Posts filed under 'Psychoanalysis'
Chris Hedges reminds us that a war of occupation is itself:
A Culture of Atrocity
by Chris Hedges
All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing-the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm-to murder-the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.
The American killing project is not described in these terms to the distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract of glory, honor and heroism, of the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. The press, as in most wars, is slavishly compliant. The reality of the war-the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis-is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a regrettable but necessary virtue.
The reality and the mythic narrative of war collide when embittered combat veterans return home. They find themselves estranged from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation.
Tina Susman in a June 12 article in the Los Angeles Times gave readers a rare glimpse into this side of the war. She wrote about a 17-year-old Iraqi boy killed by the wild, random fire unleashed by American soldiers in a Baghdad neighborhood following a bomb blast. These killings, which Iraqis say occur daily, are seldom confirmed, but in this case the boy was the son of a local Los Angeles Times employee.
Iraqi physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study last year in the British medical journal The Lancet. The study estimated that 655,000 more people than normal have died in Iraq since coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003. This is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech last December.
Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence. The remaining deaths occurred from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 additional violent deaths per day throughout the country.
Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated last year that U.S. troops had killed “tens of thousands” of innocent Iraqis through accidents or reckless fire.
Official figures have ceased to exist. The Iraqi government no longer releases the number of civilian casualties and the U.S. military does not usually give reports about civilians killed or wounded by U.S. forces.
“It’s a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance,” Alaa Safi told the Los Angeles Times. He said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.
War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects-objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighborhoods with high-powered explosives, and convoys tear through Iraq, speeding freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in firepower that obliterates landscapes and villages. The moral universe is turned upside down. No one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of barbarity, pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence.
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men and women into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist gratuitous slaughter. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak the truth. Besides, the public has little desire to puncture the mythic, heroic narrative. The essence of war, which is death, is carefully masked from view. The few lone journalists who attempt to speak the truth about war, to describe the experience of constantly being on the receiving end of American firepower, soon become pariahs, no longer able to embed with the military, dine out with officials in the Green Zone or get press credentials. And so the vast majority of the press lies to us, although not overtly; it is the lie of omission, but it is a lie nonetheless.
The veterans who return, even if they do not speak about the atrocities they have committed or witnessed in Iraq, will spend the rest of their lives coping with what they have done. They will suffer delayed reactions to stress. They will endure, as have those who returned from Vietnam, a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The high priests of our civic religion, from politicians to preachers to television pundits, who promised them glory and honor through war betrayed them.
War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war.
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits-there are few people in pulpits worth listening to. The prophets are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and find the courage to speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must hear and digest in order to know ourselves. These veterans, the ones who dare to tell the truth, have seen and tasted how war plunges us into barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies, if we take the time to listen, which alone can save us.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”
June 18th, 2007
The Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University is sponsoring a conference:
War, Torture and Terror: The Role of Psychology
Friday, June 22, 2007,
9 AM – 4 PM at the
Geraldine Schottenstein Center
239-241 East 34th Street, NYC
Schedule:
9 – 9:35 AM Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:35 – 10 AM Welcome
Shara Sand, PsyD, Chair;
Assistant Director of Clinical Training,
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University
Opening Remarks
Lawrence J. Siegel, PhD
Dean,
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University
10 – 10:45 AM Invited Address
The Development of Psychological Torture: A Modern
History of Coercive Interrogation and Its Effectiveness
Shara Sand, PsyD *
Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology;
Assistant Director of Clinical Training,
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University
10:45 – 10:55 AM Questions and Answers
10:55 – 11 AM Abraham Givner, PhD, Conference Co-Chair;
Director, School-Clinical Child Psychology Program,
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University
11 – 11:45 AM Invited Address
The Role of Psychologists in the Global War on Terror;
Professional and Ethical Considerations
Michael Gelles, PsyD *
Consultant, Washington, DC; Former Chief Psychologist,
Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS)
11:45 – 12 NOON Questions and Answers
12 NOON – 1 PM Lunch
1:15 – 2 PM Invited Address
Torture, Ethics and the Consequences of Complicity
Leonard Rubenstein, JD
Executive Director, Physicians for Human Rights
2:15 – 3:30 PM Concurrent Workshops:
I. Torture Across the Generations: The Chilean Project of
Theater Arts Against Political Violence
Steven Reisner, PhD, International Trauma Studies Program,
Columbia University; New York University, Psychoanalytic Institute
This workshop will present videotapes and discussion from a theater Arts Against Political Violence project addressing the experience of two generations of Chileans who experienced torture under Pinochet. Theater Arts Against Political Violence consisted of a psychoanalyst, a director, and an international group of actors; its mandate was to work with survivors of severe human rights violations to create works of theater derived from such experiences. In the material presented, the needs of the younger generation for revenge are positioned along with the needs of the older generation to find meaning. The presentation will offer a live performance
attempting to represent and give meaning to the complex interface of trauma between generations. It will also offer tapes of the dialogue
between the members of the two generations of survivors
that inspired the artists.
