An Overview Of Hypnosis

Hypnosis is state of mind where an individual is subjected to controlled thoughts and behavior.
Hypnosis involves two persons – the persons being treated to experiment is called subject while
the one conducting the experiment is called hypnotist. Hypnotist takes the subject into the
mental state, often termed hypnotized, and tries to get response from her. Hypnosis is possibly
one of the most debated disciplines in the world. There are so many theories associated with
this stream of studies. The basic debate hovers around the state aspect – one school of
thoughts suggests that hypnosis is a state of mind while the other school asserts it to be a
non-state.

Practitioners of state theory suggest that the mind can be transformed into an altered setting. In
other words, mind of the subject can be taken to another plane, and controlled by the
practitioner. Those from non-state theory claim that hypnosis as a phenomenon can be
observed as a culmination of focus or attention, and doesn’t necessarily lead to transformation
of mind to another state. However, it is sufficient for us to know that hypnosis is a process of
induction and observing effects of the same.

There are many myths and misconceptions associated with hypnosis. Some people opine that
hypnosis cannot be affected on persons with strong will power. Champions of hypnosis feel
otherwise – they claim that people with strong will power actually make up good subjects. This
can be attributed to their higher level of intelligence.
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Lot of research has been done on hypnosis. This research on a scientific basis stems from
Psychological research. Hypnosis is often treated as a part of peripherals of psychology.
Scientists have been trying to find the most ideal way of hypnotizing a person. Some have been
successfully doing it with words, some others with the help of triggers like clock or a pendulum.

Hypnosis is finding its way in many applications to treat patients. Hypnotherapy is one such
discipline. Some practitioners use this technique to solve psychological disorders of the
patients. Clinical hypnosis is another application area of hypnosis.

According to practitioners of clinical hypnosis, physical as well as mental illnesses can be

treated and cured with the help of clinical hypnosis. Mass hypnosis is used for prayers or magic
shows. Hypnosis applied to forensic science is called forensic hypnosis. It is not only employed
in the procedures, but also accepted in the legal perspective.

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The Pshycology Of Torture

There is one place in which one’s privacy, intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed –
one’s body, a unique temple and a familiar territory of sensa and personal history. The torturer
invades, defiles and desecrates this shrine. He does so publicly, deliberately, repeatedly and,
often, sadistically and sexually, with undisguised pleasure. Hence the all-pervasive, long-lasting,
and, frequently, irreversible effects and outcomes of torture.

In a way, the torture victim’s own body is rendered his worse enemy. It is corporeal agony that
compels the sufferer to mutate, his identity to fragment, his ideals and principles to crumble. The
body becomes an accomplice of the tormentor, an uninterruptible channel of communication, a
treasonous, poisoned territory.

It fosters a humiliating dependency of the abused on the perpetrator. Bodily needs denied –
sleep, toilet, food, water – are wrongly perceived by the victim as the direct causes of his
degradation and dehumanization. As he sees it, he is rendered bestial not by the sadistic bullies
around him but by his own flesh.

The concept of “body” can easily be extended to “family”, or “home”. Torture is often applied to
kin and kith, compatriots, or colleagues. This intends to disrupt the continuity of “surroundings,
habits, appearance, relations with others”, as the CIA put it in one of its manuals. A sense of
cohesive self-identity depends crucially on the familiar and the continuous. By attacking both
one’s biological body and one’s “social body”, the victim’s psyche is strained to the point of
dissociation.

Beatrice Patsalides describes this transmogrification thus in “Ethics of the Unspeakable: Torture
Survivors in Psychoanalytic Treatment”:

“As the gap between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ deepens, dissociation and alienation increase. The
subject that, under torture, was forced into the position of pure object has lost his or her sense
of interiority, intimacy, and privacy. Time is experienced now, in the present only, and
perspective – that which allows for a sense of relativity – is foreclosed. Thoughts and dreams
attack the mind and invade the body as if the protective skin that normally contains our
thoughts, gives us space to breathe in between the thought and the thing being thought about,
and separates between inside and outside, past and present, me and you, was lost.”

Torture robs the victim of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, is the equivalent
of cognitive death. Space and time are warped by sleep deprivation. The self (“I”) is shattered.
The tortured have nothing familiar to hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones,
language, name. Gradually, they lose their mental resilience and sense of freedom. They feel
alien – unable to communicate, relate, attach, or empathize with others.

Torture splinters early childhood grandiose narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence,

invulnerability, and impenetrability. But it enhances the fantasy of merger with an idealized and
omnipotent (though not benign) other – the inflicter of agony. The twin processes of
individuation and separation are reversed.
Torture is the ultimate act of perverted intimacy. The torturer invades the victim’s body,
pervades his psyche, and possesses his mind. Deprived of contact with others and starved for
human interactions, the prey bonds with the predator. “Traumatic bonding”, akin to the
Stockholm Syndrome, is about hope and the search for meaning in the brutal and indifferent
and nightmarish universe of the torture cell.

