1

biblio.ugent.be

The UGent Institutional Repository is the electronic archiving and dissemination platform

for all UGent research publications. Ghent University has implemented a mandate stipu-

lating that all academic publications of UGent researchers should be deposited and ar-

chived in this repository. Except for items where current copyright restrictions apply,

these papers are available in Open Access.

This item is the archived peer-reviewed author-version of:

Depsychologizing Torture

Jan De Vos

In: Critical Inquiry Volume 37, Number 2, Winter 2011

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/657294

To refer to or to cite this work, please use the citation to the published version:

De Vos, J. (2011). Depsychologizing Torture. Critical Inquiry 37(2) 286-314. doi

10.1086/657294

Depsychologizing Torture

Abstract

It was only in 2006 that the American Psychiatric Association and the American

Medical Association prohibited their members from direct participation in intelli-

gence interrogations in U.S. detention facilities such as Guantánamo and Abu

Ghraib. It took the American Psychological Association, however, still two more

years to tell their psychologists not to participate in the same type of interroga-

tions. This article asks why psychology was the ―last man standing‖ and puts for-

ward the hypothesis that the psychologization of torture is the stance which

unites defenders and opponents of torture. The historical work of McCoy revealed

the intricate bonds of the psychology departments with the military practice of

psychological torture, but a close reading of the well-known experiments of Stan-

ley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, rather then being explanatory, suggests a via

regia leading easily from psychology to torture. Thus, rejecting the idea that psy-

chology is a valuable knowledge potentially dangerous when in wrong hands, it is

argued that psychology carries in its core subjection and de-subjectivization.

Introduction

In May 2006 the American Psychiatric Association banned all direct participation by

psychiatrists in intelligence interrogations: “No psychiatrist should participate directly

in the interrogation of person[s] held in custody by military or civilian investigative or

law enforcement authorities, whether in the United States or elsewhere.” In June 2006

the American Medical Association (AMA) stated that “physicians must neither conduct

nor directly participate in an interrogation, because a role as physician-interrogator

undermines the physician‖s role as healer and thereby erodes trust in the individual

physician-interrogator and in the medical profession.”1 In the meantime, however, the

American Psychological Association (APA) allowed their members to participate and

even saw an important role for psychologists in such interrogations. It was only after

the steadfast opposition of APA activists and an enforced referendum that the APA was

1 Quoted in: S. Soldz, "Healers or Interrogators: Psychology and the United States Torture Regime,"

Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18, no. 5 (2008): 601.

3

made to change its policy. Stephen Soldz, founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psy-

chology, posted a press release on his website on 17 September 2008: “Today, the mem-

bership of the American Psychological Association... passed a referendum banning par-

ticipation of APA member psychologists in U.S. detention facilities such as Guantanamo

or the CIA‖s secret ―black sites‖ operating outside of or in violation of international law

or the Constitution.”2 The question we need to ask is why did psychology remain the last

holdout of the psy-related sciences involved in these practices.3 Many have pointed to

the entrenched political interests and the dependency of the APA on military research

funding.4 But beyond this explanation, critics and commentators invariably and incon-

spicuously resort to the explanatory framework of psychology itself to account for the

latter‖s involvement in torture (for examples, see below). In this essay I will argue that

the fact that critics tend to psychologize the close link between psychology and the mil-

itary is not without its problems, especially as this loop remains largely unquestioned.

My thesis is that the psychological perspective, when not dealing with its own inevita-

ble ouroborosian moment, might thus become part of the problem rather than simply

one point in the conjunction of the military and psychology. This is ultimately my ar-

gument for a broad sweeping critique of psychology. Starting from the involvement of

psychology in torture practices, what I envision is not so much a critique of specific in-

stitutions like the APA nor of the broader institutions of U.S. or Western psychology as

such. Rather, I seek to question the infusion of the whole field of psychology with psy-

chologization. For one might consider psychologization as more than the simple over-

flow of the discipline of psychology to the wider society and posit it as the structural

and inseparable double of psychology—the very (unacknowledged) paradigm through

which psychology asserts itself as a science. Psychologization, I claim, not only unites

the different schools within psychology but is also the common denominator of the di-

verse approaches and practices that lean in one way or another on psychology. What

this essay specifically deals with is how, more troublingly, psychologization might also

be seen as providing the very framework for today‖s practices of torture. As the

(in)famous CIA Kubark manual puts it, contemporary interrogation methods cannot be

meaningfully comprehended without psychology.5 An analysis of the intricate links be-

tween psychology as a whole and the process of psychologization is thus the necessary

2 S. Soldz, "APA members change association‖s interrogations policy! September 17th, 2008," in Psyche, Science,

and Society (2008). 3 Interestingly, the policy changes in the American Psychiatric Association and the AMA came after a huge

furore over the APA‖s holding on to its belief in an important role for psychologists in intelligence operations. 4 F. Summers, "Psychoanalysis, the American Psychological Association, and the involvement of psychologists

at Guantanamo Bay," Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 12, no. 1 (2007). 5 See: CIA, "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual,"(1963),

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/01-01.htm.

preliminary work to be done before one can begin to disentangle psychology from tor-

ture practices.

To flesh out these arguments I will first consider the well-known experiments of

Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, as these are repeatedly referred to, albeit briefly,

to explain the involvement of psychologists in torture. The experiments have been in-

voked in order to explain, for example, why psychologists obey orders that run counter

to their personal and professional ethics (drawing upon Milgram) or how psychologists

find themselves on the slippery slope where “good people turn evil” (drawing upon

Zimbardo).6 However, there are authors who critique such psychologizing explanations.

Nimisha Patel, for example, points to the fact that psychological research can also be

invoked by perpetrators of torture as a defence, wherein they argue that in particular

social contexts and circumstances anyone can become aggressive and engage in torture

practices.7 But perhaps there is more to be said about the recurring use of Milgram and

Zimbardo regarding the involvement of psychologists in the war on terror. The simple

fact that these experiments would no longer be sanctioned by any research ethics com-

mittee and would thus be forbidden—if not illegal— points to the problematic and puz-

zling link between psychology and torture. It is through an analysis of the failure of

psychology‖s current self-assessment—departing from the questionable idea that psy-

chological knowledge is dangerous in the wrong hands—that we can begin to grasp why

psychology has come to be “the most militarized among the social or biological scienc-

es,” as Alfred McCoy puts it.8 In this way it will become clear that the relation between

psychology and the discourses of power is much more troubling than the indictment of

a psychological association securing its interests in a lucrative bargain.

Milgram’s Blueprint for Psychological Torture

Jerome Bruner‖s foreword to the latest edition of Milgram‖s book Obedience to Authority

points to the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib as proof of the relevance of Mil-

gram‖s experiment.9 Various authors consider this link as self-evident: “as every gradu-

ate of introductory psychology should know from the Milgram studies, ordinary people

6 P. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect. 7 N. Patel, "Torture, psychology, and the ―war on terror‖: a human rights framework," in Just war: psychology and

terrorism, ed. R. Roberts (Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books, 2007). 8 A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books:

32. 9 J. Bruner, "Foreword," in Obedience to authority, ed. S. Milgram (London: Pinter & Martin, 2005), xi, xiii.

5

can engage in incredibly destructive behaviour if so ordered by legitimate authority.”10

In the same vein Barbara Ehrenreich evokes Milgram to explain that “we know that

good people can do terrible things under the right circumstances.”11 But where there is

so much supposed knowledge, it is important to go beyond a passing reference to Mil-

gram—as most papers connecting Milgram with Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo do—and

proceed with a closer reading. For, as will become clear, if left unquestioned, the claim

that psychology can provide both an understanding of and the remedy for its own in-

volvement in torture risks repeating the myth of homeopathy wherein one tackles the

problem with the very tools that engendered the problem.