II. Human Rights Violations in Homophobic Persecution
Leanh Nguyen, PhD, Senior Psychologist at the Bellevue/
NYU Program for Survivors of Torture; Candidate at the
NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychoanalysis; Independent
Practice in NYC
Homophobic persecution is a global epidemic that has not been discussed in the context of torture or human rights violation. Often categorized as a “bias” crime, it is treated as having cultural/religious roots and is not considered in the politics of human rights advocacy. The author, who has been involved over the past five
years with victims of homophobic persecution, will present clinical data on homophobic violence from various parts of the world, on the psychic injuries sustained by its victims, and on the implicit conceptions of their human rights in the hands of advocates, law enforcers, and healthcare providers.
III. Therapeutic Responses to Displaced African Female
Survivors of Sexual Violence
Adeyinka M. Akinsulure-Smith, PhD, Assistant Professor,
The City College of New York; Psychologist at the Bellevue/
NYU Program for Survivors of Torture
Sexual violence against women has been used as a weapon in numerous recent conflicts (Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Darfur). This workshop will focus on the nuances and extent of the crime of rape. Establishing an environment of trust and safety is essential, and because individual therapy can be a foreign concept, group therapy is frequently employed. Clinical aspects of working with survivors of sexual violence, war trauma survivors, refugees, asylees and asylum seekers will be explored.
IV. Riding Two Horses: The APA’s Support for Interrogations,
Psychological Ethics, and Human Rights
Edward J. Tejirian, PhD, Independent Practice,
New York City
In 2005, the APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics in National Security Investigations (PENS) was formed and opposed any participation by psychologists in torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The report also said that psychologists could play a vital role in interrogations in settings such as Guantanamo that have been denounced as being in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture. The APA Board of Directors invoked a little-used rule to adopt the PENS report as APA policy without consultation with the membership, resulting in a complex controversy within the APA. This workshop will invite participants to
look at and discuss both sides of that controversy.
V. From Trauma to Tragedy: How Holocaust Survivors
Rebuilt Shattered Lives
Carl Auerbach, PhD** and Shoshana Mirvis, PsyD*
During the Holocaust, six million Jews were systematically annihilated in Nazi-run concentration camps and ghettos. Despite enduring years of incomprehensible horror, many survivors managed to begin anew and lead apparently normal lives. This workshop will focus on exploring this question of survival and resiliency. The survivors’ experience will be explored through the lens of a theory of structural dissociation.
VI. Defining Evil, the Depravity Standard and War Crimes
Michael Welner, MD, Chairman, The Forensic Panel;
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine;
Adjunct Professor of Law, Duquesne University School of Law;
Special Consultant, ABC News
Judges and juries both across the United States and in other countries who decide that a crime is “depraved,” “heinous,” or “horrible” can assign more severe sentences. There is no standardized definition for such dramatic words. The Depravity Scale research aims to establish societal standards of what makes a crime depraved, and to develop a standardized instrument based on specific characteristics of a crime that must be proven in order to merit more severe sentences. This instrument distinguishes not who is depraved, but rather what aspects of a given crime are depraved and the degree of a specific crime’s depravity.
