Politics, History, and Ethnohistory

This essay examines accounts by former Romanian political prisoners incarcerated in the notorious Piteshti penitentiary for opposing CeaLishescifs communist regime. These vic­tims were subjected systematically to harsh physical and psychological torture aimed at re-shaping their mind and, ultimately, transforming them into torturers devoted body and soul to Ceaushescu’s culture of terror.

I show that the accounts of former political prisoners evidences a network of cultural processes, expressed in complex cultural codes, which processes permit a better under­standing of how systematically exerted violence can be shaped and codified to become culturally acceptable and then appropriated culturally as “education.” The dynamic model of systematic torture used in mind control reveals that ideologies are constituted as cultural sequences of acts, manipulations, seductions, torture, inquests, “mise en scene”—used to destroy the prisoners’ previous interpersonal, collective, and familial networks. Finally, I point to the relations of reciprocity between acts of violence and changes in effects that in turn validate the assumption that culturally orchestrated vio­lence can transform any recalcitrant individual into a loyal one. I conclude by showing that this study of the “re-education” of political prisoners in Romania by their inmates and a better understanding of their methods of mind control, may help us begin to formu­late a semiotics of cultural violence.

Following the dismantling of Ceaushescu's communist regime, many abused indi­viduals began to seek help to reenter the mainstream Romanian culture. Specifically, former political prisoners of Ceaushescu attempted to achieve some psychic integration, in order be capable to function in the new, post-communist era. In an effort to further our understanding of the long-term effects of traumatic stress and mind control, The Cincin­nati Psychoanalytic Institute has initiated a cooperative study (the Psycho-Social and Medical Research Association, PSAMRA, project) that includes therapists from former communist countries.

My own contribution is the close study of reports presented by Romanian therapists, who, like the former political prisoners whom they are currently treating, have lived for a long time under harsh totalitarian rules and have also been culturally imbued with misin­formation and fear, as well as with a sense of mistrust of authorities.