The abuser becomes the black hole at the center of the victim’s surrealistic galaxy, sucking in
the sufferer’s universal need for solace. The victim tries to “control” his tormentor by becoming
one with him (introjecting him) and by appealing to the monster’s presumably dormant humanity
and empathy.

This bonding is especially strong when the torturer and the tortured form a dyad and
“collaborate” in the rituals and acts of torture (for instance, when the victim is coerced into
selecting the torture implements and the types of torment to be inflicted, or to choose between
two evils).

The psychologist Shirley Spitz offers this powerful overview of the contradictory nature of torture
in a seminar titled “The Psychology of Torture” (1989):

“Torture is an obscenity in that it joins what is most private with what is most public. Torture
entails all the isolation and extreme solitude of privacy with none of the usual security embodied
therein… Torture entails at the same time all the self-exposure of the utterly public with none of
its possibilities for camaraderie or shared experience. (The presence of an all powerful other
with whom to merge, without the security of the other’s benign intentions.)

A further obscenity of torture is the inversion it makes of intimate human relationships. The
interrogation is a form of social encounter in which the normal rules of communicating, of
relating, of intimacy are manipulated. Dependency needs are elicited by the interrogator, but not
so they may be met as in close relationships, but to weaken and confuse. Independence that is
offered in return for ‘betrayal’ is a lie. Silence is intentionally misinterpreted either as
confirmation of information or as guilt for ‘complicity’.

Torture combines complete humiliating exposure with utter devastating isolation. The final
products and outcome of torture are a scarred and often shattered victim and an empty display
of the fiction of power.”

Obsessed by endless ruminations, demented by pain and a continuum of sleeplessness – the

victim regresses, shedding all but the most primitive defense mechanisms: splitting, narcissism,
dissociation, Projective Identification, introjection, and cognitive dissonance. The victim
constructs an alternative world, often suffering from depersonalization and derealization,
hallucinations, ideas of reference, delusions, and psychotic episodes.

Sometimes the victim comes to crave pain – very much as self-mutilators do – because it is a
proof and a reminder of his individuated existence otherwise blurred by the incessant torture.
Pain shields the sufferer from disintegration and capitulation. It preserves the veracity of his
unthinkable and unspeakable experiences.

This dual process of the victim’s alienation and addiction to anguish complements the
perpetrator’s view of his quarry as “inhuman”, or “subhuman”. The torturer assumes the position
of the sole authority, the exclusive fount of meaning and interpretation, the source of both evil
and good.

Torture is about reprogramming the victim to succumb to an alternative exegesis of the world,
proffered by the abuser. It is an act of deep, indelible, traumatic indoctrination. The abused also
swallows whole and assimilates the torturer’s negative view of him and often, as a result, is
rendered suicidal, self-destructive, or self-defeating.

Thus, torture has no cut-off date. The sounds, the voices, the smells, the sensations reverberate
long after the episode has ended – both in nightmares and in waking moments. The victim’s
ability to trust other people – i.e., to assume that their motives are at least rational, if not
necessarily benign – has been irrevocably undermined. Social institutions are perceived as
precariously poised on the verge of an ominous, Kafkaesque mutation. Nothing is either safe, or
credible anymore.

Victims typically react by undulating between emotional numbing and increased arousal:
insomnia, irritability, restlessness, and attention deficits. Recollections of the traumatic events
intrude in the form of dreams, night terrors, flashbacks, and distressing associations.

The tortured develop compulsive rituals to fend off obsessive thoughts. Other psychological
sequelae reported include cognitive impairment, reduced capacity to learn, memory disorders,
sexual dysfunction, social withdrawal, inability to maintain long-term relationships, or even mere
intimacy, phobias, ideas of reference and superstitions, delusions, hallucinations, psychotic
microepisodes, and emotional flatness.

Depression and anxiety are very common. These are forms and manifestations of self-directed
aggression. The sufferer rages at his own victimhood and resulting multiple dysfunction. He
feels shamed by his new disabilities and responsible, or even guilty, somehow, for his
predicament and the dire consequences borne by his nearest and dearest. His sense of
self-worth and self-esteem are crippled.

In a nutshell, torture victims suffer from a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Their strong
feelings of anxiety, guilt, and shame are also typical of victims of childhood abuse, domestic
violence, and rape. They feel anxious because the perpetrator’s behavior is seemingly arbitrary
and unpredictable – or mechanically and inhumanly regular.

