Psychology and Torture III – The Reluctant Psychologist Imagines: What Would Freud Think (WWFT)?

“If anyone were inclined to put forward the paradoxical notion that the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows, psycho-analysis, on whose findings the first half of the assertion rests, would have no objection to raise against the second half.” 

Freud, S. (1923).  The Ego and the Id.  Standard Edition. P. 52.

The Ego and the Id is the text in which Freud describes one of his models of the mind – the one that he is most popularly known for.  This structural model solved some important problems for him, but it was always, for him, just one model among many.  I used to have my graduate students studying personality theory read this text, but they, frankly, found it too difficult and dense.  And it is difficult and dense.  It was written when Freud was in tremendous pain from the effects of Jaw cancer and the ideas were not yet clear to him, and therefore they are all but opaque to the reader.  That said, I think this model of the mind has become his signature because it seems – from a distance – clear and easy to understand and because it is, in fact, tremendously useful.  I will try, in this post, to use it as a means of understanding some aspects of the recent debacle in psychology where officers of the American Psychological Association (APA) colluded with the CIA and/or Department of Defense (DoD) to tinker with the ethical principles of the APA so that psychologists could sign off on what we later came to see clearly was torture.  I have written about the process of this coming to light here and here and you may want to read those first if you don’t have some background on the APA situation. (I have also written about my reluctance to write this post, and the dream that helped propel me to do it, here).

As a means of easing into the Ego and the Id, let’s first think about what it means to become a psychologist.  I have written elsewhere that psychologists do not engage in torture.  Well, that is both true and untrue.  By definition, psychologists, when they are functioning as psychologists, do not engage in torture because the guiding document – the ethical principles - states that psychologists “do no harm in their professional actions.”  Psychologists as people do harm.  Just ask my little brother.  I was not nice to him when I was a kid.  He would say I tortured him.  The relevant defense at this moment (of course I owe my brother apologies and other reparations, but that is between him and me) is that I was not acting as a psychologist in those moments.  Interestingly, though, if I am harming someone whom I am treating or, as in the case of the DoD psychologists, whom I am responsible for, I am, based on that statement, not acting as a psychologist in that moment.  In other words, psychologists are not psychologists just by virtue of attaining a degree or meeting a standard, but by having done that and by living up to an ethical standard at a particular moment.  The degree gets you in the door, but to stay in the club, you have to play by the rules on a continuous basis.  I will leave aside the thorny issue of the necessity of harming, for instance by taking away a treasured but malignant world view, to achieve a greater personal good – though I think that the cabal of APA psychologists who apparently colluded to align our ethical principles with the DoD’s needs intended to be invoking something like this in their position that the unusual war against terrorists created a higher good that necessitated extraordinary measures.

For Freud, we are born with a mind that is all Id – or, in German, Das Es – The It, in English.  This later disowned part of ourselves is, in fact, our primary self (for one among many disparate views of this see a review of the Conscious Id here and a very different take on development - one that has more empirical support here).  And it is, in the metaphor that has suddenly become available again this summer, the Pac Man aspect of ourselves – the part that sees what it wants and goes out to get everything desirable that is in its path, without regard for the consequences.  The Ego, Das Ich in German, The I in English – the person at the controls in Pac Man – is constrained by the reality principle – the idea that we need to wait a bit for the right moment to grab the cookie so that we don’t get caught – or we might not take the cookie at all because it is bad for us or for others.  Another way of thinking of it is that the Ego is equivalent to the ethical principles of psychologists.  It is a check on our behavior that helps us to function in ways that are good for the organism – the self in the individual, and society in the case of psychology.

At this point you might be saying, “What happened to the Super Ego?”  Well, that’s the interesting thing.  The superego is a component of the Ego.  It is one of many ego functions.  It is a big one, but not the only one.  The book is not called the Ego and the Id by accident.  Freud didn’t just forget the superego.  What he did was sneakier than that.  When we read about the Ego in textbooks, it is frequently presented as the conscious part of the self.  In fact, for Freud – and this was something the graduate students really had trouble wrapping their minds around – the Ego is largely – almost entirely - unconscious.  Conscious functioning is a very small part of the mind for Freud – and it mostly has a role as an observer, not as the author of actions.  It is the ego – a set of activities – that guides actions – and that inhibits some actions.  In this model, we are driven to act by forces that can’t become conscious, and we use those forces, we (the I or ego) direct them, to engage in activity that passes muster for us.  The Superego is one of many subsets of ego functions that guide and direct our behavior, but it is a critically important one – one that takes up a great deal of space in Freud’s model of the mind, but it is also just one among many ego functions.

