Psychoanalysis and Human Rights
Steven Reisner on politics, theater, and ending psychologists’ complicity in torture
By Austin Ratner
Illustration by Austin Hughes
Steven Reisner is a psychologist, political activist, and writer who helped force the American Psychological Association to ban therapists’ involvement in torture and covered the 2024 presidential election from a psychoanalytic perspective in a series of articles for Slate. Austin Ratner spoke with him during the leadup to the election.
Austin Ratner: I share your interest in political messaging for socially just causes. Appealing to unconscious emotions and associations in political discourse continues to be used by right-wing politics in our country. On the left there is, oftentimes, what strikes me as emotionally unintelligent messaging that is data-driven and leaves emotion totally out of it.
Steven Reisner: People who use psychoanalytic insights very often do it for manipulative purposes rather than for purposes of helping people tolerate complexity while aligning with the true and the good. Therapy once was this idea that one had to learn to tolerate the troubling, complicated, and painful aspects of one’s experience to be able to have some personal and social growth and to be able to live a complex life and still make decent choices based on experience and a compassionate view of the world. That is a process that takes time and effort and is painful. And we live in a society where what is capitalized on is helping people believe they can avoid pain and maximize a certain kind of pleasure. I think this comes from medicine. The focus is that you’re supposed to get rid of the symptom, and if you’re feeling bad, that’s a symptom. Rather than: There are very often good reasons to feel bad, and you have to experience feeling bad in order to understand what’s happening and what you can really do about it.
What happens in politics is that people are invited to regress, to become children, to complain about their suffering. And everybody sympathizes with this idea, especially in America today, that if you have a bad experience, you weren’t supposed to have it, that it’s an injustice, that it’s unfair and something’s supposed to make it better very quickly. Psychoanalysis takes the same information but offers a different solution. That is the solution of what you can learn from embracing the complexity of harsh experience without rushing to polarize, to blame, to regress, to get rid of it. That’s the psychoanalytic process. The basic essence of psychoanalysis is that if you allow true free association to take place or if you pay attention to your dreams, the human organism, which is adept at denial, also has a mechanism where the denied information is brought to the surface so it can be integrated, even if it’s painful. Psychoanalysis is based on that premise: that most people will seek health and integration at least at night, in their dreams, or when they’re relaxed on the couch—that this will rise to the surface and make their lives richer, more complex, and that in doing this people will become more in touch with their humanity and other people’s humanity, with the fact that we all are fallible, suffering creatures who are trying the best we can.
We have politicians on both sides of the aisle who are promising quick solutions to suffering, and we have a world, especially these days, that is in significant ways coming apart. And so people are increasingly anxious in America for two major reasons. There’s the traditional reason, which is economic inequality, which is very severe and was severe in this way a couple of times in the past, and it always ended badly. But we also have the impact of the changing climate. In one of my pieces, I said that 50 percent of Americans have experienced in the past year or two some severe weather event that was unexpected and had an effect on their lives. That is getting worse and worse, and nobody is actually inviting Americans to acknowledge the reality and be willing to suffer whatever it takes to mitigate it—to accept that this is happening, that the bad effects are already there, that they can either get worse or they can be less worse. But it requires people doing something that wasn’t a dirty word, but it is now, and that is sacrifice. People really have to be willing to give certain things up in their fantasy of their lifestyles, and no politician believes they can get elected if they advocate for any kind of genuine sacrifice, especially because most of the voters are struggling. In France the Yellow Vest slogan was, “You talk about the end of the world. We talk about the end of the month.” The truth is there has to be a huge reckoning to deal with this, and no politician is willing to do this.
We have a level of anxiety in society in America, where people are working harder than ever, not guaranteed healthcare, not able to pay for their houses or rent or if they get sick or whatever. You can’t ask them to sacrifice unless you have a huge program that makes sense and takes all of this into account and a philosophy of life that includes thinking about the next generations, etcetera, etcetera. Somebody has to be very wise and very experienced and worldly and serious and introduce that psychoanalytic idea that we have to be willing to experience pain before we know how to make it less painful—or better, to make it meaningful. That’s a psychoanalytic idea that politics and corporate profits mitigate against. And that’s the struggle we’re in.
I am trying to introduce little tastes of tolerating the difficult reality in each article by doing two things. One is identifying processes that might be helpful and letting the good people capitalize on those. I’m looking at what I call the archetypes, the psychological relationships that can be played on. I made the argument in the first article that [in politics], like in psychoanalysis, you want to use the transference, but you also want to eventually bring it to consciousness so that it can be dissolved, and that what you learn during the dependent transference moment can be used for good. So if you’re going to rely on a politician as a parent, you want to know what kind of parent that is, and then you want to be able to internalize being a good parent yourself. That’s the shorthand of what I’m trying to do, one article at a time. In each one I try to focus on some very basic psychoanalytic concepts to either help the Democratic Party move forward, aligning with what’s real and what’s good, or inoculating people against being manipulated in terms of what’s evil. So in Walz versus Vance, I tried to clarify the difference between the death drive or pleasure of destruction versus the pleasure of bringing humans together and uniting. I try to make it sexy by including sexuality in Eros. Walz doesn’t seem to have the ability to make his own message sexier. His message is great, but he doesn’t seem to be able to make it inclusively sexy for this population I think he could reach.
