Symposium: International Congress Rome 2009 ( www.iagpcongress.org )

Rome, Italy 24-29 August 2009 Ergife Palace Hotel

THE LUCIFER EFFECT:THE COMPLICITY OF MENTAL HEALTH CLINICANS
IN RATIONALIZING TORTURE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF STATE

 

 

 

Symposium: International Congress Rome 2009 from Bill Roller on Vimeo.

The mental health professions have been challenged by recent revelations that clinicians have participated in the planning, design, and execution of torture, both physical and psychological, by agents acting under the authority of the national security state. This symposium elucidated some of the psychological processes which underlie the complicity of psychologists, group therapists, family therapists and other mental health professionals in these acts of torture.

We focused on three factors:

1. The intergenerational transmission of trauma by which traumatized parents transmit their traumatic stress disorder to their offspring which then can lead to acts of abuse.

2. The use of rationalization by clinicians to justify acts of abuse.

3. The application of projective identification by which clinicians see their own aggression in others, identify them as enemies, and fight against them by all means, including torture.

The title of our symposium, THE LUCIFER EFFECT, refers to a book by Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. In this book, Professor Zimbardo recounts the outcome of the Stanford Prison Experiment in which students were divided into prisoners and guards and the way those in the role of guards quickly became abusers of those in the role of prisoners. The ease with which normal subjects abused their power and persecuted their peers became the subject of a film produced by Zimbardo, called "Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment" This film demonstrates the phenomenon of abuse quite shockingly. The findings of this experiment and the earlier experiments of Stanley Milgram (Obedience to Authority) and the studies of A.G. Miller (The Obedience Experiments) are the theoretical basis for exploring the psychological processes at work in the behavior of those who participate in torture. In this symposium, we focused on three of these processes.

Bill Roller, Chair, Berkeley Group Education Foundation, Berkeley, California

Howard D.Kibel, New York Medical College, Valhalla, New York

Raymond Battegay, School of Medicine, Basel, Switzerland