Psychology of torture
apreyto
(excerpt)
Psychologically, torture often creates a state where the mind works
against the best interests of the individual, due to the inducement of
such emotions as shame, worthlessness, dependency, and a feeling of
lacking uniqueness. Cunning torturers often induce pandered pride,
specious worthiness, false favoritism, and grandiose specialness to
further fool the subject. These and other responses can lead to a
mutated, fragmented, or discredited personality and belief structure.
Even the subject's normal bodily needs and functions (e.g., sleep,
sustenance, excretion, etc.) can be changed and made to be construed
as self-degrading, animalistic, and dehumanizing.
Social effects
Torturers and bystanders resent the tortured because the tortured make
the perpetrators and bystanders who collude with the torture feel
guilty and ashamed for having tortured and/or for having done nothing
to prevent the atrocity. The sufferers threaten their sense of
security and their much-needed belief in predictability, justice, and
rule of law. The sufferers, on their part, do not believe that it is
possible to effectively communicate to "outsiders" what they have been
through. Author K. Zetnik is on record calling the Auschwitz torture
chambers "another galaxy", during his testimony at the Eichmann trial
in Jerusalem in 1961.
Kenneth Pope, in "Torture," a chapter he wrote for the "Encyclopedia
of Women and Gender: Sex Similarities and Differences and the Impact
of Society on Gender," quotes Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman:
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the
perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the
universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the
contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim
demands action, engagement, and remembering."
...just don't play with me and you won't get burned...