AR: How did you come to train in psychoanalysis?
SR: I was sort of the therapist in my family. I come from a family of Holocaust survivors and always as a young child felt like there was a huge world, a huge emotional world that either I didn’t have access to or I felt overwhelmed by, depending on whether my mother was the focus or my father. In my autograph book from graduating primary school when it said, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wrote “psychiatrist.” I was 11. So I had this idea that I wanted to be a psychoanalyst from very early on.
[While in graduate school for clinical psychology] I went and heard Martin Bergmann speak and realized that this is the man I wanted to be in analysis with. People say that Martin, during his day, trained at least a third of the psychoanalysts in New York in one way or another. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Woody Allen’s movie Crimes and Misdemeanors. Woody Allen plays a documentary filmmaker, and he’s making a film of, like, a Primo Levi character. And the person who plays the Primo Levi character is Martin.
He was quite well known at the time, and I was totally intimidated. But I heard him speak and I made an appointment to see him. I thought he only saw the rich and famous people, but I went into analysis with him. And meanwhile I was working in a hospital and I started my own practice and was writing. I did my dissertation on the space between Freud’s theories and Freudian theory and how it got that way. And then there came a point when I said to Martin, “Maybe I should go into psychoanalytic training,” and Martin said, “Haven’t you been infantilized enough?” And he said, “You know, you are as much of a psychoanalyst as anybody. You just have to decide when you’re going to call yourself a psychoanalyst.”
At that point I had had so much psychoanalytic supervision, and I had done so much psychoanalytic study, and I had been in analysis with Martin four times a week for some time. He not only treated me psychoanalytically, but I would bring my difficult patients to him sometimes. And so he kind of supervised me as well. At some point I just decided I was a psychoanalyst, and nobody except the American [Psychoanalytic Association] has had any difficulty with that. I can tell you my experience with institutes has not been great. I find just about every institute to be problematic in terms of how soul-killing they tend to be of their candidates. So I think I was very lucky to have navigated my own entry into psychoanalysis the way I did.
Somebody has to … introduce that psychoanalytic idea that we have to be willing to experience pain before we know how to make it less painful—or better, to make it meaningful.
AR: You played a big role in getting the American Psychological Association to ban psychologists from participating in CIA interrogations that involved psychological torture. How did you come to political activism?
SR: I did political theater in New York. I helped create a theater company that did human rights work starting in 1999. We worked with Tibetan refugees, and I went to Kosovo and worked with Kosovar refugees, and we worked with Liberian refugees and did theater pieces with them. My area was always trauma, and I did a bunch of trainings for UN clinical staff. I always had my hand in human rights work.
But then the war started in Iraq and the reports started to come in that Americans were torturing people. You know, having a psychoanalytic sensibility, I could always read through the propaganda of the articles, but the reporters for the most part in the beginning were just accepting what the spokespeople for the CIA and the government were saying. It was pretty clear to me that psychologists and psychiatrists were joining in the abusive practices for intelligence purposes, right from the beginning. I remember the first clue I had was reading about when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured. The article said that they had another card to play. The CIA was holding his two sons and could use that as leverage against him. The spokesperson said, “But don’t worry, the boys are being handled with kid gloves. There’s a child psychologist looking after them.” And I thought, Oh my goodness. So there’s a child psychologist giving cover for the fact that an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old are being held in some jail somewhere as leverage—they’ve been kidnapped and they disappeared. I mean, how many human rights violations were happening at once?
Then there was this leak of a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross from Guantanamo, saying that teams of psychologists and psychiatrists were overseeing torture at Guantanamo, and that became a big scandal in December 2004. By 2005 the American Psychiatric Association said their people can’t be part of that. The American Psychological Association said they’re going to have a committee review this. So they had a committee review it and they released a document saying that they were against torture. The psychiatrists’ position was that they can’t have anything to do with interrogations, period. The psychologists said that interrogations support was fine. Just torture was not OK. The military at Guantanamo made an announcement that, thanks to these differences, they’re going to only use psychologists to advise on these interrogations. So reading between the lines, it seemed to me that the psychologists were joining the torture program unabashedly.