Milgram‖s intention with his experiments in the early 1960s was to study obedience

to an authority figure.12 In his fake learning experiment, which was said to test the ef-

fects of punishment on learning, test subjects turned out to be willing to press a button

to deliver an electric shock to another person simply because he or she was instructed

to do so by someone posing as a researcher. While no one was actually shocked, the ma-

jority of the subjects who played the role of teacher followed the orders of the experi-

menter even when the so-called learner begged and screamed for mercy. Brad Olson,

Soldz, and Martha Davis, commenting on the involvement of psychologists in Abu

Ghraib, contend that the central constellation of the Milgram experiment—the triad of

learner, teacher, and experimenter—is being repeated in Abu Ghraib in the form of the

detainee, psychologist, and military command.13 But let us take a closer look at how Mil-

gram understands or, better, stages authority in his experiment. Yannis Stavrakakis

writes that Milgram himself understood that it is not the substance of the command but

the source of authority that is decisive. For Stavrakakis, the source is always experi-

enced by the subject via a fantasy scenario. In the Milgram experiment the fantasmatic

frame is science itself, and the command is taken seriously because it is situated within

a scientific experiment.14 But while Milgram knows that he obtains obedience with aca-

demic currency, he does not think this through. Milgram writes that he chose science as

the stand-in for authority, which suggests the mere contingency of his choice. He con-

tends that he might just as easily have designed an experiment featuring a military or

religious authority.15 This becomes particularly problematic when we consider his

10 S. T. Fiske, L. T. Harris, and A. J. C. Cuddy, "Social psychology: why ordinary people torture enemy

prisoners," Science 306, no. 5701 (2004): 1483. 11 B. Ehrenreich, "Feminism‖s Assumptions Upended " Los Angeles Times, 4 June 2004 2004. 12 The analysis presented here is based on J. De Vos, " ―Now That You Know, How Do You Feel?' The Milgram

Experiment and Psychologization." 13 B. Olson, S. Soldz, and M. Davis, "The ethics of interrogation and the American Psychological Association: A

critique of policy and process," Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 3(2008). 14 Y. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left. Psychoanalysis, theory, politics 172–87. 15 S. Milgram, Obedience to authority: 142.

choice of psychological science (the psychology of learning) as the context for his ex-

periment. The test subjects were asked to participate in an experiment on the effects of

punishment on learning and even received a short tutorial on (behavioral) learning psy-

chology. So if Stavrakakis can reread obedience to authority as obedience to science, we must

specify that the experiment is, more precisely, about obedience to psychology. Here Mil-

gram‖s experiment is caught within an unrecognized short-circuit in the sense that the

setup of the experiment and the explanatory framework are one and the same, that is,

psychology. The first deduction we can make here is that the triad of learner, teacher,

and experimenter sketched out by Olson and others has to be amended with an unques-

tioned fourth term that backs up the authority of the experimenter—namely, Milgram

himself as the representative of science and, more particularly, of psychology. This sug-

gests that the Abu Ghraib triad of detainee, psychologist, and military command also has

to be amended with the fourth term of the discipline and the discourse of psychology. It

is a thorough reflection on this fourth term that, I claim, is missing in both the Milgram

experiment and in the critical movement of psychologists against torture. Moreover—

and here we must venture a bold step in our understanding—this shortcoming is pre-

cisely what renders Milgram‖s experiments not so much explanatory but, rather, the

direct forebearer of the presence of psychologists in the torture chambers.

To disentangle the experiment, we will begin from the point where traditional cri-

tiques of Milgram usually stop. The key criticism of Milgram tends to be that he did not

actually analyze obedience but merely designed an ingenious enactment of it. E. Jones,

for example, called the experiment “a mere triumph of social engineering,”16 and, more

recently, Augustine Brannigan described it as a dramatization “of humankind‖s capacity

for ruthless violence.”17 However, an essential question seems to be forgotten in these

critiques: what exactly is being enacted? As we have already indicated, the script of Mil-

gram‖s dramatization refers directly to the science of psychology, so the answer is sur-

prisingly simple: the experiment is the self-enactment of psychological discourse. To

understand this autoreferential dramatization of psychology, let us discern the different

roles at play. To start with, the so-called naive test subject is, surprisingly, put in the

role of the apprentice/scientist; he is actually asked to play the role of experimental-

learning psychologist. Strangely enough, none of the test subjects seem to question this,

as though it were perfectly logical for a test subject to be asked to conduct an experi-

ment. It is, then, in this role as quasi-psychologist that the subject is brought to be the

obedient bureaucrat inflicting torture and pain on the so-called learner. But if we are

looking for an instance of total obedience, is there not a more obvious example? Mil-

16 Quoted in: I. Parker, "Obedience," 112. 17 A. Brannigan, The rise and fall of social psychology: 57.

7

gram achieved full obedience from his colleague, the so-called experimenter who

coached the naive subject with monotone prompts of “please continue,” or, “the exper-

iment requires that you continue.”18 The film footage of the original experiment shows a

merciless experimenter who, while the obviously agitated and stressed subjects express

their wish to stop, mechanically and emotionlessly repeats his stock phrases.19 The con-

clusion is that the obedient torturer that Milgram was seeking was already inscribed in

the experiment. Is the position of the experimenter not structurally similar to that of

the psychologists in Guantánamo and other military sites, who advise and instruct those

doing the actual torture? But to fully understand the similarity, we still have to assess

the central role of Milgram himself. The key moment in the experiment is, arguably,

when Milgram enters the room to lift the veils of the deception in the style of Candid

Camera. Milgram tells the test subject that the learner did not receive any shocks, after

which Milgram defuses the situation, reconciling the victim with his torturer—a mo-

ment that may remind us of today‖s emo-television. Milgram, in this instance, is the

dramaturge and demiurge who, unexpectedly, ends up psychologizing the issue of obe-

dience with his standard debriefing questions (“Do you feel upset?” “What did you

feel?” and “Now that you know, how do you feel?”). If Milgram wanted to show that

obedience to authority is situational and not individually determined, it is something of

a paradox that the experiment ends firmly in the arena of individual psychology. If in

the real Candid Camera the gaze of the Big Other is revealed, with Milgram this turns out

to be the gaze of psychology. Having scripted an experiment in which psychological sci-

ence operates as the stand-in for authority, this individualizing psychological discourse

reemerges at the end as the frame of the analysis, and the circle closes. While Kenneth J.

Gergen notes the immanent looping effects in psychological research whereby the pub-

licizing of psychological research in turn influences the field of research,20 Milgram‖s

experiment shows that this aspect is only a secondary effect. The primary loop is mani-

fest in the way in which psychology asserts itself as a science, that is, in its performative

gesture, an acting out. Or, in other words, here we have psychology grounding itself in

psychologization. Milgram‖s own role is thus to recuperate and capitalize on the surplus

value of the loop. His postexperimental question, “now that you know, how do you

feel?” harvests the psychologizing answers in order to make his case on obedience. Here

Milgram stands in for the ultimate authority. By psychologizing obedience, he obtains

full compliance. By hailing the subject into introspection, he encourages him/her to

believe that this is the way out of blind obedience and toward emancipation. As Hender-

ikus Stam puts it, the test subject is meant to be overwhelmed with the powerful effects

18 S. Milgram, Obedience to authority: 21. 19 S. Milgram, "Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority." 20 K. J. Gergen, "Social psychology as history."

of psychology.21 Still today, the Milgram experiment is evoked in the same manner; in

textbooks, in university auditoria, and in the popular media the experiment is almost

invariably introduced without disclosing the deception. After the preemptory question

“what would you do?” one is meant to be taken aback by the moment of revelation-

humiliation and further psychologization: “Now that you know, how do you feel?”

Milgram believed that psychology was the key to grappling with the atrocities of the

Nazi regime, which he understood in line with Hannah Arendt‖s “banality of evil,” and

as such would open the road to emancipation from submissive obedience. If we have

sufficient knowledge of the psychology of obedience, Milgram argued, then this will al-

low us to resist malign authority. His psychological understanding of obedience, howev-

er, ultimately rests upon the prior psychologization of the whole experimental setting.

Coming back to the current situation, it is exactly this stance that returns in the critique

of psychologists involved in torture. Again, it is assumed that psychology can facilitate

both an understanding and a remedy. But the problem is, as in Milgram‖s experiment,

that psychology is already in place; today‖s torture is already informed by psychology.

The problem with a psychologized understanding of today‖s torture practices is that it

leans on the same psychological canons that inform the torture. Of course, the Milgram

experiment explains a lot; it is a core element of the operative script in military set-

tings.22 It is this loop that remains largely unquestioned in contemporary references to

Milgram and Zimbardo. Guantánamo revealed the use of so-called psychological torture

and the actual involvement of psychologists in the practice of torture itself, which

makes a naive psychological understanding of torture highly problematic.

To push this argument to its limits, we must risk another step in our analysis: is psy-

chology‖s involvement in torture not the actual realization of Milgram‖s experiment?

For in Milgram‖s experiment obedience to authority actually boils down to obedience to

psychology, an obedience that results in the inflicting of harm on another human being.

That is, the test subjects were asked to “torture” for the sake of psychological research!

Milgram‖s experiment thus seems to be the prelude to the alliance of psychology and

torture; he prepared the setting for Guantánamo. It is no mere happenstance that Mil-

gram‖s research is central to the canonical literature that informs the enhanced inter-

rogation of the military. What makes the use of Milgram in critiquing psychological tor-

21 H. J. Stam, I. Lubek, and L. Radtke, "Repopulating social psychology texts: Disembodied 'subjects' and

embodied subjectivity," in Reconstructing the psychological subject: Bodies, practices and technologies, ed. B. Bayer

and J. Shotter (London: Sage, 1998). 22 In this way it is not important whether or not Milgram‖s research was financed by the CIA, as McCoy sug-

gests (A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan

Books.). It is clearly part of military intelligence design and thus shows a de facto involvement and entangle-

ment of psychology with the military.