3:30 – 4 PM Open Forum Discussion
Shara Sand, PsyD, Moderator
Download a brochure here, register online here.
June 12th, 2007
News of an upcoming conference in Chicago on psychologists and torture:
The Chicago Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology
and
The Chicago School for Professional Psychology – Center for Multicultural and Diversity Studies
present
A Symposium: Psychologists, the APA, and Coercive Interrogations
Saturday, May 12, 2007
12:30 noon to 3:30pm
The Chicago School of Professional Psychology
325 N. Wells Street
(Across the street from the east side of the Merchandise Mart)
Close to public transportation and parking garages.
With presentations and discussions facilitated by:
Brad Olson, Ph.D.
Frank Summers, Ph.D., ABPP
Gary Walls, Ph.D.
This very important symposium will focus upon the American Psychological Association’s (APA) current position involving psychologist participation in coercive interrogation in U.S. detention centers as well as the involvement of psychologists in military actions during wartime. A group of committed psychologists have been working to influence the APA to adopt an unequivocal stance against psychologists using their knowledge and skills in coercive manners – including but not limited to physical, psychological and emotional torture. These psychologists are especially focused upon closing “loopholes” in the APA Ethical Guidelines that could be used to support activities that cause harm to human beings by violating basic human rights.
The history of differing stances within APA will be discussed to clarify the current issues and bring the audience up to date on the conflict first discussed at the CAPP CE Program on April 1, 2006. This discussion will focus upon some of the manifest and latent reasons for the current APA policy, and why change is necessary for the field of psychology. In addition, the symposium will include discussion of a number of initiatives, including necessary changes in the APA ethics code as well as the APA moratorium.
Objectives:
1] To develop a greater understanding of how the APA ethics code impacts psychological practice.
2] To develop a greater understanding of how human rights, law and policy impact psychological practice.
3] To identify the major positions within the APA regarding psychologists’ involvement in military action including interrogation and torture.
4] To develop critical evaluation skills of the implied moral commitments that underlie professional ethical guidelines.
5] To develop critical evaluation skills of political agendas that are embedded in the language and wording of the APA ethical guidelines.
6] To develop a clearer understanding of the historical context for the form and changes in professional ethical guidelines across time.
$10.00 at the door for current CAPP members (includes CEs and CEUs for licensed professionals)
$15.00 at the door for non-CAPP members (includes CEs and CEUs for licensed professionals)
FREE to students with valid school ID.
Frank Summers, Ph.D., ABPP is a supervising and training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry ant the Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Medical School. He serves as a faculty member of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and the Minnesota and Wisconsin Institutes for Psychoanalysis. He is the author of three books: Object relations theories and psychopathology: A comprehensive text (1994), Transcending the self (1999), Self creation: Psychoanalytic therapy and the art of the possible (2005). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Last but not least, Dr. Summers is a member of CAPP.
Gary Walls, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology (CSoPP), on the Board of APA’s DIV39-Section IX Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and on the CSoPP’s Committee for Multicultural and Diversity Studies. He is an advanced candidate at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, and author of several articles on the political and societal implications of psychoanalysis conceived as a social practice. Dr. Walls is also a member of CAPP.
Brad Olson, Ph.D. is a personality, social and community psychologist and faculty at the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University in the School for Education and Social Policy. He is President of Divisions for Social Justice (DSJ) a collection of 12 divisions of the American Psychological Association and their executive committees. DSJ includes the Division of Psychoanalysis (DIV39). In addition to his work on life stories, narratives, and psychobiography, he is an activist who led an effort to place a treatment on demand referendum initiative on the Cook County ballot. Dr. Olson has published several articles on psychologist involvement in interrogations and — working with groups like Physicians for Human Rights, Psychologists Acting with Conscience Together (PsyACT), and Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) — he has taken a strong stance against psychologist participation in torture and interrogations, and for the APA moratorium.
April 30th, 2007
Michael Shermer, in Scientific American, writes of the human tendency to rationalize error rather than acknowledge it. Based on a new book by psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), he writes of Bush’s inability to acknowledge error, leading to ever worse policies. Tavris and Aronson are social psychologists who use the language of cognitive dissonance. We psychoanalysts tend to speak of defense mechanisms. But both are getting at that universal human tendency to self-delusion that, as both history and great novels illustrate, can easily lead to tragedy.