That was 2006. I wrote a letter to the President of the APA. He wrote a letter back saying that I was being naive. I posted my letter and his response on a psychologist/psychoanalyst listserv, a very small group, but one of whom was friends with Amy Goodman, who has a progressive TV show [Democracy Now]. So she invited me and the president of the APA to debate each other on her TV show. And suddenly I became kind of a spokesperson for the group of psychologists protesting psychologist participation in those torturous interrogations. And then a small group of us got together. It was mostly Physicians for Human Rights that organized it. They put the disparate psychologists who were trying to fight this together in a group and gave us some funding. And we started our battle. And it took 10 years—10 years—but after 10 years, we exposed the fact that this task force that wrote the “psychologists don’t torture” paper was actually stacked with psychologists who were working at Guantanamo, and not only at Guantanamo, but at CIA black sites at Bagram in Afghanistan. It was the highest level of intelligence psychologists working for the government and military and CIA that you could ask for, along with three psychologists from the peace division [APA Division 48]. So it was six military and intelligence, three peace psychologists, and they created this paper that basically justified psychologists continuing to do what they were doing.
It took us 10 years to expose the manipulations of the intelligence psychologists at the APA, and the collusion of the APA with them. But we did, and it was on the front page of The New York Times. It was a huge embarrassment for the APA, and we managed to get them to do a complete 180 and prohibit psychologists from having anything to do with interrogations in the military or intelligence agencies. So it was a big victory. We did a lot of work with great human rights investigators, reporters. It was slow and steady, but eventually it bore fruit.
AR: The argument that the military psychologists were making seemed to be that, well, torture is a physical act, not a psychological act.
SR: There’s this idea that you have to have scars for it to count as torture. When I was doing theater work for human rights, I was also teaching at NYU at a place called the International Trauma Studies Program. It was a training program in trauma, and as part of that program we created a pro bono therapy practice for torture survivors. And so I was treating, and supervising people who were treating, torture survivors. I learned firsthand what has the longest lasting traumatic effect. Psychological torture doesn’t sound psychological when you hear what is done to people. It’s only psychological in that it doesn’t leave marks on the body. You put people in these positions with a rope around their neck. The rope is attached to their arms and if they hold their arms in a certain way, they’re not going to choke. But if they begin to get tired, they are going to choke, because their arms go down. And they’re taunted and humiliated for not being able to hold out. What ends up happening is that people who are tortured without marks feel more humiliated and guilty, especially if they give out information, which pretty much everybody always does, whether it’s accurate or not. The level of humiliation, nightmares, the traumatic effects are severe. And then there’s the embarrassment of talking about it because you can’t actually point to a scar or a physical sign that justifies your experience or helps people understand it. Some people would say that the effects are longer lasting and worse.
Freud actually talks about this. He says that if there’s a wound, there’s less likely to be a trauma. He gives a physiological reason for that about all of the cathexes in the body going to the place of the wound. If there isn’t a wound, it’s very hard to organize a response. So, for Freud, you go back to the moment and you try to relive it and try to make it different. And that’s the problem with traumatic nightmares, Freud says. If there’s no wound, you just go back and you try to undo it, but you can’t quite undo it. You’re trying to generate a kind of physical, emotional response to the trauma, but it’s the essence of the repetition compulsion for Freud. In any case, even Freud understood that having a physical wound actually helps process trauma in a way.
The torturers also developed these highly advanced techniques of torture, which have to do with the three Ds: dread, debility, and dependency. You should take a look at the CIA’s torture manuals from Latin America, where they talk in psychoanalytic terms. The goal of the torture is regression. You regress the subject to an infantile state and then they will tell you whatever you want to know. And it says in the CIA manual that it’s always good to have a psychologist on hand so that the regression doesn’t go too far and the subject loses their mind completely. So they have this whole developed process that the CIA mastered way back in the 80s, and it was repeated in the global war on terror.
AR: I have one last, perhaps provocative question. You talked about Eros in politics as an alternative to Thanatos, the aggressive drive. Freud said something similar to Einstein in their correspondence about war. But is there a role for aggression in politics? I can’t help but feel there’s a role for some type of aggression to protect ourselves from the Nazis.
SR: This is very important. And Freud was very clear. He said that these two [drives, Eros and Thanatos] are both equal powers and that they work sometimes together and sometimes in opposition. Freud will say in a politically incorrect way how sometimes we have to use some aggression to be able to consummate the sexual act—that the sexual act itself includes both. I think it’s essential to understand that we can’t polarize. For me, life is a process whereby Thanatos has to be put in the service of Eros. The task is not to get rid of our aggression, but for our aggression to be subjugated to the purposes of Eros until one’s death, where one actually uses Eros in the service of Thanatos. That’s my view of the course of a lifetime. And you know, we try our best to extend the domination of Eros as long as possible, and we use aggression to support it. Evil is when Eros is used as a manipulation for aggressive power when it’s not necessary, but when it is just for the sake of power. And so a sociopath will be seductive for the aim of aggressive power, and that to me points to the difference between good and evil.
I’m not a pacifist by any means. I think that sometimes you have to fight for the good, and you have to use aggression, but you have to always have a higher-level perspective so that you know why you’re doing it and don’t get hypnotized by the pleasures of the aggression itself.
Published November 2024.