9

ture especially disturbing, however, is that if we think our analysis of the experiment

through, the experiment itself is structured as torture. For in the moment of disclosure

and debriefing, Milgram tries to extract the truth from test subjects in order to produce

scientific data. It is here that we have to situate the ultimate dehumanization and de-

subjectivization, where the subject is reduced to the unemancipated position of the ob-

ject of the psy-sciences, frozen in a Candid Camera moment.

This sheds particular light on Olson and others‖ recourse to Milgram when they argue

that although experiments like Milgram‖s are now rightly blocked for ethical reasons,

they still have something significant to say about the events in Guantánamo and Abu

Ghraib.23 Are these remarks not structurally similar to the arguments used by propo-

nents of coercive interrogation? The common idea is that the use of unethical and

transgressive methods can extract the truth from subjects.24 In this way we cannot but

be suspicious of the plea to remove the military psychologists and bring in the trauma

psychologists. Soldz, for example, contends that psychologists should take “the lead in

forming a truth and reconciliation process facing up to the roles our profession has

played in these dark times.”25 Dan Aalbers wants psychologists to be part of the “clean-

up crew” to stop the abuses in, for example, Guantánamo. He wants to get “the psy-

chologists that are working for the detainers” out and bring the “psychologists who are

working for the detainees in.”26 There is a clear echo of the military discourse here from

the APA‖s task force that will look into the involvement of psychologists, to Aalbers

“cleanup crew,” to Olson‖s phrasing that “fighting powerlessness and trauma should be

a highest priority.”27 Are we not here close to declaring a war on trauma? More im-

portantly, these pleas to bring in “good psychologists” are structurally analogous to the

moment of debriefing in Milgram‖s experiment, which should lead us to expect little

23 See: B. Olson, S. Soldz, and M. Davis, "The ethics of interrogation and the American Psychological

Association: A critique of policy and process." 24 Even though contemporary ethical committees would prohibit experiments such as Milgram‖s and Zimbar-

do‖s from being conducted, nothing prevents, as Jenny Diski notes, similar “―experiments‖” from being “car-

ried out repeatedly for our fascination and entertainment on reality TV shows,” citing Big Brother, Castaway,

and so on (J. Diski, "XXX · The Man who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram by

Thomas Blass," London Review of Books 26, no. 22 (2004).More explicitly, the BBC has produced a Zimbardo-lite

experiment; see S. Reicher, "Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study." For a critique, seeJ.

De Vos, "From Milgram to Zimbardo: the double birth of post-war psychology(zation)," History of the Human

Sciences (2010, in press).. More recently, a French TV show with less scientific pretensions replicated the Mil-

gram experiments; see D. Chazan, "Row over Torture on French TV " BBC News(2010),

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8573755.stm 25 S. Soldz, "Healers or Interrogators: Psychology and the United States Torture Regime," 597. 26 D. Aalbers, "APA Approves Measure Banning Psychologists from Interrogations". 27 B. Olson, S. Soldz, and M. Davis, "The ethics of interrogation and the American Psychological Association: A

critique of policy and process," 12.

from them in the way of emancipation. In terms of our analysis, the idea of bringing in

the psychologists leads us to Zimbardo‖s Stanford Prison experiment, as it is Zimbardo‖s

experiment that leads to a further introduction of psychology and psychologists to the

American penitentiary system. However, at the level of the experiment itself, one can

claim that the psychologists were already there, albeit in a totally different manner than

is usually assumed.

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment: A Prison Run by Psychologists

Zimbardo‖s well-known experiment has been invoked repeatedly to explain how psy-

chologists could be drawn into reprehensible practices in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

Frank Summers, for example, contends that the Stanford Prison experiment shows “the

ease with which people will inflict pain on each other.”28 But this explanatory relevance

has also been questioned. Banyard, for example, explicitly criticizes Zimbardo‖s contri-

butions to the debate, arguing that there is a direct road from Zimbardo‖s experiment to

Abu Ghraib; behind the scenes in these military prisons psychologists were feeding the

guards ideas on how to deal with the prisoners.29

In commenting on the involvement of psychologists in interrogations, Zimbardo ap-

peals to social psychology, pointing to the “slippery slope of initial commitments,” “ca-

maraderie, ―group think,‖” and the “diffusion of responsibility.”30 Zimbardo‖s main ar-

gument is that psychologists in intelligence settings are locked into social psychological

mechanisms and are therefore not able to make distinctions between permissible and

impermissible interrogation.31 Does Zimbardo not locate psychology in a peculiar posi-

tion here, as the science above all other sciences, including itself? This is what we might,

with Lacan, term the Other of the Other. Zimbardo seems able to assess how psycholo-

gists in military service are in the grip of systemic influences and how these mecha-

nisms also impede the APA in realizing a fully informed and balanced ethical stance. But

what should stop us from concluding that Zimbardo and other critics are also in the grip

of systemic influences precisely insofar as they claim an Olympian perspective? Soldz

points to the dangers of this assumed metaperspective, commenting on the previous

28 F. Summers, "Psychoanalysis, the American Psychological Association, and the involvement of psychologists

at Guantanamo Bay," 85. 29 P. Banyard, "Tyranny and the tyrant. Zimbardo's 'The Lucifer Effect' reviewed," 495. 30 P. Zimbardo, "Thoughts on psychologists, ethics, and the use of torture in interrogations: Don't ignore

varying roles and complexities," Analyses of social issues and public policy 7, no. 1 (2007): 69. 31 See: L. S. Rubenstein, "First, Do No Harm: Health Professionals and Guantanamo," Seton Hall Law Review 37,

no. 3 (2007).

11

APA policy whereby psychologists could help keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and

effective,”32 and questions the assumption that psychologists have some unique moral

quality that makes them able to resist situational pressures.33 But, in a further twist, the

same critique can be made of Soldz. Are there not always situational factors to be dis-

cerned that might invalidate his claim to be able to see through things and see clearly

where “bad psychology” goes astray? In other words, what makes us critics safe from

psychology?

The only way out of this loop is to decenter the naivete. Take, for example, a typical

assessment that draws upon Milgram and Zimbardo and urges us to rid ourselves of the

naive notion that torture is perpetrated by individual monsters: “these horrific acts are

often perpetrated by seemingly ordinary individuals, acting within systems that allow

and encourage it.”34 Is it not equally or even more naive to speak in these late modern

times of “ordinary individuals” in the grip of mechanisms that psychology could lay

bare? To put it bluntly, the naivete is on the side of the psychologist who—resembling a

naive anthropologist—looks down from a metaposition onto supposedly naive and ordi-

nary persons. Zimbardo‖s Stanford Prison experiment, however, shows that such an ivo-

ry-tower psychology is necessarily based on a totalitarian psychologization of the ter-

rain surrounding the tower. It is here that Zimbardo takes Milgram‖s stance one step

further. Using the terms of Lacan‖s four discourses, Milgram‖s psychologizing question

“now that you know, how do you feel?” leaves the old master discourse—exemplified in

the authoritative figure in the lab coat—behind and opens the way for the university

discourse.35 Milgram‖s experiment does indeed concern obedience in that he shows or,

better, enacts how in late modernity one is called upon to subject him- or herself to the

psy-sciences. In this sense, the experiment can be understood as a dramatization of the

adoption of the psychologizing gaze. Zimbardo‖s experiment, then, is about what hap-

pens after this operation.

In the Stanford Prison experiment, psychology is not called upon to structure the

stage. From the very beginning the scene is set within the university discourse of psy-

chology itself. Zimbardo‖s advertisement ran: “male college students needed for psycho-

logical study of prison life.”36 There is no deception here. It was clear to everybody that

the experiment was about the psychological effects of being a prisoner or prison guard.

