Psychology and Torture II: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Ponders the Implications of the Hoffman Report

In the wake of the September 11 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration engaged in a war on terror that included actions that we later deemed to be torture.  The American Psychological Association (APA), including its chief officers, played an important role in supporting the legality of that torture.  In order to engage in "enhanced interrogation", a mental health practitioner needs to be present to evaluate the impact of the interrogation on the mental health of the person being interrogated.  The AMA, the national association of Social Workers, and the National Association of Nurses all refused to work with the government on this project.  The APA agreed to play a role.  The organization then denied that they had done this and actively worked to cover this up.  A group of psychologists used access to a limited pool of emails to write a report about what they believed had taken place.  That initial report is available here and I blogged about that report when it came out here.  The Board of Directors of APA then commissioned a group of lawyers to investigate whether “APA ‘colluded’ with government officials to ‘support torture’.”  This quote is from the resulting investigation, titled the Hoffman report, which is available here.  To see a Freudian analysis of this situation, go here.  The Hoffman report, as of this writing, has not been “accepted” by APA, but it has been shared both with the membership and with the public.

I have been putting off writing about this for some time.  First of all the report is long – over 500 pages - so finding time to read it has been difficult, and I have not waded all the way through it yet.  Second – the topic is difficult.  And what I would like to blog about here is the complexity of that topic – which I think includes many separate topics, and why the topic as a whole is so difficult – I think understanding the components will help with that.  I am not going to cover all of the subtopics.  The report is a deceptively simple and straightforward set of information and opinions about what is in fact a dense intersection of many deeply psychological issues, and I will not be able to flesh any of them out in depth in this post.  It will take time for me, the organization, and others to sort through them.  They are deeply human issues that are not confined to this situation nor to this moment, but they are emblematic of it and at least mapping some of the territory seems to me to be a good first step. 

I have been talking with many peers about this, and have been following comments on list serves and on other public forums.  There is lots of dismay, anger, and distress, and actions that have been taken.  Three top staffers at APA have lost their jobs and more may follow.  Even more importantly, the report suggests that individuals have had torture inflicted on them at least in part because of the actions of psychologists - the psychologists were not protecting those being interrogated but actively promoting the torture (See the movie The Report for a horrific rendition of this).  In one conversation, with a former chair of my department, a different attitude was expressed.  He said, “This will blow over.”  And he is right.  It will blow over.  APA may dissolve, it may reorganize, or business may continue as usual.  This will become a moment that is taught about in ethics class (we already did that this summer on my campus), and the intensity of feeling that is currently in the air will be cleared as new storm systems move through.  But the issues will linger because they are foundational to the profession, but more so to being human and to the very complicated process of trying to understand what it means to be human.

The Hoffman report is an interesting document because it is written by a group of six lawyers who studied APA for 8 months.  They had no prior institutional knowledge of APA, though they have some knowledge of their own professional organization.  They also had little knowledge about psychology as a profession.  What is clearer to me, and perhaps to them after having written this document, is that the ethical principles of an organization are at the heart of what that organization is - in some ways it defines the organization, just as our conscience - and how we react to it - is an important definition of who we are as people.  I had come to think of the ethical guidelines of APA (the current version is available here) as being important because they are guides to good clinical practice.  They are more than that, they are also guidelines for good research practice.  And they define, in very important ways, who we are as psychologists, whether engaged in research or practice. Part of what the Hoffman folks did to get up to speed was to learn about the history of APA as an organization.  I will go even a little further back in history and then catch up with Hoffman et al.

Psychology was originally an academic discipline and could have been described as the scientific study of the human condition.  This marks a crossing of two traditions that were previously separate – philosophy, which was a liberal art and therefore used the liberal arts such as logic and rhetoric to explore humanity, and science, which was a process for observing and reporting on natural objects.  At one time science was also a subset of philosophy, and Aristotle opined about physics based on a logical understanding of the world – one that was based on first principles (such as nature abhors a vacuum).  A group of philosophers agreed to use a method to empirically determine how the world operates.  This method involved proposing hypotheses or theories and then testing them to see if, in the real world, they held up.  If not, the new information was used to tweak the hypothesis or as the basis for entirely new ways of thinking about things.  So, if I observe that I can suck all the air out of a tube, nature may still abhor a vacuum, but they do exist, and I need to think about altering what is now a theory rather than a principle.