They feel guilty and disgraced because, to restore a semblance of order to their shattered world
and a modicum of dominion over their chaotic life, they need to transform themselves into the
cause of their own degradation and the accomplices of their tormentors.
The CIA, in its “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983″ (reprinted in the April
1997 issue of Harper’s Magazine), summed up the theory of coercion thus:

“The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by
bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of
autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the subject regresses, his learned
personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. He begins to lose the capacity to carry
out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, or to cope with stressful
interpersonal relationships or repeated frustrations.”

Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, its victims feel helpless and powerless. This loss of control
over one’s life and body is manifested physically in impotence, attention deficits, and insomnia.
This is often exacerbated by the disbelief many torture victims encounter, especially if they are
unable to produce scars, or other “objective” proof of their ordeal. Language cannot
communicate such an intensely private experience as pain.

Spitz makes the following observation:

“Pain is also unsharable in that it is resistant to language… All our interior states of
consciousness: emotional, perceptual, cognitive and somatic can be described as having an
object in the external world… This affirms our capacity to move beyond the boundaries of our
body into the external, sharable world. This is the space in which we interact and communicate
with our environment. But when we explore the interior state of physical pain we find that there
is no object ‘out there’ – no external, referential content. Pain is not of, or for, anything. Pain is.
And it draws us away from the space of interaction, the sharable world, inwards. It draws us into
the boundaries of our body.”

Bystanders resent the tortured because they make them feel guilty and ashamed for having
done nothing to prevent the atrocity. The victims threaten their sense of security and their
much-needed belief in predictability, justice, and rule of law. The victims, on their part, do not
believe that it is possible to effectively communicate to “outsiders” what they have been through.
The torture chambers are “another galaxy”. This is how Auschwitz was described by the author
K. Zetnik in his testimony in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961.

Kenneth Pope in “Torture”, a chapter he wrote for the “Encyclopedia of Women and Gender:
Sex Similarities and Differences and the Impact of Society on Gender”, quotes Harvard
psychiatrist Judith Herman:

“It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the
bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The
victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands
action, engagement, and remembering.”
But, more often, continued attempts to repress fearful memories result in psychosomatic
illnesses (conversion). The victim wishes to forget the torture, to avoid re-experiencing the often
life threatening abuse and to shield his human environment from the horrors. In conjunction with
the victim’s pervasive distrust, this is frequently interpreted as hypervigilance, or even paranoia.
It seems that the victims can’t win. Torture is forever.

Note – Why Do People Torture?

We should distinguish functional torture from the sadistic variety. The former is calculated to
extract information from the tortured or to punish them. It is measured, impersonal, efficient, and
disinterested.

The latter – the sadistic variety – fulfils the emotional needs of the perpetrator.

People who find themselves caught up in anomic states – for instance, soldiers in war or
incarcerated inmates – tend to feel helpless and alienated. They experience a partial or total
loss of control. They have been rendered vulnerable, powerless, and defenseless by events and
circumstances beyond their influence.

Torture amounts to exerting an absolute and all-pervasive domination of the victim’s existence.
It is a coping strategy employed by torturers who wish to reassert control over their lives and,
thus, to re-establish their mastery and superiority. By subjugating the tortured – they regain their
self-confidence and regulate their sense of self-worth.

Other tormentors channel their negative emotions – pent up aggression, humiliation, rage, envy,
diffuse hatred – and displace them. The victim becomes a symbol of everything that’s wrong in
the torturer’s life and the situation he finds himself caught in. The act of torture amounts to
misplaced and violent venting.

Many perpetrate heinous acts out of a wish to conform. Torturing others is their way of
demonstrating obsequious obeisance to authority, group affiliation, colleagueship, and
adherence to the same ethical code of conduct and common values. They bask in the praise
that is heaped on them by their superiors, fellow workers, associates, team mates, or
collaborators. Their need to belong is so strong that it overpowers ethical, moral, or legal
considerations.

Many offenders derive pleasure and satisfaction from sadistic acts of humiliation. To these,
inflicting pain is fun. They lack empathy and so their victim’s agonized reactions are merely
cause for much hilarity.

Moreover, sadism is rooted in deviant sexuality. The torture inflicted by sadists is bound to
involve perverted sex (rape, homosexual rape, voyeurism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, fetishism,
and other paraphilias). Aberrant sex, unlimited power, excruciating pain – these are the
intoxicating ingredients of the sadistic variant of torture.
Still, torture rarely occurs where it does not have the sanction and blessing of the authorities,
whether local or national. A permissive environment is sine qua non. The more abnormal the
circumstances, the less normative the milieu, the further the scene of the crime is from public
scrutiny – the more is egregious torture likely to occur. This is especially true in totalitarian
societies where the use of physical force to discipline or eliminate dissent is an acceptable
practice.

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