So while Milgram had his psychologizing debriefing moment, Zimbardo had his psycho-

32 O. Moorehead-Slaughter, "Ethics and national security," Monitor on Psychology 37, no. 4. 33 S. Soldz, "Healers or Interrogators: Psychology and the United States Torture Regime," See: . 34 A. S. Keller, "Torture in Abu Ghraib," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49, no. 4 (2006): 567. 35 J. Lacan, The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII: The other side of psychoanalysis. 36 C. Haney, C. Banks, and P. Zimbardo, "Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison," International Journal of

Criminology and Penology 1(1973): 73; my emphasis.

logical prebriefing. He divided his group of volunteers at random into prisoners and

guards and gave the latter group a so-called guard orientation. Zimbardo told them that

it was up to them to produce the “required psychological state in the prisoners.”37 But

while this has been critiqued by many authors, it is somewhat surprising that none of

them came to see that the subjects are thus asked to take the role of the experimenter.38

This is what the Stanford Prison experiment shares with the Milgram experiment. The

difference is that with Milgram the assignment of roles is based on deception. Milgram‖s

experiments, therefore, do not concern role play. The naive subject performs an as-

signment but remains very much himself. It is only with the disclosure that he or she is

exposed as having been playing a double role. With Zimbardo things are all out in the

open. Not only is it clear who is playing which part, but, before this, it is made explicit

that role play is taking place. The essence of role play is that it leans on a staged lucidity

within a redoubled role; Zimbardo‖s students are not instructed to play guard, they are

instructed to play a psychologist who is pretending to be a guard. The Stanford Prison

was, thus, fully staffed with guard-psychologists, with Zimbardo himself joining the

crew in the role of superintendent. Does this not prefigure the mechanisms at work in

Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib—showing how the discourses of power and psychology

have already joined forces? In the words of one of Zimbardo‖s student-prisoners, Zim-

bardo‖s mock prison was the first “prison run by psychologists.”39 We thus move from

Milgram‖s script to a general rehearsal.

With the naivete of psychology in mind, the brutal and sadistic scenes in Zimbardo‖s

experiment acquire a different meaning. Zimbardo, mistaking a totally psychologized

situation for the real thing, was convinced that he had laid bare “the crucible of human

behaviour.”40 A closer reading, however, allows us to understand the brutal and humili-

ating behavior in a different light. Dave Eshleman, the student who for his role as a bru-

tal guard was nicknamed John Wayne, proclaimed in an interview that the first day he

thought that nothing was really happening and “that in order for the experiment to get

any results... somebody had to start to push the action and I took it upon myself to do

so.” He even went so far as to say that he “was running a little experiment on [his]

own.”41 If we read this to the letter, we see that it is precisely in his identification with

the role of experimental psychologist that Eshleman engages in brutal and sadistic be-

havior. Eshleman has stated that he drew his inspiration from the fraternity hazing he

37 P. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: 41, 55; my emphasis. 38 M. Nussbaum, "Texts for torturers. From Stanford to Abu Ghraib - what turns ordinary people into

oppressors?."; P. Banyard, "Tyranny and the tyrant. Zimbardo's 'The Lucifer Effect' reviewed." 39 P. Zimbardo, "Quiet rage: The Stanford prison study video." 40 P. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: 169. 41 P. Zimbardo, "Quiet rage: The Stanford prison study video."

13

had just gone through. Hazing takes place in the absence, and thus against the back-

ground, of the agents of the authority. The central mechanism is the mimicking of that

authority, and in this way we could concur that hazing reveals the obscene underside,

the obscene surplus of that authority.42 In the case of Zimbardo this is the obscene sur-

plus of a psychology that naively assumes a metaperspective. Zimbardo‖s excuse for

having inflicted real pain on his subjects should be questioned. He has argued that he

got carried away and confused his dual roles of experiment leader and prison superin-

tendent. Considering that the doubling of roles is essential to the experiment, this can-

not but mean that Zimbardo got carried away in his role as psychologist. With his excuse of

having been carried away, the whole ambiguity of Zimbardo‖s position is that he has

more or less denounced his experimental setup but still claims he has laid bare the truth

of the human species in his experiment.

This is, of course, as it was with Milgram, strictly homologous to the structure of tor-

ture. With Zimbardo, however, another aspect becomes clear. When the scenario derails

and the players start to run amok, a perverse stance enters the experiment, not primari-

ly with the guards, but with Zimbardo himself, where he claims to behold the abyss of

humanity as it really is. Just consider how a certain pleasure or even jouissance is dis-

cernable with Zimbardo. In getting carried away, he transgresses all boundaries and

believes he has glimpsed what no mortal should: bare life. The gist of the Lacanian con-

cept of jouissance is that it is to be distinguished from mere pleasure; jouissance is what is

envisioned in a transgressive movement beyond the pleasure principle. For our purpos-

es, Zimbardo‖s exalted cry of having seen “the crucible of human behavior” should be

understood as a sign of jouissance within the framework of perversion. As the orgasm as

the ultimate instance of jouissance shows, in jouissance the subject disappears. The trick

of perversion, therefore, is to assume the place of the object of the jouissance of the Big

Other.43 That is where we find Zimbardo, as he seems able to withstand the painful gaze

of Medusa and still return to mortal life and considers his ordeal something that he has

to go through for the sake of science: “we are seeing things no one has witnessed before

in such a situation.”44 This idea of being the mere servant or instrument of a higher

cause—be it for the sake of science or to obtain information that can save the country—

links the Zimbardo experiment to torture practices via the paradigm of perversion. In

the case of Zimbardo, reducing oneself to an instrument of science is strictly homolo-

gous to the position of the pervert. As Lacan states, the pervert occupies the place of the

42 I here draw upon S. Žižek, The Parallax View: 368. 43 J. Lacan, The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: 185. One can further argue that Zimbardo‖s desire to

behold bare life might entail a core aim of sadism; through humiliation and pain the sadist seeks to lay bare

real life. 44 P. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: 169.

object for the benefit of another “for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic

pervert.”45

Thus the experiment is not about brutality as enacted by ordinary people or sadism

on the nightshift —an all-too-readily invoked argument in the case of Abu Ghraib—but,

rather, it is about perversion and jouissance as operative in psychology as a scientific

practice itself.46 Perhaps this is the shift at stake between Guantánamo and Abu Graib. In

Abu Ghraib the perpetrators were not part of the official interrogation team. They were

military police who were asked informally by military intelligence to prepare and “to

soften up” prisoners for interrogation.47 Just like Zimbardo‖s students, they quickly un-

derstood what was expected from them, and they reenacted and mimicked the official

enhanced interrogation techniques. The untrained MPs were thus neither involved in

sadism on the nightshift nor improvising or drawing upon their own allegedly natural sa-

distic impulses; rather they were acting out the military manual and its forms of torture,

which are the result of semiclandestine research on the part of the American intelli-

gence agencies in cooperation with the psy-sciences after World War II.48 What Abu

Ghraib reveals, as Žižek has remarked, is the dimension of jouissance involved in these

practices.49 If Guantánamo stands for the ordered use of torture (informed by psycholo-

gy), Abu Ghraib reveals the jouissance—the obscene underside and the perverse core—of

the methods informed by psychology.50

The shift from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib is in this way an echo of the shift from

Milgram to Zimbardo. Milgram attempted to deal with the horrors of the Nazi era, for it

was there that the Western world was confronted with the deadlock of modernity and

the Enlightenment project and the impotence of scientific discourse. Milgram‖s experi-

ment can, then, be understood as the departure from the master discourse and an at-

tempt to reground science within the university discourse, restaging, in the process, a

subject called upon to adopt the scientific gaze. Here Milgram‖s solution was to establish

psychology via the paradigm of psychologization itself. Zimbardo, however, is already in

the university discourse. Milgram constructs a scene and lets the subject believe it is

45 J. Lacan, The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: 185. 46 The sceptical reader, of course, will argue that this is where I myself engage in psychologising Zimbardo

through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. However, my argument is not rooted in an individual psycholo-

gy. I do not hold Zimbardo himself to be a pervert; rather, I argue that Zimbardo is laying bare a potentially

perverse dispositif, namely, that psychology assigns discursive positions according to the structural frame-

work of perversion. For more on the potential structural similarities between psychological discourse and

perversion, see: J. De Vos, "From La Mettrie‖s Voluptuous Man Machine to The Perverse Core of Psychology." 47 S. M. Hersh, Chain of Command. The road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 29. 48 A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books. 49 S. Žižek, "What Rumsfeld Doesn‖t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib." 50 Of course, there is no doubt that the ordered use of psychology was also prevalent in Abu Ghraib.

15

real to only later disclose the setup (where psychology turns out to provide the script

for not only the setup but also the subsequent analysis). Zimbardo similarly constructs a

scene but, unlike Milgram, he does not cover it up, but, rather, he assigns roles and then

takes what unfolds as though it were reality. In this way we can say that, if Milgram‖s

experiment boils down to the enactment of psychology via psychologization, then Zim-

bardo grounds this movement via a transgression in the name of the higher cause of

science, that is, in the supposed abyss of humankind. In Milgram‖s paradigm the auto-

genesis of psychology is laid bare for anyone to see, as it is founded on a mere loop.

Zimbardo attempts to consolidate and to legitimate this via a mythical heroic journey

into the underground of the Real of mankind. However, as I have argued, it is only then

that the potentially perverse core of psychology reveals itself. Psychology is not so

much a dangerous knowledge as it is a dangerous fantasy. In order to further our under-

standing of the entanglements of psychology and torture let us scrutinize these two

propositions one by one.

