In this article I will describe briefly how psychoanalytically informed thinking guided me through my struggle with the role of the American Psychological Association (APA) in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers.
Shortly after the attacks on New York and Washington of September 11, 2001, the American Psychological Association convened a Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) to consider the ethics of psychologist involvement in interrogation of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other such centers. The PENS Task Force report, while disavowing any role for psychologists in torturing detainees during interrogations, supported a critical role for psychologists in carrying out interrogations in detention centers where human rights and international law were being violated. Concurrently, the APA's Ethics Committee revised the organization's Ethics Code in such a way as to allow for psychologists to act in accord with what is required by their organizational employers, even when such actions are in violation of the overall Ethics Code. Ethical principle 1.02 thus effectively disabled the
Neil Altman, Ph.D., is faculty at the William Alanson White Institute and Ambedkar University of Delhi. He is editor emeritus of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and author of The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens.
entire Ethics Code in cases where it conflicted with employer directives. Crucially, among the employers concerned were the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
U.S. psychology, especially clinical psychology, has a long history of collaboration with the military and the CIA. Clinical psychology, as documented by Frank Summers in 2008, originated in the U.S. military. The APA has consistently cultivated relationships with government at all levels in its efforts to promote the economic and political interests of psychologists. At the same time, the APA presented itself as a guardian of the public interest and a promoter of the highest standards of ethical behavior on the part of psychologists. Ethical principle 1.02 seemed to make it clear when ethics collided with economic and political self-interest, the latter would prevail.
The SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) was intended to train U.S. military personnel, if captured by enemy forces, to resist abusive interrogation techniques. This program included simulated torture to train soldiers to resist techniques, such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and overload, intended to force them to reveal critical information. Some psychologists, building on their knowledge of these techniques of torture, trained interrogators in detention centers to apply them in their interrogations.
In the years following 9/11, the Bush administration justified the use of such techniques, referring to them as “enhanced” interrogation methods. Former attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, stated international law and conventions that banned these techniques, such as the Geneva Conventions, were “antiquated.” The psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jensen of Mitchell Jensen and Associates, were employed by the U.S. government to consult on the use of enhanced methods of interrogation. A case in point was the role of psychologist John Leso, who planned and directed the interrogation of Mohammed Al-Qahtani at Guantanamo Bay.
Al-Qahtani was suspected of being the “twenty-second” plane hijacker on September 11, 2001, who was allegedly unable to take part in the attacks because he was denied entry to the U.S. He was later picked up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay. He was never tried for any crime because the military prosecutor assigned to the case said the evidence against him was invalid, having been obtained by interrogations involving torture planned and directed, as stated above, by John Leso, an APA member.
A complaint was filed against Leso years later with the Ethics Committee of APA. In 2014, the Ethics Committee declined to take any action against Leso, stating (evidently referring to ethical principle 1.02) Leso's actions were not unethical at the time they were undertaken. The Ethics Committee later revised the Ethics Code and eliminated principle 1.02 after a referendum of the membership required the APA to oppose the presence of psychologists at detention centers such as Guantanamo Bay. Meanwhile, Al-Qahtani remains indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, unable to be convicted or freed because he was tortured, while Leso goes unsanctioned because the torture he directed was not considered unethical at the time, though it would have been so considered in years prior to and following the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Clinical psychology, as documented by Frank Summers in 2008, originated in the U.S. military.
Psychoanalytic psychologists were in the forefront of the movement to convince APA to take a position against psychologists working at detention centers in the years following 9/11. I served on the Council of Representatives, the governing body of APA during six of those years, during which I proposed a resolution calling for a moratorium on psychologist involvement at Guantanamo Bay. I was surprised both by the consistent support of my psychoanalyst colleagues on the council, and the lack of support among the great majority of other council members, including those who generally took positions in favor of human rights. In the end, some of my psychoanalytic colleagues who were not members of the council succeeded in obtaining a referendum of all APA members calling on the leadership of APA to impose the kind of moratorium I, and a few colleagues, had been trying unsuccessfully to get the council to approve.
I was guided in my political efforts to a great extent by psychoanalytic principles, specifically the Kleinian notions of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. The paranoid-schizoid position is a psychological state in which good and bad are sharply differentiated. The depressive position is one of ambiguity in which good and bad are intertwined. Guilt arises in the depressive position, as one recognizes and takes responsibility for the badness in oneself. Critically, these are not developmental stages; one is not more mature than the other. They are positions; one goes back and forth between them.
In my paranoid-schizoid moments, the APA was simply bad for its support of government-sponsored torture. In my depressive position moments, I could understand and identify with the self-interest that underlay the wish to cooperate with the “powers that be” in the government, as well as the fear and rage that led to the urge to retaliate and torture. I could identify with the impulse to torture, while not approving, indeed strongly disapproving. As a result I strove to take a strong position against psychologist participation at Guantanamo Bay, while remaining linked psychologically, and thus able to dialogue with, my colleagues who opposed my position.
Working in this way from the inside of the APA system, I was unable to effect the kind of change my colleagues, working from outside the council, were able to accomplish. After leaving the council, I cast my lot with the paranoid-schizoid position and resigned from APA. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer of this article for pointing out that in the depressive position, in which one experiences other people, as well as oneself, as containing both good and bad, one expects others to experience guilt for their own badness. This helped me to understand better why I often retreat from the more “hard line” positions of some of my colleagues about APA's involvement with torture. The rationalization by APA officials of APA's position seemed to deny guilt. Some of my colleagues seemed to me to be trying to force guilt onto these officials, which I thought only made APA take a more defensive position.
I find myself most in agreement with Slavoj Zizek who wrote in the “London Review of Books,” in 2004, that he could resonate with the impulse to torture; the problem as he saw it was the effort to avoid the associated guilt. A one-dimensional paranoid-schizoid position gives rise to the idea that torture serves the forces of good against evil, thus giving no cause for guilt. Adding the depressive position to the mix, one notes as one engages with those thought to terrorize, one is drawn to terrorize.
For me, an essential psychoanalytic contribution is the insight that in efforts to solve a problem, one first becomes the problem, as it were. In psychoanalysis, the analyst must become the pathogenic object in order to lay that ghost to rest, according to Hans Loewald. In politics, as in psychoanalysis, it makes all the difference if one is able to observe and think about this process, ceaselessly striving to extricate oneself from entanglements that seem to replicate the problems one intends to remedy, ceaselessly and inadvertently entering into new ones.