The Hoffman report picks up with psychology as an emerging discipline for the scientific study of humans at the end of the 1800s.  At first we were trying to figure out things like reaction times and whether they differed between people. Now psychology becomes also an applied science.  So we were also trying to figure out what would predict who needed more support to do well in school.  In the US, the growth of our profession, the applied part of our work, has been closely tied to the military.  Our testing in the First World War determined who would be privates and who would go to Officer Training School.  In the Second World War there was a shortage of qualified treaters for soldiers who were traumatized by the war, so, in addition to assessment, we started treating.  Our science has also been supported by the Department of Defense (DoD), which has provided funds to study aspects of behavior that have military applications.

So, when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred, the DoD turned to us and we to them, and this was nothing new.  "How do we address this new threat?" we asked each other.  And the Hoffman report suggests that a cabal – a small group of psychologists – determined how we would do that.  This group, supposedly one that was a group of APA psychologists representing APA was dominated by psychologists in the employ of the DoD who had an agenda in mind that was based on a position that some in the DoD were taking that was in line with the position the Justice Department was taking under the Bush Cheney leadership that suggested that we did not need to be governed by international law, but by our own law as interpreted by the current administration.  There was conflict in the DoD about this, and there would have been HUGE conflict about this in APA generally, but through a collusion between (and the Hoffman report is clear that in their judgement there was a collusion here) APA officials including the chief ethics officer (a staff position), the head of the practice directorate (a staff position - and this person was married to one of the DoD psychologists - a conflict of interest), a series of Presidents of APA (an elected position), and others in the organization, there was a concerted effort to make sure that the ethics guidelines met the requirements that the DoD wanted to have in place to engage, legally, in what would later come to be seen as torture.  This was a subversion of the process that the APA psychologists should have been protecting - that psychological ethics should be determining our guidelines, we don't rent them out to other agencies to determine any more than we would let someone else dictate to us our own personal morality.

Why did the psychologists do this?  In part, there was likely patriotic fervor in the wake of 9/11.  But mostly this seems to have been the result of a guild based long term effort to improve the standing of psychology in the eyes of the DoD – an entity that had supported psychology, but one where psychiatrists (physicians who also have psychological training) had more standing than psychologists.  There may have been other side motives.  The Hoffman report does not enumerate these and I don’t think they can.  The people most likely to have such motives refused to be interviewed.  Speculation about such motives would be just that, but they might have to do with individual loyalty or competition and/or things as concerning as personal sadism (Yes, I'm afraid psychologists can be, not just a little bit, but characteristically sadistic).  Who knows?

So what are the questions that this confluence of factors raises?