April 16th, 2007
In A Terrible Secret: The Psychology Behind George W. Bush’s Decision-Making, John P. Briggs and JP Briggs II, a psychoanalyst and a student of creative processes have analyzed President Bush’s decision-making processes in the light of his character.
When we feel inadequate about some aspect of our lives, we work to submerge those feelings with compensations and defenses. Evidence is that in the case of George W. Bush, deep feelings of inadequacy and powerful defensive behaviors employed to submerge them and cover them up cripple the decision-making process he needs for his duties as president.
The dynamics of the president’s cover-up involve a vicious psychological paradox: because he secretly anticipates the humiliating failure he has experienced all his life, he behaves in ways that ensure that he will fail. He makes hasty, risky, ill-informed decisions in which he relies on his defenses rather than judgment. When the decisions go bad, they reconfirm his inner feelings of incompetence and heighten his fear of being “found out.” The feedback loop forces him into an ever deeper “state of denial” about the decisions and an ever-renewed tendency to make more flawed decisions.
If this dynamic is close to correct, then keeping the secret of his feelings of inadequacy has become a matter of life and death for the president. The stakes for him are higher than we can imagine because, by becoming president, he raised his expectations for the success he has sought for so long (the final escape from this secret fear), and he has inflated his worst fear to its grandest scale. He is a man working with all his resources to keep his sense of himself afloat–and he is in danger of drowning.
By applying to George W. Bush’s well known history some basic principles of psychodynamics shared by different psychological and psychiatric schools, we can glimpse how incompetence came to be the central, driving issue for the 43rd President.
They have fascinating insights into many aspects of Bush, Jr.’s psychology, including his personal motivations for the Iraq war:
From early on, the son’s emulation contained its opposite–a resentment, a need not just to gain his father’s approval but a competing desire to rebel against him, beat him down, punish him—a resentment that came to the surface in the well known incident when, at age 26, drunk, he challenged his father to go “mano a mano right here.”
Over the years, the pattern continued. It showed up in his compulsion to re-fight his father’s war against Iraq, but this time to topple Saddam. Salon’s Laura Miller dramatizes the psychology of the situation when she imagines Bush thinking, “I don’t want to kill my father, he does, and to prove that I’m devoid of such bad impulses, I’ll take him out.” By re-fighting the war he could win a duel some thought his father failed to win with Saddam: so he could emulate his father, show his contempt for him, redeem him, and go “mano a mano” with him all at once….
The irony, of course, is that instead of proving himself better than his father, the son tragically failed and showed his father had been wise to avoid stepping into an Iraq quagmire.
One example, among the many that they give:
April 2004. A reporter asks the President GWB if he would accept any responsibility for either the intelligence failures before 9/11 or the flagging Iraq war. His response: “I hope I don’t want to sound like I’ve made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t—you just put me under the spot here and maybe I’m not quick—as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.” (20) Not wanting to sound like he’s made no mistakes, he reverses the double negative and actually says the opposite—he hopes that he does sound like he hasn’t made mistakes He also combines two clichés, being put “under the spotlight” and “on the spot.” Both give us the flavor of how he’s feeling inside.
In two sentences he presents himself as both a man who arrogantly thinks he doesn’t make mistakes, and a man who feels inadequate and “under the spot” because he’s not as quick as he should be about thinking of some. It’s a confession and a denial of what it confesses all at the same time. Bush is also betraying here the sophisticated defense of appearing to laugh at himself. People find charming his willingness to make selfdeprecating jokes about on his own verbal blunders and awkward moments. Here we can see, though, that there is both an aggressiveness and hopelessness in this defense.