Psychology Is Not a Dangerous Knowledge

Mark Burton and Carolyn Kagan write that one should take a firm stance against organ-

ised psychology‖s participation in torture and interrogation but warn that this will not

affect “the influence of the security apparatus on North American psychology—itself the

hegemonic force in world psychology, and one that touches us all.”51 Indeed, one should

not underestimate North American psychology. Even when one should succeed in keep-

ing psychologists—the bad and the good—out of intelligence settings, psychology as a

theoretical framework would still be used and would thus still inform the interrogation

techniques and technologies. Are we thus led to the absurd conclusion that, in addition

to the interdiction against psychologists working for the military, there should be an

embargo on (a certain part of) the knowledge of psychology itself? But, of course, the

real issue at stake is the question of whether or not psychology really constitutes a criti-

cal and thus a dangerous knowledge

Working from Milgram and Zimbardo, this conclusion is to be doubted. For if one is

to maintain that they delivered sound scientific research and reliable knowledge, one

should ask whether they could have gathered this data in any way other than through

their transgressive experiments. The answer is clearly negative. Their findings cannot

be detached from the transgressive structure that produced them. Milgram‖s experi-

51 M. Burton and C. Kagan, "Psychologists and torture: more than a question of interrogation," The Psychologist

20, no. 8 (2007): 487.

ment would be impossible without the deception and the inherent humiliation that are

close to the structure of torture itself. Zimbardo‖s experiment needs the enacted trans-

gression (Eshleman becoming the brutal and sadistic John Wayne) to lead to the unveil-

ing of the so-called crucible of human behavior. Milgram and Zimbardo‖s experiments

are not about a dangerous knowledge that might potentially be misused; rather, they

are performances of a technology of conduct posing as science. They do not deliver the

theoretical framework or modern techniques for torture but, rather, its rationale—its

practical framework—precisely in their claim to have discovered a knowledge that

should be prohibited from being used for foul ends. It is this construction of an illusion

that is the most dangerous aspect of both Milgram and Zimbardo‖s experiments.

One should thus pose a simple question: has psychology “improved” torture? Has it

brought new and more effective forms of torture? Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist who

has acted as a consultant to, among other agencies, the Canadian Department of Nation-

al Defence and NASA, has his doubts: “Psychology as a discipline appears to have played

no verifiable role in the development of torture techniques.... There does not seem to be

much that psychologists could add, or have added, to the tools already at hand.”52

Maybe Suedfeld has a point here. Considering the outcome of scientifically informed

torture resulting from the CIA-sponsored “Manhattan project of the mind,” as McCoy

calls it, one is inclined to say that the harvest has been quite poor.53 At most, torture has

become a bit less bloody as the focus has been to leave no marks, and perhaps this is the

most concise way to describe psychological torture. As Patel contends, the distinction

between physical and psychological torture is artificial.54 This could also be understood

as pointing to the fact that, when considered in the context of the traditional arsenal of

torture, psychologists have not invented a single new method. At most, psychologists

have helped systematize torture, a point supported by the Red Cross report on Guantá-

namo that stresses the formalization and the systematization of interrogation tech-

niques.55 The psychologization of torture furthermore served as the legalistic coup de

theatre of the Bush administration. Torture was redefined as any practice leading to

organ failure or death, and this opened the way for enhanced interrogation tech-

niques.56 Psychology here becomes an ideal partner in this newspeak operation. The

first step in a critique, therefore, is to expose and deconstruct the very concept of psy-

52 P. Suedfeld, "Psychologists as victims, administrators, and designers of torture," in Psychology and Torture, ed.

P. Suedfeld (New York: Hemisphere, 1990), 105. 53 A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books:

7. 54 See: N. Patel, "Torture, psychology, and the ―war on terror‖: a human rights framework." 55 N. A. Lewis, "Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo," The New York Times, November 30 2004. 56 A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books:

123.

17

chological torture and state that psychology only provided the systematization and re-

finement of torture techniques. For if one concedes that psychologists have valuable

knowledge that can be misused, then psychologists are de facto not guilty. This is the

stance of Suedfeld: “If torturers use dental drills on healthy teeth, this does not imply

that researchers and practitioners who develop, improve, and use such drills in the

course of ethical dental practice should feel guilty.”57

For Patel, this fundamentally obscures the ethical responsibility of psychologists and

their legal obligation not to support or be complicit in any acts of torture.58 Jack Vernon,

conducting similar research on sensory deprivation as Donald Hebb, contends that

“while our goal is pure knowledge for its own sake, we have no objection to someone‖s

use of that knowledge.”59 Does this celebration of neutral knowledge not sound rather

hollow? As noted above, it is precisely the claim to be merely serving science that drives

psychology into the perverse structure. In this light, locking someone up and depriving

him of any human interaction is a peculiar way of searching for neutral knowledge.

Even if one doubts the direct military involvement of academic psychologists engaged

in research on sensory deprivation, for example, does their ruthless objectifying and

technologizing of human subjects still not stand out? In less blunt terms, this desubjec-

tivizing stance is also present in mainstream psychology. Reading, for example, the

post-9/11 APA document “Combating Terrorism Responses from the Behavioral Scienc-

es,”60 one is struck by the ambitious psychosocial engineering and the eagerness of psy-

chologists to be involved in the war on terror.61

Psychology Is a Dangerous Fantasy

The fact that psychology is not a dangerous knowledge can help us to understand a

strange twist in the recent history of torture. U.S. intelligence, during the urgent period

following 9/11, devised their enhanced interrogation methods by reverse engineering

their programs that aimed to train their own personnel to resist coercive interrogation

57 P. Suedfeld, "Psychologists as victims, administrators, and designers of torture," 106. 58 See: N. Patel, "Torture, psychology, and the ―war on terror‖: a human rights framework." 59 J. Vernon, Inside the Black Room: Studies of Sensory Deprivation (London: Penguin Books, 1966). 60 APA, "Combatting terrorism: Responses from the behavioral sciences.,"(2004),

old.apa.org/ppo/issues/svignetteterror2.html. 61 If Vanessa Pupavac writes that in the perspective of international humanitarian policy the tendency is “to

treat war as the continuation of psychology as opposed to the earlier Clausewitzian model of war as the con-

tinuation of politics,” then Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib show us the true meaning of this (V. Pupavac, "War

on the Couch: the emotionology of the new international security paradigm," European journal of social theory 7,

no. 2 (2004): 156. In modernity war and torture are the continuation of psychology with the same means.

and torture. In both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, military personnel used techniques

based on the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) program that included

forced nudity, stress positions, isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, and ex-

haustion.62 The SERE program—designed to train U.S. special operations forces how to

evade capture and to resist breaking under torture—thus became the main inspiration

in devising enhanced interrogation techniques. The CIA put the two developers of the

original SERE program, psychologists James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in charge

of reverse engineering the tactics to use on detainees in the global war on terror. Mitch-

ell and Jessen were directly involved in training interrogators in brutal techniques, in-

cluding waterboarding.63 As such, we are here led to see the switch of the good use of

psychology based on a defensive patriotism to the deviant use of psychology based on

an offensive patriotism.

But this obscures the more fundamental question of why the U.S. intelligence ser-

vices needed the detour of the reverse engineering. Would this not be similar to devis-

ing biological weapons starting from an antiserum? Why not just use the real stuff? To

understand this, let us begin by taking a closer look at the SERE program. During SERE,

trainees are subjected to harsh and abusive treatment modelled upon the cold-war era

psychological torture techniques used by China, North Korea, and the former Soviet Un-

ion.64 However, with these forms of torture allegedly invented by the Communists, we

enter the misty realm of cold-war fantasy. McCoy points to the fact that the CIA inter-

preted the success of the public show trials in the USSR as demonstrating that the Sovi-

ets had discovered more subtle techniques than traditional physical torture, “including

psychosurgery, electroshock and psychoanalytic methods.”65 This engendered the myth

of so-called brainwashing and resulted in the CIA beginning to fund experimental psy-

chological research in order to give the U.S. an advantage in “brain warfare.”66 For ex-

ample, Irving L. Janis, arguing that the Communists had some special psychological

technique to effect false confessions, advised the CIA in 1949 to engage in a systematic

investigation of drugs, electric convulsive treatments, and other techniques for weaken-

ing the resistance of detainees to “duplicate the public confessions obtained in Soviet-

62 M. Benjamin, "The CIA's torture teachers. Salon. June 21, 2007,"(2007),

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/21/cia_sere/index.html. 63 K. Eban, "The War on Terror, Rorschach and Awe," Vanity Fair 2007. 64 B. Olson, S. Soldz, and M. Davis, "The ethics of interrogation and the American Psychological Association: A

critique of policy and process." 65 A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books:

23. 66 M. Welch, "The Re-Emergence of Torture in Political Culture: Tracking It‖s Discourse And Genealogy,"

Capítulo Criminológico 35, no. 4 (2007): 481.

