the victim, while censorship destroys the voice of those who might speak on her behalf. Torture destroys language, the contents of consciousness, the Self and the predictability of human interaction. In this way it attempts to annihilate the humanity of the victim, but at the same time, brutalises the torturer and state officials involved. Unfortunately, the effects filter through to society at large and every citizen's voice is increasingly diminished.

References

Amnesty International (1988), Amnesty International Report. Amnesty International Publications, London.

Amnesty International (1984), "Torture in the Eighties." Amnesty International Publications, London.

Bendfeldt-Zachrisson, F., "State (Political) Torture: Some General, Psychological, and Particular Aspects", International Journal of Health Services, Vol.15(2), pp.339-349.

CIRR (1988), "Now Everyone is Afraid. The Changing Face of Policing in South Africa." CIRR, London.

Foster, D., with D. Davis and D. Sandler (1987), "Detention and Torture in South Africa: Psychological, Legal and Historical Studies." David Philip, Cape Town.

Miller, A. (1987), "For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Childhood." Virago Press, London.

Ruthven, M. (1978), "The Grand Conspiracy." Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London.

Scarry, E. (1985), "The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World." Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Ullman, R. B., and Brothers, D. (1988), "The Shattered Self: A Psychoanalytic Study of Trauma." The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, N.J.