Torture and Transference

After Ceashescu's fall from power in Romania and his prompt execution, the surviving inmates of Piteshti prison became increasingly willing to speak up and eventually dared to seek help from the local therapists.

To illuminate the peculiarly strong process of counter-transference in therapists from Romania, which signals a very intense cultural indoctrination in therapists as well, I have concentrated on the codification and the narrativization of the highly stylized methods of mind control in these prisons. Commonly, brainwashing began with intimidation, provo­cation, and temptation, and ended in the total seduction of the prisoner, and, as result, his acculturation in a culture of terror.

This peculiar seduction via torture aimed to destroy the prisoners' previous interper­sonal, collective, and familial networks, shatter completely their previous cultural net­work. Specifically, communist cultural seduction endeavored to create a tabula rasa into which to pour its own ideology. This seduction appears to have been extended to the en­tire population.

In juxtaposing two accounts I compiled—the narrative of the mental health worker, during the workshop, and that of the patient, generated in the space-time of therapeutic sessions in the office of the therapist—I was able to discern singularly damaging counter- transferential tendencies which surfaced in the narratives of the native therapist. These peculiar counter-transferential inclinations and a hyper-identification, usually encoun­tered in situations of high experiential affinity—such as that of Holocaust survivors, pa­tients, and therapists, for example—alert us to the possibility of serious problems in the treatment of post-traumatic stress patients in Eastern Europe by their local mental health workers. The incapability of the therapists to detect and subsequently properly integrate their high level of counter-transference, and their peculiar identification with communist hyper-codes, signal a pathology surfacing frequently in the Romanian therapists' self as­sessments.

On a larger scale, by intersecting the narrative path of the therapist with that of the former prisoner, and by systematically illuminating the obscured distortions occurring in therapeutic situations in the aftermath of totalitarianism (see Lifton 1961: 122-135), we may come to understand how to nurture the fragile relationship between patient and therapist operating in cultures that have internalized acculturation methods similar to those used in communist regimes. The delicate patient-therapist relationship—commonly threatened by the usual memory loss of the patient, any resistance, and a sense of shame—seems endangered in cultures of terror. The relationship's fragility is exacer­bated by strong undercurrents of a culturally promoted hostility towards “transgressors” and “traitors,” as well as by the customary lack of mutual trust, instilled in its citizens, in former communist countries.

In investigating the two narrative paths, we also unveil the circulation of communist cultural hyper-codes, such as “internal unmasking,” “external unmasking,” “rehabilita­tion,” and “re-education,” and, as a result, we understand better the processes which have governed cultural codification in communist Eastern Europe. This new knowledge em­powers us to lend a more knowledgeable hand to the treatment of all those traumatized in the process; namely, it compels us to include the therapists who, quite clearly, were also victims of communist cultural indoctrination.