19

dominated trials.”67 Dick Anthony contends further that the pseudoscientific theory of

brainwashing was also used as a propaganda device to combat communism. Brainwash-

ing was said to explain why some U.S. prisoners of war appeared to convert to com-

munism while imprisoned in Korea.68 Public announcements of the CIA‖s “battle against

Communist brain warfare” and several popular articles stoking public fears about mind

control thus ensured a place for the evil Communist Dr. Psy in the public imagination.69

So one should carefully untangle the knot of the enhanced torture techniques being

devised by reverse engineering the SERE program. U.S. intelligence did not go back to

enemy (Communist) forms of psychological torture, as has been claimed in the media,70

nor did the U.S. resort to alternatives developed in-house. Rather, the process of reverse

engineering makes it clear that the U.S. variant of psychological torture bypassed any

actual evidence from the mysterious forms of tortures supposedly used by the enemy. In

other words, the enhanced interrogation techniques have their foundations in what the

U.S. fantasized the enemy was capable of. And here psychology is the vehicle, the dis-

course in which the terms of the fantasy of Communist mind control were constructed.

In addition to serving a propagandistic function, the imagery of psychological torture

served as the basis for training soldiers to resist torture, which can be understood fore-

most, as Brad Olson contends, as a program to foster aggression and deindividuation in

U.S. soldiers, a sort of hazing that would make them more likely to kill in battle.71 In a

final turn of the screw, psychologists reverse engineered the fantasy to give psychologi-

cal torture a scientific rationale and a thorough systematization. Thus psychology does

not potentially fuel dangerous fantasies as much as it carries in its very core the dan-

gerous fantasy itself.

Evidence of this historical lineage can be seen in the recent disclosure of a chart that

systematizes the effects of coercive techniques (including sleep deprivation, prolonged

constraint, and exposure) used by military trainers at Guantánamo in 2002. The chart

was actually an excerpt from an article written in 1957 by the social scientist Albert D.

Biderman on forced false confessions by Communists.72 While Biderman‖s chart is noth-

ing more than the schematizing of interviews of U.S. prisoners of war who have been

67 A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books:

22-23. 68 D. Anthony, "Pseudoscience and minority religions: An evaluation of the brainwashing theories of Jean-

Marie Abgrall," Social justice research 12, no. 4 (1999): 421–56. 69 A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books:

24. 70 S. Shane, "China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo," The New York Times, 2 July 2008. 71 Olson, email to author, 25 Nov. 2008. 72 A. D. Biderman, "Communist attempts to elicit false confessions from Air Force prisoners-of-war," Bulletin of

the New York Academy of Medicine 33, no. 9 (1957): 616–25.

tortured, it has come to be known as Biderman‖s principles, a schematic protocol for the

implementation of psychological torture. Regarding torture in communist countries,

Lawrence Hinkle, Jr. and Harold Wolff, contemporaries of Biderman, are correct in a way

when they state:

...in no case is there reliable evidence that neurologists, psychiatrists, psycholo-

gists or other scientifically trained personnel have designed or participated in

these police procedures. There is no evidence that drugs, hypnosis or other devic-

es play any significant role in them. The effects produced are understandable in

terms of the methods used.73

The neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, indeed, were only brought in by the

U.S., with Hinkle, Wolff, and Biderman as the first. Drugs and hypnosis would follow lat-

er with, for example, the infamous psychological research of Ewan Cameron in Canada.74

What Biderman, Hinkle, and Wolff initiated was a mode of thought, that is, psychology

as a way of making understandable what they thought, inferred, and fantasized about

the Communist maltreatment of prisoners.

One should not underestimate the role of fantasy in the legitimization of torture.

Consider, for example, Antonin Scalia‖s defence of heavy-handed interrogation tactics

when referring to the popular TV series 24, where the protagonist Jack Bauer repeatedly

engages in torture in a ticking-time-bomb scenario. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles,”

Scalia said, “Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?”75 This ticking-time-bomb scenario, of

which Alan Dershowitz is the most well-known advocate,76 is refuted by many authors

for its high implausibility and the slippery slope risk it carries with it of legitimizing

torture in less clear-cut circumstances.77 What is so remarkable in Suedfeld‖s attempt to

defend the ticking-bomb scenario, then, is how determined he is to rescue the scenario

as such. Suedfeld accuses the opponents of the ticking-time-bomb argument of making

absolutist and simplistic arguments and a politicized bias, countering them with basical-

ly one argument: reality is more complex then you think. Suedfeld desperately tries to

rescue the scenario qua scenario, that is, the fantasy of a transgressive hero that does

the abhorrent dirty work for the better of mankind. “Having accepted that torture is a

73 H. G. Wolff and L. E. Hinkle, "The Methods of Interrogation and Indoctrination Used by the Communist State

Police," Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 33, no. 9 (1957): 609. 74 A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books:

42. 75 Quoted in: K. Eban, "The War on Terror, Rorschach and Awe." 76 A. M. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works (New Haven , CT Yale University Press, 2003). 77 See: M. Costanzo, E. Gerrity, and M. B. Lykes, "Psychologists and the use of torture in interrogations,"

Analyses of social issues and public policy 7, no. 1 (2007); D. M. Rejali, Torture and democracy (Princeton. N.J;:

Princeton University Press, 2007).

21

last resort, the pain of the tortured suspect may be less abhorrent than not doing every-

thing possible to save all those innocent lives.”78

Are we not led to the conclusion that wherever there is psychology there is a scenar-

io, a script, and thus a fantasy to be saved? To be clear, the suggestion is not that there

could somehow be a reality free of fantasy. This is exactly the reproach that can be

made of mainstream psychology; it claims to be able to assess the human being as it re-

ally is (in terms of neurotransmitters, evolutionary patterns, emotions, skills, brain are-

as, childhood traumas, cognitions, rapid eye movements, and so on). Here I endorse

Žižek‖s claim that it is not that we have the wrong idea of how things really are but, ra-

ther, that we have the wrong idea of how things are mystified.79 Mainstream social sci-

ence analyses may well be the material from which today‖s mystifying veils are made.

The centrality of the script and the fantasy of having access to the real thing—and how

this is disavowed—is exactly what we have learned from Milgram and Zimbardo, and it

is this that returns in the psychologized discourses of both the proponents and oppo-

nents of the involvement of psychology in interrogation.

If one fails to take this into account, one cannot avoid the paradox of torture being so

widely employed despite its ineffectiveness in obtaining reliable information. Recourse

to psychology once again forecloses a much needed political analysis. McCoy, for exam-

ple, ends his historical analysis quite disappointingly by attributing the persistence of

state-sponsored torture to “its deep psychological appeal, to the powerful and the pow-

erless alike, in times of crisis.”80 Hinkle and Wolff also resort to psychologizing explana-

tions that link the turn to torture to feelings of insecurity and the pressure to produce

speedy confessions.81 Similar psychologizing arguments have mentioned frustration and

desperation on the part of the interrogator.82 Other authors point to torture as a tool of

intimidation both on an individual level, in terms of the prisoners, and on a social level,

with torture as a policy that is seen to maintain social order by instilling a constant

threat within the population.83 Jerry Piven resorts to a psychoanalytically inspired psy-

chologization, asserting that neither Arendt (the banality of evil), Milgram (the obedi-

ence to authority), nor Zimbardo (the adoption of assigned roles) can account for the

78 P. Suedfeld, "Torture, Interrogation, Security, and Psychology: Absolutistic versus Complex Thinking,"

Analyses of social issues and public policy 7, no. 1 (2007): 60. 79 S. Žižek, "Ignorance of the Chicken, or, Why Many Lacanians Are Reactionary Liberals." 80 A. W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books:

207. 81 H. G. Wolff and L. E. Hinkle, "The Methods of Interrogation and Indoctrination Used by the Communist State

Police." 82 See: M. Costanzo, E. Gerrity, and M. B. Lykes, "Psychologists and the use of torture in interrogations." 83 See for example: D. M. Rejali, Torture and democracy; N. Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

(London: Penguin Books, 2007).

“fervor and excess of murder, genocide, or sadistic cruelty” in torture. To explain why

the U.S. persists in torture despite it being obviously ineffective, Piven engages in post-

Freudian interpretations, for example, by understanding perpetration as a strategy of

punishing and destroying loathsome aspects of the self projected onto the other. In this

way Piven passes from individual psychodynamics to a sociological level, arguing that

“this is why torture must be understood psychologically.”84 The fundamental error of

authors who psychologically interpret the question why torture? is that in so doing they

merely repeat the stance of the CIA. Both opponents and proponents share the same

fantasy, namely, that psychology allows direct access to human reality.