1. What is the role of the Military-Industrial Complex in the functioning of our everyday lives?  How does it impact us just as a result of being citizens of a particular country?  Presidents from Washington to Eisenhower have been concerned about our dependency on war to fuel our economy as a means of pushing us into a position where we needed to be warlike to survive.  We have one set of values that we espouse for ourselves – freedom, equality.  We have always been somewhat hypocritical about this – first with slavery, and then with a variety of doctrines, Manifest Destiny being one, that protected our rights at the cost of undermining those of others.  Does our marriage to our sovereignty lead us, paradoxically, to give up control over those things that we hold most dear? This is a higher level question and it has broader roots and branches than I can enumerate here (are we responsible for exploiting Chinese workers when we buy an Ipad could be a related topic, for instance), but I do think we need to both know and own up to our role as citizens of the dominant Superpower.  We didn’t become that just by being the champions of freedom.  We are also the biggest gorilla on the block.  How does that seep through the walls that we build to protect us from many things, including knowing that we are supporting a government that can be a bully?
2. What is the role of a set of ethical guidelines in determining the identity of a professional group?  How important is it that we decide what we will and will not do?  Especially when that group is also a scientific organization?  I am going to ask what seems like a crazy question in this context, but have we failed to study torture in ways that we should have?  Do we need additional evidence – should every psychologist be able to cite the limits of torture and the damage that it causes both individually and to the fabric of a society?  Part of what has driven our ethical code’s development has been experiments like the Milgram Experiment that caused tremendous distress to individuals who engaged in them.  Do we need to focus more effort on ways of indirectly studying and documenting the impact of stress and trauma?  Do we need to know more about things like sadism?  I am aware that we know, collectively, a lot about trauma and sadism and even, I have learned from the Hoffman report, something about torture.  Have we shied away, though, from the dark side of what humans do to each other – as if we could just have a positive psychology and as if we were only motivated to help each other, when in fact our motivations are much more complex and include destructive components.
3. We need to acknowledge, and do, through various mechanisms that, despite our best efforts, our members do not consistently subscribe to the ethical principles.  I see this annually within our training program (and don’t see more than I do see).  Psychologists are human and are, therefore, all kinds of things – including prejudiced in a variety of ways.  When we act in harmful ways on those prejudices, ethical or legal sanctions should result.  In this case, the gatekeeper to the sanctions – Behnke – was apparently publicly saying that reprehensible behavior would be punished while, behind the scenes, giving free passes to people who were alleged to have engaged in unethical behavior.  How do we oversee the overseers?  When I worked in a bank I learned that all bank employees need to take vacations every year so that audits can be scheduled when key employees can’t cover their tracks.  Do we need to build more of this into our system?  Is this going to lead us to crack down on people who are making human mistakes and cause unnecessary grief?
4.  Can we build in safeguards to an organization so that it does not get hijacked by well or ill-intentioned members?  Isn’t it ironic that this should happen to the largest organization of psychologists in the world?  Should we be more humble about the limits of our knowledge and our ability to manage behavior when we have such difficulty managing our own behavior?  We can describe what has happened and why, and I think some of our theories – psychoanalytic and psychological – will be terribly important in doing that.  But despite our insights and knowledge, we continue to be human.  And there is more than a little perniciousness in that.
5. What about all the smaller stuff?  Part of this whole debacle seems to have been driven by the wish for one guild – the psychologists – to displace or find an equal place at the table with another – the psychiatrists.  Isn’t this, in some sense, tribal thinking?  On the other hand, if we don’t look out for ourselves – what will happen?  How do we balance the good of the individual (in this case, the individual organization) against the good of the whole?  And how do we recognize that winning this battle – beating the psychiatrists – results in losing two wars – one against our own sense of what is humanly right – it means that people are lead to believe they will drown and are terrorized by that – and more than that – we have ceded the war to the terrorists.  We are now communicating on their level.  Our intention is to build not just a guild, not just a nation, but a world that is just and safe and helpful.  Is this both beyond and within our bounds?  Don’t our actions with each other – whether on a large or small scale – create that society and doesn’t that ripple in ways that we cannot fathom, but desperately want to?  Does the petty narcissism, or whatever else was in the co-pilot’s seat on this one really trump the reasons that we are here?  And yet doesn’t it all the time?  Don’t we need to constantly re-gird ourselves to do what is right and to make amends for what we have done wrong?
6. Finally, do we need to ask a weird question - are ethics essentially philosophical in nature or are they also empirical?  Have we just run an experiment and collected some data and found that - for instance - making decisions about ethical codes in secret is a really bad idea?  In fact, this was pointed out by our faculty member who teaches ethics - that the dilemmas the officers faced are the same ethical dilemmas that practitioners face on a regular basis.  And isn't it ironic that one of the implicated presidents literally wrote the book on ethics that is used to teach graduate students?  To state it more plainly - aren't ethical principles - as philosophical as they might seem - actually guides to behavior and we may need to test them out - preferably by thinking about what might happen in the future rather than, as in this experiment, seeing how much damage can be done by ill conceived principles.

This has turned into a rant.  For that I apologize.  The bad news is that this is not the end of things.  The Hoffman report was looking at something very focal – it did not take on the issue of the organizational cover-up, which went on for almost a decade – and the ways that those in power may have abused that power to hush up the would be whistle blowers.  The organization is much broader than its relationship with the DoD.  How well is it functioning across the scope of its very broad mission?  Will good things go unnoticed?  Will the bad be exaggerated or hidden?

Most people come into this profession, on a conscious level, primarily because of its ideals.  That said, they are also interested in the well-being that the life of a professional provides.  The majority of people in our organization, for the majority of the time, on balance act in ways that we would universally acknowledge as ethical.  All of us, some of the time, engage in unethical behavior.  We will learn more about how close to a tipping point that balance has been within our organization and perhaps within ourselves as this organizational situation unfolds. 


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