And an example where they are provocative, but, perhaps, overreaching given the paucity of actual evidence on Bush’s inner processes. After all, cynically proposing policies that turned out to mean the exact opposite of their stated intent could be considered the Bush administration standard operating procedure. For a long while, they did it because it worked. The public was captured by the image and failed to pay attention to the contrary substance:
Some Bush scenes unfold over years. Early in his presidency, he pushes through his “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Cloaked in the language of helping students and schools improve, the program enacts a stringent testing regimen that soon forces teachers around the country to “teach for the test” and demotes the more subtle and individual aspects of education. Most educators believe the program is a disaster, particularly since the president’s budgets fail to fund it, forcing school systems to divert scarce resources into compliance. People appreciate the irony of a president who was a poor student himself insisting on testing standards that might have failed him outright had he been without his family connections and resources. But is it more than ironic? What does the apparent cynicism of his sabotaging the program by failing to fund it mean? Why is the punishing aspect of testing and “failure” so prominent in the language and thinking of the law? Is this program Bush’s attempt to help students learn where he failed to learn, or is he getting back at educators and education for his humiliating experience? Is he recreating for hundreds of thousands of students the despair he felt in front of the “tests” of his years as a student, being constantly forced “to measure up”? Consider the emotional overtones of the phrase “No Child Left Behind” as it might apply to the boy George Bush. Are enacting the program and then sabotaging the program gestures that express the sense of inadequacy and despair he felt as a student (so he identifies with these failing students and wants to lift them to success), his urge to become the tester who punishes others with standards as he must feel he was punished; or is it an attempt to disguise his own inadequacy with regard to education by showing, I’m not like them, I made it; even as an inferior student I was not a failure like they are? “Is our children learning,” the president famously asked.
On the other hand, the authors’ potential insight here is well worth pondering:
In the developmental stages recognized by psychologists, two normal periods of oppositional behavior stand out. The “terrible twos” and the teenage years. In the first, the child is learning to separate his own will by saying “no” to any parental request. In the second period of “adolescent rebellion,” the individual is moving to solidify a separate identity by “being different.” Some of George W. Bush’s responses (his 2007 “surge” plan for Iraq is the latest example, a response that is the diametric opposite of what his father’s colleagues advised) are a form of continued rebellion against his parents. Most people get through these oppositional stages and establish their own identity. If an individual is not at least relatively secure in his identity, however, such rebellious responses will continue.
Once you begin to notice the activity of opposites in George W. Bush, they seem to be everywhere.
Early in the president’s first term, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords offered a list: the proclaimed uniter who was actually a divider; the compassionate conservative who favors “those who need help least and neglect[s] those who need help the most”; the president who proclaims his commitment to education, then refuses to fund it; the man committed to protecting the environment who abandons all protections of it. The list goes on.
Jeffords described the Bush oppositions with the phrase, “saying one thing, doing another.”
At the same time, the authors are clearly in danger of over-psychologizing:
In the Roman era and in the histories of English kings, wars fought because of filial psychology were common enough, but for an entire modern democratic nation to be driven to war on such psychodynamics is thought provoking, to say the least.
Thus, Bush undoubtedly had personal reasons for wanting the Iraq war, but that war had been the major policy goal of the neocons for many years, as witness the now-infamous Project for a New American Century. It is difficult for all of us to acknowledge the profound psychological forces that impel an individual, or a country, in a certain direction, while not denying the centrality of social tensions and forces. Thus, there really is a struggle for domination of the world’s economy. The United States, under many different leaders, has really committed itself to using its dominant military might to win that struggle. There really is a finite amount of oil in the world and Iraq happens to possess a not insignificant fraction of it. And the United States economy really is facing major challenges that, in the long run, threaten his dominance.
Bush, or any leader’s psychodynamics can contribute to pushing the country in a certain direction. But it is because that leader convinces others that the chosen direction will solve the country’s problems that the leader “succeeds.” Thus, a full analysis of the last six years requires an examination of G W Bush’s insecurities and self-delusions. But it also requires an examination of the self-delusions of the public as together we confront, or fail to confront, the challenges facing us.
There is much in this article. It is well worth reading in full. But we must also remember that great men, and great failures, do not, alone make history.
April 15th, 2007
My latest piece on psychologists and abusive interrogations — Aid and Comfort for Torturers: Psychology and Coercive Interrogations in Historical Perspective — is now available on
CounterPunch [No links. All others have extensive linked references]; Never In Our Names; Daily Kos; InformationClearinghouse, Dissident Voice, and OpEdNews:
I expect several other sites to carry it in the next few days.