Psychology and Homo Sacer: The Matrix of (De)psychologization and (De)politicization

How then can we escape this endless psychologizing and come to a truly political as-

sessment?85 If psychology has a tendency to depoliticize and to swap the socioeconomic

level for the individual level and consequently to obliterate the material conditions of

existence and power imbalances, must we then, in response, leave the subjective dimen-

sion behind? Against this, considering distress as something personal might not neces-

sarily, as Ian Parker puts it, be a bad thing. Parker argues that we need to develop “a

response to social problems which works at the interface of the personal and the politi-

cal instead of pretending that society is something separate from us.”86 The unmistaka-

ble conclusion is that this link between subjectivity and politics is obscured or even neu-

tralized by the individualizing tendencies of mainstream psychology and psychologiza-

tion as its shadow. That is to say, repoliticizing this issue does not mean rejecting the

question of subjectivity. Quite the opposite. It means reinvigorating it.

This is my ultimate argument against the predictable objection that my use of La-

can—speaking of Zimbardo‖s jouissance and his being caught in the tricks of perversion—

does not escape the very psychologization it aims to criticize. For if psychoanalysis can

be called the mother of all psychologization—consider how Freudian terminology rapid-

84 J. S. Piven, "Terror, Sexual Arousal, and Torture: The Question of Obedience or Ecstasy among Perpetrators,"

Discourse of Sociological Practice 8, no. 1 (2007): 4, 10. 85 A possible solution would be to drop psychology and ascribe the homoerotic, misogynistic, and sadistic

tendencies involved in torture to the collaborating anthropologists, as it has become clear that U.S. intelli-

gence also drew upon scientific findings on the Arab mind (sexual taboos, fear of dogs, and so on). For an an-

thropological critique of the use of anthropology in this context, see J. K. Puar, "On Torture: Abu Ghraib,"

Radical History Review 2005, no. 93 (2005).. Then again, by anthropologizing the obscene dimension do we not,

at the same time, lose the political? 86 I. Parker, "Deconstructing diagnosis: psychopathological practice," in Controversies in Psychotherapy and

Counselling, ed. C. Feltham (London: Sage, 1999), 104.

23

ly found its way into everyday life—this accords it the position of privileged partner, the

one that can take psychologization seriously, in contrast to mainstream psychology,

which structurally has to obscure the fact that its central paradigm is that of psycholo-

gization. In this way, a Lacanian approach to the late modern subject as the psychologi-

cal-psychologized doublet can make it possible to resuscitate the entanglement of sub-

jectivity with politics.

To explore this, and finally answer the question of why psychologists were the last to

leave Guantánamo, let us consider Giorgio Agamben‖s analysis of Guantánamo. Agam-

ben‖s notion of homo sacer attempts to critically amend Michel Foucault‖s notion of bio-

politics. Foucault argued that at a certain point in history the era of discipline came to

an end and the era of biopolitics began. Biological life as such began to be drawn into

the sphere of politics, becoming the subject of knowledge on which power could be ex-

erted. In biopolitics, power takes life itself and exploits it.87 For Foucault this was the

end of sovereignty, as power was no longer strictly localizable; power is now every-

where and comes from everywhere.88 Agamben‖s point, however, is that sovereignty and

the sovereign use of power is still apparent in biopolitics and argues that the exception-

ality of sovereign power—the fact that the law by definition has to ground itself in a

point beyond the law—rests upon a similar exceptional state at the other end of the

power spectrum.89 The included/excluded sovereign is structurally in need of an equally

included/excluded counterpart. Agamben situates homo sacer and what he calls bare life

as this counterpart. In Roman law a person who was declared homo sacer was a person

banished in terms of law and religion; anyone could kill him or her with impunity and

he or she could neither be sacrificed nor buried according to religious rituals. Thus homo

sacer is reduced to bare life. For Agamben, the turn to biopolitics means that homo sacer,

from a position on the margin, becomes the central object of power as bare life becomes

the focus of government. It is this logic of the juxtaposition of sovereign power and ho-

mo sacer that, for Agamben, was at work in the Bush administration. On the one hand,

there are the detainees of Guantánamo. Labelled unlawful combatants, they are homines

sacri—outside the law—or, as Agamben has said in an interview, they are subject only to

raw power while having no legal existence.90 On the other hand, there is George W.

Bush‖s position of not having to answer for alleged human rights violations when it

came to such prisoners. He is the figure of the sovereign who, just like homo sacer, is out-

87 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 142–43. 88 See: ibid., 93. 89 G. Agamben, Homo sacer. 90 G. Agamben, "Interview with Giorgio Agamben - Life, A Work of Art Without an Author: The State of

Exception, the Administration of Disorder and Private Life‖, Ulrich Raulff (interviewer)," German Law Journal 5,

no. 5 (2004).

side of the law. Homo sacer is a nonperson under the law; the sovereign transcends the

law.

Here the echo of Zimbardo‖s experiment cannot but strike us. The central issue of the

Stanford Prison experiment is precisely the power of psychology to reveal the “crucible

of human behavior.” Zimbardo claims to lay life bare as it is—in Agamben‖s terms, “pure

life, without any mediation.” This is why psychology serves Guantánamo and other ex-

traterritorial black sites so well. The psy-sciences are the tools that remove the media-

tion; they deliver the technologies to reduce someone to bare life: “Insofar as its inhab-

itants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp

was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power

confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation.”91

While Agamben focuses on the implications of medical discourses, Guantánamo re-

veals the central role of psychology as delivering the tools to strip down the subject and

reduce him or her to bare life. Military interrogators not only had access to the medical

records of detainees but also to psychological data, such as comments by psychologists

on conditions such as phobias.92 Thus psychologization as depoliticization is not only at

work in the critiques of torture but is already evident at the torture sites themselves.

From political subject, the detainee is reduced to an individualized psychological subject

(regardless of whether this makes the person disclose information, simply humiliates

him or her, or scares other detainees or the wider population).

However, Agamben‖s analysis poses two problems. As Agamben‖s notion of homo sacer

attempts to come to an understanding of the current aporia of democracy, his main ar-

gument is that we are all potentially homines sacri. Here two things remain unclear. First,

there is the question concerning the way in which we are all potentially homines sacri—

as most examples given by Agamben (and his commentators) concern homo sacer as a

peripheral figure and do not address the fact that everyone is, or can become, homo

sacer. Second, it is not clear how exactly we should think sovereignty in the new global

order. If the Guantánamo detainee can be connected in a straightforward way to the

American president, it remains unclear how, distinct from this, we should think of sov-

ereignty in the case of all of us being potentially homines sacri. Maybe Lacan‖s notion of

the discourse of the university can help, as it shows how knowledge itself can take the

place of the agent in a discourse or, in Agamben‖s terms, how knowledge can take the

place of the sovereign. Academia—particularly psychological discourse—has come to

play an increasingly important role in processes of power. Consider how the psy-

complex more and more often poses as the sovereign, transcending the law and politics

91 G. Agamben, Homo sacer: 171. 92 See: P. Slevin and J. Stephens, "Detainees‖ Medical Files Shared. Guantanamo Interrogators‖ Access Criticized.

," The Washington Post, 10 June 2004.

25

and exerting a parapolitical power. We can see examples of the psy-complex claiming

jurisdiction concerning suburban riots, political scandals, pedophilia cases (see the case

of Marc Dutroux in Belgium), terrorist attacks, and so on in which the psy-perspective

supposedly transcends all contradictions, ideological divisions, and societal ruptures,

and the psy-experts partake in the decisions and—without any democratic legitima-

tion—set policies. Lacan, commenting on the events of May ‖68, claimed that we were

witnessing a hegemonic shift from the master discourse to the discourse of the universi-

ty.93 Psychological discourse‖s central role in this shift must be discerned. It is exactly

here that we are all potentially homines sacri insofar as we become the object of the ex-

pert, caretaking, psychologizing discourse that produces and expropriates our subjec-

tivity. Post-Fordism is thus not—as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt would have it—

about the simple and direct production of subjectivity and social relations.94 Today our

subjectivity and social relations are monitored, controlled, and managed as we find psy-

workers everywhere from kindergartens, through the workplace, right up to retirement

homes. This is what the involvement of psychology in torture shows: the obscene truth

of the supposedly spontaneous production of social relations and subjectivity in the

West is the blunt psychologized production of bare life at the borders and in the folds of

Empire.

