Integration of Points Brought Up during Sessions
As related above, the victims mention and health workers reflect on:
(1) Images and feelings about torturers and chief torturer: anger and contempt together with love and admiration.
(2) Life, death, and suicide: the previous idea of heroic and “momentary” death, and then repeatedly living through the real point of death; repeatedly wishing to die in a certain moment of the torture, and then wanting to survive it at any price.
(3) Family and sex: instincts and fantasies replacing real life events (very difficult to express or avoided; analogous difficulties for the therapist).
(4) Religious, moral, and political values; deliberate submission to the “new values,” feigning enthusiasm; then moments of real frenzy; the way back.
(5) Images of and feelings about friends or fellows who are submitted to the same process, at the same time.
(6) Dreams.
The therapist complained he could not listen quietly to the patient's account because that account was too close to the therapist's own feelings. He felt that this is the reason why he had also thought of a play in which the tzurcan was playing the main role and was trying to demonstrate to them that they all resembled him. At the end he would say, “Do not hide it, confess you all love me.” He said that perhaps the tzurcan on stage was himself. All this could have been to make the feelings more bearable by sharing them with an imaginary audience.
The therapist felt he was really “in Mr. B's shoes” and felt suddenly relieved. But later, when his repeated account was getting to this point, namely to the transformation into a torturer, the therapist confessed that he was feeling upset and secretly wanted him to stop short of telling this part of his story.
The patient declared that he certainly could not have resisted. He would have become a torturer, but he felt lucky because he had came to the Piteshti prison with the last series of prisoners.
In these transformational events, torturers re-educated and the re-educated tortured. Travel is a transfer from one state of mind to another. Hence, education is a travel/transfer; torture is an education/travel. Symptoms (consequences) of torture are diseases, and diseases are addressed by torture. This Romanian institution illustrates how violence can feed on itself, and rather than be depleted, will instead be amplified— perhaps across generations as well as through the life-history of the victims.
References
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