This is based upon a talk delivered, March 17, 2007 at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) conference: UNFREE ASSOCIATION: The Politics and Psychology of Torture in a Time of Terror.
April 14th, 2007
Johann Hari of the Independent has an excellent piece on the sadness, and viciousness, behind our obsession with self-help. He brings out the disgusting reactionary ideology behind much of the self-help movement. We psychotherapists and psychoanalysts are not above this ideology either:
The Selfishness of The Self-Help Industry
The Cult of Positive Thinking Blames All The People Who Falter or Fail in Life For Their Own Misfortune
by Johann Hari
I am thinking of writing a book called The Power of Negative Thinking. Subtitle: Let’s Hear It For Hate. Yes, let’s hear it for pure, undiluted loathing, for negativity, for black-eyed bile.
I say this because I have just pored through the “book” that has thwacked Harry Potter into second place and sent The Da Vinci Code spinning back into its Vatican vault. The Secret - written by Australian reality TV producer Rhonda Byrne - has sold six million DVDs and books since it first sprouted a few months ago, even earning the recommendation of St Oprah of the Screaming Studios.
In its slim 198 pages, it crystallises a sit-up-and-smile-right culture that is, in fact, making us all more miserable.
The Secret boasts that it can change your life. On every page. At least three times. Byrne brags that she has uncovered the One True Law that guarantees success. “I began tracing the Secret back through history,” she writes. “I couldn’t believe all the people who knew this. They were the greatest people in history: Plato, Shakespeare, Newton…” and on and on.
So what is this not-very secret Secret? It is the most extreme strain of positive thinking yet preached. In a desperate attempt to give it a scientific sheen, Byrne calls it “The Law of Attraction”.
You are, she says, like a giant transponder, sending signals out into the universe. “Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency.” If you send out negative thoughts, you will attract negative things into your life. If you send out positive thoughts, positive things will come. “It is exactly like placing an order in a catalogue,” she says. Exactly.
If you want a mansion, you need to really, really picture a mansion, believe in it - and it will be yours. Ask, believe, receive. “The Universe will start to rearrange itself to make it happen for you… If you see it in your mind, you’re going to hold it in your hand.”
If you plough enough positive thinking into something, it will “always” happen. As one “case study” in the book puts it, “I would visualise a parking space exactly where I wanted it, and 95 per cent of the time it would be there for me and I would just pull right in.” Another “case study” is of a woman diagnosed with breast cancer who shunned medical treatment, pictured herself without breast cancer really, really hard - and the cancer vanished.
By taking the cult of positive thinking, which stretches back to Norman Vincent Peale’s famous book in the 1950s, to this barking extreme, The Secret reveals what was wrong with the idea all along: it instinctively blames all the people who falter or fail in life for their own misfortune.
Look at the pressure always put on people diagnosed with cancer, who are entitled to be wailingly, howlingly depressed, to “stay positive”. The American writer Barbara Ehrenreich wrote recently: “I hate hope. It was hammered into me constantly when I was being treated for breast cancer”, and, she believes, it only places “an additional burden on the sick and aggrieved”.
The Secret takes this further, saying: “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an unbalanced perspective, or we’re not being loving and grateful.” Ah, Aids - a sign of ingratitude. Cancer - a sign you don’t love.
The Secret takes this to its sick logical conclusion. Did the 9/11 victims “attract” Mohammed Atta? Did the Jews “attract” Auschwitz? Yes: “If people believe they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, those thoughts can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Bob Proctor, one of the “gurus” who features heavily in the book, was asked on the TV show Nightline whether the children of Darfur - currently being hunted down and murdered for being black - had been thinking negative thoughts that “manifested” in the Janjaweed. He replied, “I think the country probably has.”
The Secret isn’t only a piece of charlatanry; it’s a social barometer that reveals something sad about our psyches after 30 years of spiralling inequality and the collapse of political hope.