With Milgram and Zimbardo we have already seen how psychology constitutes itself

in a desubjectivization and, thus, a depsychologization of the subject.95 Processes of psy-

chologization are always processes of depsychologization. Just think of how psychologi-

cal explanations in contemporary mainstream psychology make way for biological and

neurological paradigms. In this sense, panpsychologization leads to depsychologiza-

tion.96 It is hard, then, to dismiss Cameron‖s CIA-funded “psychic driving” experiments—

the erasing of a person‖s memory using electroshocks, chemicals, sensory deprivation,

and the consequent attempt to rebuild the psyche—as a mere anomaly of psychological

science.97 The experiment can be regarded as paradigmatic of a discourse in its entan-

93 See:J. Lacan, The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII: The other side of psychoanalysis. 94 M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire. 95 This makes psychology the very tool to effect Theodor Adorno‖s depsychologization. For Adorno, depsy-

chologized man is the subject as mere effect of administrated modern life, that is, fully determined by the

logic of technorationality instead of the Oedipal father figure who was responsible for the psychological pro-

file of premodern man; see T. W. Adorno, "Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda," 132. 96 See J. De Vos, "From Panopticon to Pan-psychologisation." Even the psy-discourses that try to bypass the

neurobiological framework end up depsychologizing the subject. Žižek, for example, writes that the psycholo-

gization of social life—the psychological manuals, the Oprah Winfrey style of public confession, politicians

disclosing their emotionality—is but “the mask . . . of its exact opposite, of the growing disintegration of the

proper ―psychological‖ dimension of authentic self-experience” S. Žižek, The art of the ridiculous sublime: on David

Lynch's Lost highway (Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000), 32. 97 D. E. Cameron, "Psychic driving," The American Journal of Psychiatry 112, no. 7 (1956).

glement with power. Psychology seems to take a central role as a discourse and praxis in

the late modern biopolitical production of bare life, the included/excluded, psycholo-

gised/depsychologized, politicized/depoliticized homo sacer. It is due to the privileged

place of this matrix in late modern politics that psychology was the last man standing in

the black sites of U.S. intelligence.

Conclusions

Guantánamo will soon be closed down—perhaps in the logic of the limited hangout.

Zimbardo has recently expressed his hope that the APA will now have learned their les-

son and that the APA ethical guidelines will become the standard not only for its mem-

bers but for psychologists around the world.98 This vision of global expansion can only

prompt us to state, paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz, that psychology is the continua-

tion of war by other means. It becomes clear on which front this war will be fought

when considering Ronald F. Levant. Levant was the APA president who authorized the

much contested Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security

(PENS), which eventually blocked any opposition to the involvement of psychologists in

U.S. intelligence operations.99 Levant‖s summarization of his presidency, “Making Psy-

chology a Household Word,” sounds rather cynical in the light of how psychology was

spread worldwide with the help of U.S. intelligence.100 The article echoes former APA

president George Miller‖s plea in 1969 to “give psychology away” and his claim for “psy-

chology as a means of promoting human welfare.”101 Later Miller described the experi-

ments of Milgram and Zimbardo as “ideal for public consumption of psychological re-

search.”102 Indeed, the two are seminal experiments; not only were they broadly dissem-

inated into the public imaginary, but our analysis has also revealed them to be paradig-

matic examples of the usability of psy-technology in producing the included/excluded,

psychologized/depsychologized homo sacer. Levant subtitles his conclusion “The Stage Is

98 P. Zimbardo, "Thoughts on psychologists, ethics, and the use of torture in interrogations: Don't ignore

varying roles and complexities," 73. 99 For critiques see: S. Soldz, "Healers or Interrogators: Psychology and the United States Torture Regime."; F.

Summers, "Psychoanalysis, the American Psychological Association, and the involvement of psychologists at

Guantanamo Bay." 100 R. F. Levant, "Making psychology a household word." 101 G. A. Miller, "Psychology as a means of promoting human welfare," 1071, 63. 102 P. Zimbardo, C. Maslach, and C. Haney, "Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis,

Transformations," in Obedience to authority: Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm, ed. T. Blass (Mahwah

(N.J.): Erlbaum, 2000), 208.

27

Set”—a theatrical metaphor that once again suggests that the core business of the main-

stream discourse of psychology concerns the scripting of subjectivity.

How totalitarian the hegemony of this psychological discourse is—and where its ob-

scene kernel is revealed—can be witnessed in the CIA‖s Kubark manual. The interroga-

tion manual opens with the remark that it is no longer possible to discuss interrogation

meaningfully without reference to psychological research. The total grip of this vision

becomes clear when the manual suggests how to deal with detainees who fake psychiat-

ric or psychological disturbances:

Under the influence of appropriate drugs the malingerer will persist in not speak-

ing or in not remembering, whereas the symptoms of the genuinely afflicted will

temporarily disappear. Another technique is to pretend to take the deception se-

riously, express grave concern, and tell the “patient” that the only remedy for his

illness is a series of electric shock treatments or a frontal lobotomy.103

The force of Klein‖s The Shock Doctrine lies in situating the totalitarian grip of psy-

discourse on a global political and economic level. Klein sees a parallel between personal

psychology and politics insofar as the way a person reacts to traumatic experiences is

similar to the way a whole population reacts. Klein thus connects Milton Friedman‖s

doctrine of using the opportunity of a crisis to install ultraliberal market capitalism to

the “shock and awe” doctrine of warfare and the CIA-funded experiments in electro-

shock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s: “The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the

pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies much as the blaring music and blows

in the torture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the

names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they

would otherwise fiercely protect.”104 The so-called Chicago Boys thus wait for the mo-

ment that a population is “psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted” to start

their work of remaking the world. Klein recognizes in these strategies the similarity

with Cameron‖s “psychic driving” experiments.105 The problem with Klein‖s argument is

that, in the end, she fails to produce a political explanation as to how these connections

between the individual and the social are to be understood, relying too heavily on the

psychology of trauma to do the explaining for her, which leaves her at risk of psycholo-

gizing both politics and the economy. Friedman‖s shock doctrine is not to be explained

along psychological lines; rather, it is more likely that it is itself indebted to psychologi-

cal imagery. The Chicago Boys‖ imagery and their idea of producing bare life in order

then to re-create society anew along ultraliberal lines is close to Zimbardo‖s fantasy of

103 CIA, "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual". 102. 104 N. Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: 17. 105 Ibid., 21.

the “crucible of life.” Klein writes that Friedman relied on the fact that the speed, sud-

denness, and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the

public that would “facilitate the adjustment.”106 But if we look at Friedman‖s actual

words we see that the stress is actually put on informing the public: “The more fully the

public is informed, the more will its reactions facilitate the adjustment.”107 Thus Fried-

man was not exactly concerned with the psychological reactions in the public but, ra-

ther, with their education, that is, with allowing the public to believe that financial and

socioeconomic reforms are necessary to prevent further disasters. Klein misses the fact

that the link between Friedman and the psy-sciences lies here and not in the real psy-

chology of real traumas and real shocks. Friedman understood that changing minds is

an educational business, just as Miller understood that it is necessary for psychology to

give itself away. There is, we might say, no psychology without educating the people in

the ways of psychology. Psychology has to pass through the process of psychologization.

This is why the Kubark manual, in introducing the psychological as the backbone of in-

terrogation, must explicitly and repeatedly evoke psychology as its supporting science.

This is exactly what the Milgram experiment shows: psychology is grounded in the im-

position of the psychological gaze.

To understand the unacknowledged paradox of this, let us in conclusion return to the

APA document “Combatting Terrorism Responses from the Behavioral Sciences.” The

document presents so-called vignettes that present a problem connected to societal is-

sues after 9/11, provides examples of relevant research, and then proposes implications

and applications for counterterrorism. The text abounds with expressions such as “hu-

mans are,” “the human language is,” and “what is known of human behavior.” Does this

not suggest a discursive position beyond the human, one that looks at humanity as

though peering into a human zoo? It is as if in late modernity one is condemned to look

at oneself and the world from the outside, as if we have lost the very capacity to look at

ourselves and the world from within the set. As such, the imposition of the psychologi-

cal gaze in psychoeducation engenders a strange paradox. If everyone is drawn onto the

side of psychology, then the cages of the human zoo cannot but remain empty.

This would be good news, as we could then emancipate ourselves from this gaze that

only offers us prepsychological reflections and specters of the human. A postmodern

metareflexive gaze that sees us as zoon psychologicon would be one way out. But this may

not be enough, for what Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib have shown us is that our Western

psychologized gaze is based on the Real of the effective and existing cages of the homines

sacri. Hegemonic discourses feed on real people and natural objects. If we fail to con-

106 Ibid., 7. 107 M. Friedman and R. Friedman, Two lucky people: Memoirs (Chicago: Chicago University Press., 1999), 592.

29

front the Real of this horror of psychological torture, we will soon find ourselves at the

next stage, which will no doubt be neurotorture.108 This new Manhattan Project of the

mind is most likely already up and running in the laboratories.

108 Žižek has already alluded to “the direct stimulating of the brain centers for pain”, S. Žižek, The Puppet and

the Dwarf: 76.