Torture

Polity, 2010

Despite being the subject of much recent scholarly work, torture remains an ambiguous concept. As recent legal arguments have made clear, such vagueness has important and immediate political consequences. This article makes a number of contributions towards resolving this ambiguity. First, it argues that the distinction between physical and psychological abuse is unwarranted. Second, it puts forward a logical basis for the distinction between torture and legally permissible punishments like incarceration. Third, it distinguishes between torture and related concepts like cruelty or sadism by stressing the instrumentality of torture. Ultimately, torture is defined as the systematic and deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person over whom the actor has physical control, in order to induce a behavioral response from that person.

International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Education, 2018

The title of this paper, 'The mark of torture,' comes from the clinical insight that in the intersubjective field of therapy for torture survivors a distinct set of motives tends to repeat itself. These motives are here conceptualized as 'perversion-like states', since they present features and dynamics that can also be found in the so-called 'perversions'. However, the limits and the sense of the use of this term will be discussed and clarified. It is argued that such states are the result of the perverse traumatic experiences of torture in which trauma represents only the pars destruens of the process, the disrupting device that disintegrates the previous psychological organization and leaves posttraumatic symptoms as traces of the impact of this experience; while the 'perversion' constructs and converts the functioning of mind-pars construens-through its characteristic use of body and pain. It is assumed that this happens through an implicit registration of the experience that may or may not reach the point of changing the characteristics of the person's object relations. A clinical vignette outlining the development of a particular course of therapy with a torture survivor will illustrate some of these peculiar aspects. This paper implies that a well-founded understanding of these aspects in the interpersonal dynamics of therapy may help the therapeutic dyad to unpack crucial themes created by torture, thus accelerating the patient's progress towards recovery.

Women s Studies International Forum

In this article, we reflect upon how bodies are experienced under torture. We centre this around Consuelo's personal experience, as a feminist lesbian and political activist tortured under the Chilean military government. We also draw on the training both of us received in ...

Occasional Papers of the School of Social Science, IAS, 2017

What are the possibilities for theorizing torture independently from the question of whether or not it “works”? This question has to be posed because to ask whether or not torture works is to narrow our focus to its instrumentalities; to tolerate largely irrelevant debate, based on unrealistic assumptions, about acceptable circumstances for torture’s use. It is to give rise to theorizing aimed not at understanding torture but at justifying it, by contriving to have us view the practice from the standpoint of a hypothetical torturer. To theorize about torture would seem to call for a different kind of question, one concerned with what work torture does. A question of this sort would invite us to attend to the relation of the torture situation—in which a totally dominated person is subjected to torment inflicted in the name of a public authority, for a function or functions that remains to be determined—to the state idea. Beyond torture’s instrumentality, its epistemology of pain, and debates about human dignity, it is the special structure of domination, the arbitrariness of interference, and its relationship to public authority that make torture distinctive, and politically significant.

Presented at “Flesh and Space: Intertwining Merleau-Ponty and Architecture,” Mississippi State University (Starkville, MS), September 9, 2009

This paper claims that torture involves an experience and expression of space, and offers a phenomenological description of this practice that delves beneath its mere physical effect on the human body, in order to demonstrate that bodily pain is only one dimension of the experiential structure of torture. This claim is supported by Merleau-Ponty's comments about spatiality, which are closely interwoven with his theories of the embodied subject and perception. This analysis underscores what space means to us as the spatial and spatializing beings that we are, and shows that no matter how "unscarred" survivors of torture may be, their lived world remains irretrievably damaged at the ontological level, due to the living spatiality stolen from them during their ordeal.

This paper will explore and compare the experiences of two men who suffered torture in very different ways and times in history. One is Jean Améry, an Austrian Jew and member of the Belgian underground, who fought against the Nazi occupation during World War II. He was captured in 1943, imprisoned, tortured, interrogated, and finally transported to Auschwitz, the eastern Poland death camp where he managed to survive. The other victim that I introduce is Jose Luis Moreno Borbolla, a 1970s guerrilla fighter in Mexico who was detained, tortured and interrogated at a military prison by police and military agents. I intend to introduce a variety of issues and concepts related to torture. My starting point will be Jean Améry´s book, At the Mind’s Limits, a work that employs a phenomenological approach on. The book offers deep philosophical reflections and insights on the aftermaths and consequences of being tortured. This paper will present Améry and Moreno´s phenomenological analysis and views as survivors of torture, a state of being that reflects on such matters as the helplessness of being tortured, the trust in the world, the detention, the first blow, etc. And it is from this perspective that this research will contrast the similarities and differences emanating from two different experiences of torture.

CUNY Law Review

Ms. Sveaass also serves as a chairperson of the Human Rights Committee of the Norwegian Psychological Association, a board member of the International Society for Health and Human Rights, and a member of the U.N. Committee Against Torture. For many years Ms. Sveaass has worked as a clinical psychologist, supervisor, and trainer in relation to traumatized refugees and health workers in the field. She has published on the subjects of human rights violations, psychology, and health care.

Law and Critique, 2010

Torture has reappeared in liberal democracies in the guise of antiterrorism strategies. The acceptance of its use and the fascination with the images and documents that indicate the pain and suffering of the tortured point to more than a belief in the need for torture to counter terrorist threats. This fascination implies an enjoyment on the part of the liberal subject who is looking on while the other subject is being beaten. In this article I consider the liberal subject's acceptance of and fascination with the scene of torture. I argue that the scene of torture, as imagined by the subject looking on, provides a formula for the relief of anxiety in the liberal subject who does not know if s/he will be subject to torture at any time.

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2018

The aim of this paper is to bring a phenomenological perspective to bear on a specific problem: how to understand the diminished sense of reality that is often reported by persons who have suffered severe and prolonged interpersonal trauma. For this purpose I turn to resources from two traditions. First, I present a phenomenological account of the intersubjective constitution of objective experience, which is then complemented by a developmental account of how the very small child comes to inhabit a world of shared mind-independent things. On this basis, I aim to show how the sense of reality, as the clear and dependable sense of the difference in experience between inner life and external reality, is an interpersonal developmental achievement that goes hand in hand with the development of the sense of self. I will in particular draw on Husserlian phenomenology and Winnicott's psychoanalytic perspective on developmental psychology.