The rise of self-help exactly coincides with the decline of faith in collective political solutions. You won’t find an answer out there, through getting involved with the society you live in, it says. “I made a decision I would not watch the news or read newspapers any more, because it did not make me feel good,” Byrne declares. She urges her readers to shun their friends if they become sick, because “you are inviting illness if you are listening to people talking about their illness”.
You shouldn’t even look at fat people because that lets “fat thoughts” into your mind. (If you already looked at my byline picture - too late, fatso.)
If it seems like a leap from The Secret to the ballot box, you just have to turn to the book’s explicitly political pronouncements. “Why do you think that 1 per cent of the population earns around 96 per cent of the money that’s being earned?” it asks.
Massive tax cuts, markets rigged in the favour of the rich, the rise of a right-wing ideology? No, “the rich think thoughts of abundance and wealth, and they do not allow any contradictory thoughts to take root in their minds.” And as for the poor, “the only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them in their thoughts.”
The American self-help industry, inevitably drifting across the Atlantic, has always been a reactionary response to economic stresses beyond the control of citizens sitting at home alone. Since the 1950s, whenever there has been a sense of economic anxiety - and for most poor and middle-class Americans, the Bush years have been a time of declining relative incomes even as the super-rich soar off into the stratosphere - this industry has been there with a simple message: the problem is within you.
One of the reasons Bush has got away with so much is that so many Americans have internalised the cruel myths of the self-help industry. I can’t think of a sadder symbol of the Bush years than the news that the One God, One Thought Church is screening The Secret DVD to their housing counselling programme “to show people who feel hopeless that they can own a home”. Don’t create political pressure for cheap houses for Katrina refugees; just tell them to visualise it very, very hard.
This is the real secret - that the book is a pure expression of Bushism: a slop of rancid aspiration-speak masking selfishness, social collapse and religiose myth-making.
In place of this siren vision of self-help, let’s help each other. In place of obsessively changing yourself, let’s change the world. And in place of blithe, blind optimism, yes - let’s hate.
j.hari@ independent.co.uk
April 12th, 2007
Dori Smith, producer of Talk Nation Radio (who interviewed me last week), interviewed Mark Benjamin of Salon this Monday. Benjamin, as you may recall, has written about the SERE-BSCT connection, and on the APA controversy. He was the first reporter to publish the entire membership of the PENS Task Force, which he got from Congressional sources.
The interview can be listened to or downloaded (at 128 bitrate) here. For downloading, most people will want the smaller 64 bitrate file here. Usually the interview eventually shows up transcribed on the Talk Nation Radio site.
This interview focuses on the APA and psychologists in interrogations. Dori quotes me a couple of times during it.
March 28th, 2007
Psychoanalyst and social critic Slavoj Zizek wrote, in a recent New York Times op-ed on the damage the American regime of torture is doing to all of us:
Knight of the Living Dead
By Slavoj Zizek
SINCE the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent of his crimes has been mixed with doubts. Can his claims be trusted? What if he confessed to more than he really did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop the water boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”?
If there was one surprising aspect to this situation it has less to do with the confessions themselves than with the fact that for the first time in a great many years, torture was normalized — presented as something acceptable. The ethical consequences of it should worry us all.
While the scope of Mr. Mohammed’s crimes is clear and horrifying, it is worth noting that the United States seems incapable of treating him even as it would the hardest criminal — in the civilized Western world, even the most depraved child murderer gets judged and punished. But any legal trial and punishment of Mr. Mohammed is now impossible — no court that operates within the frames of Western legal systems can deal with illegal detentions, confessions obtained by torture and the like. (And this conforms, perversely, to Mr. Mohammed’s desire to be treated as an enemy rather than a criminal.)
It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, but also the fight against them, now has to proceed in a gray zone of legality. We thus have de facto “legal” and “illegal” criminals: those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers and the like), and those who are outside legality, subject to military tribunals or seemingly endless incarceration.
Mr. Mohammed has become what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “homo sacer”: a creature legally dead while biologically still alive. And he’s not the only one living in an in-between world. The American authorities who deal with detainees have become a sort of counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law and yet not regulated by the rule of law.
Some don’t find this troubling. The realistic counterargument goes: The war on terrorism is dirty, one is put in situations where the lives of thousands may depend on information we can get from our prisoners, and one must take extreme steps. As Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School puts it: “I’m not in favor of torture, but if you’re going to have it, it should damn well have court approval.” Well, if this is “honesty,” I think I’ll stick with hypocrisy.
Yes, most of us can imagine a singular situation in which we might resort to torture — to save a loved one from immediate, unspeakable harm perhaps. I can. In such a case, however, it is crucial that I do not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle. In the unavoidable brutal urgency of the moment, I should simply do it. But it cannot become an acceptable standard; I must retain the proper sense of the horror of what I did. And when torture becomes just another in the list of counterterrorism techniques, all sense of horror is lost.
When, in the fifth season of the TV show “24,” it became clear that the mastermind behind the terrorist plot was none other than the president himself, many of us were eagerly waiting to see whether Jack Bauer would apply to the “leader of the free world” his standard technique in dealing with terrorists who do not want to divulge a secret that may save thousands. Will he torture the president?
Reality has now surpassed TV. What “24” still had the decency to present as Jack Bauer’s disturbing and desperate choice is now rendered business as usual.
In a way, those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It thrives only if it is sustained by what Hegel called “objective spirit,” the set of unwritten rules that form the background of every individual’s activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.
For example, a clear sign of progress in Western society is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is “dogmatically” clear to everyone that rape is wrong. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, he would appear so ridiculous as to disqualify himself from any further consideration. And the same should hold for torture.
Are we aware what lies at the end of the road opened up by the normalization of torture? A significant detail of Mr. Mohammed’s confession gives a hint. It was reported that the interrogators submitted to waterboarding and were able to endure it for less than 15 seconds on average before being ready to confess anything and everything. Mr. Mohammed, however, gained their grudging admiration by enduring it for two and a half minutes.
Are we aware that the last time such things were part of public discourse was back in the late Middle Ages, when torture was still a public spectacle, an honorable way to test a captured enemy who might gain the admiration of the crowd if he bore the pain with dignity? Do we really want to return to this kind of primitive warrior ethics?
This is why, in the end, the greatest victims of torture-as-usual are the rest of us, the informed public. A precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of “The Parallax View.”
March 27th, 2007
I was interviewed by Dori Smith on Talk Nation Radio for their March 15 broadcast.
Talk Nation Radio for March 15, 2007
Stephen Soldz on Psychologists Aiding in Military Interrogations
Produced by Dori Smith at Pacifica Affiliate WHUS, Radio for the People, at the University of CT in Storrs, Connecticut
Total Running Time: 23:31
The interview can be downloaded here.
This is the description sent out to Pacifica stations on the show:
If you log on to the web site of the APA, American Psychological Association, you find what appears to be a strictly health oriented group of medical caregivers. The site offers medical referrals for those seeking therapists and provides advice on everything from depression and PTSD to how to help your child overcome school yard bullying. Yet, the APA has argued that the practices of members with US Military and intelligence agency ties should not be evaluated based on current medical practice standards or the hippocratic oath. A committee set up by the APA’s leadership defends members who participate in US Military or CIA interrogations and argues on behalf of the business side of this practice.
Big Brother, the FBI, has even urged psychologists to inform on their patients.
APA is positioned to have a major impact on the way Americans perceive the role of psychologists, but what might patients think? Does the fact that some psychologists are working at places like Guantanamo impact patients who might lose trust in therapy in general? And what impact is the presence of psychologists at interrogations having?
Psychologist, author, and peace activist, Stephen Soldz, has taken a strong stand against torture and he is presently working to get the American Psychological Association or APA to create stricter guidelines on torture. He is withholding his membership dues, and is helping to coordinate a petition drive to urge the APA to enact a moratorium on member participation in US Military interrogations. http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/
Transcripts: http://www.talknationradio.org
[The transcript does not appear to be up yet.]
If anyone needs a higher bitrate version, it can be obtained here. It is twice as large as the 64 bitrate one linked to above.
UPDATE: The interview transcript is now available online.
March 19th, 2007
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