The superego comes from an internalization of values through the process of identifying with the individuals that are teaching us what is right and wrong.  And this happens in a wide variety of ways for each individual and across individuals, though Freud talks about it as if we all incorporated our values in the same way.  He sees the mechanism for this as the Oedipus complex – the resolution of our inability to compete with our same sex parent for the love of the other, and our ultimate decision to identify with the same sex parent (if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em) (this model works MUCH better for boys than for girls – and it is important to realize that it is not all that good for some boys – or for any particular boy – because there are lots of little differences in the particular way this happens for each individual).

In any case, the superego is a way of describing a whole set of individual controls or control systems learned or internalized from our parents and these controls are distinguishable from regular ego controls, which are in place because they protect the self, because these protect the self in the eyes of others.  We are doing not what will result in our survival, but what will result in our receiving praise or avoiding censure from others as we imagine them.  So, one of our internal voices when we are deciding what to do in a given situation is one that says something like – If you take this course of action, everyone will love you.  This is not unlike the cartoon of the person (the ego) with the angel (superego) and devil (id) on their shoulders proposing alternate actions. 

The difficult piece with the ethics code situation is that the praise of others is not just nice, but essential.  If you aren’t following the ethics code, you aren’t being a psychologist.  This was a problem for the DoD because they needed a psychologist to sign off on their interrogations in order for them to be legal.  So they worked with a group of psychologists, the majority of whom were in the employ of the DoD, to create APA ethical guidelines for interrogations.  They came up with a loose set of guidelines – that psychologists should only sign off on interrogations that were “Safe, Legal, Ethical and Effective”.  The way that this was defined was too loose for the minority members of the committee.  The majority promised that they would produce a casebook with particular examples in order to mollify the minority - and to clarify what needed to be clarified, what was and was not ethical, which they then never did.

The guidelines were loose.  That was a problem.  The second problem was that the gatekeeper of those guidelines, the person who would determine what actions would be taken against those psychologists who didn’t adhere to them, as loose as they were, was the director of ethics for APA who had worked behind the scenes on the APA position so that it lined up with the DoD position.  When people complained about the functioning of psychologists, this person, Stephen Behnke, while publicly saying that he would bring the psychologists to task, in fact apparently did not follow up on the complaints brought to him.

This is what happens on the individual level.  We know that what we have done is wrong.  But we justify our actions.  We publicly take a stance against a particular activity – imagine a preacher preaching about the importance of marital fidelity – and then we engage in behavior that we don’t approve of – the preacher has sex with one of his congregants to whom he is not married.  Then we justify our actions.  Perhaps we take the position that the congregant needed the special closeness that we could offer – or worse we blame the congregant for seducing us (of course, we psychologists engage in this forbidden behavior as well – we sleep with our clients - see a post about that here).  Behnke, as director of ethics for APA, took the public position that torture was wrong, but privately did not act to bring those psychologists supporting it to task.   He knew – assuming the report to be correct – that his actions were wrong, and yet he engaged in them anyway.  How do we do this?  According to Freud, we have separate entities – I would call them functions – that exist internally and they engage with each other and come up with plans of action that are a compromise behind the demands of each.  In this case, the importance of self-preservation and the importance of retaining integrity appears to have been focused on the DoD cabal that Behnke led.  He was personally attached to and identified with them and what they had constructed together.  This trumped his identification with other psychologists and with APA and its ethical principles as a whole.   Freud points out how sadistic the superego, which is allied with the id can become.  In order to protect the compromise solution, and the “ethical” position that Behnke took, this analysis would suggest that it allowed him to mobilize forces to protect it – in part because it was a precarious compromise – one that he, on another level, knew to be precarious at best and publicly indefensible – by attacking those who would question it.

But the beauty, at least in this case, is that others did question it.  Just as the individual questions his or her morality – as Behnke was doing, apparently, and then strongly protecting it (methinks thou dost protest too much).  The organization – the other individuals in the organization – questioned Behnke despite his protestations.  And in doing this they were, to paraphrase the quote that is at the head of this post, more moral than we can know.  Though the Hoffman report does not address the cover-up and the resistance to it, that, it seems to me, is the front where we as a profession can be proud.  Some who knew did not compromise, but continued to question what we had done.  They suspected a rat and worked to out it.  This doesn’t always happen – it happens probably much less frequently than it should.  But knowing how it worked in this case – and knowing what mechanisms kept this from coming to light for so long, will be an important analytic part of the investigation.  And, just as in a personal analysis, one hopes that the next time we will have checks and balances, personal and institutional, in place that will allow us to more effectively – and sometimes that means consciously (in the individual) and publicly (in the institution) articulate the process that we engage in to arrive at actions.  This can be less efficient in the moment – but as the fallout from the debacle over the APA scandal will likely demonstrate -  save a lot of grief in the long run.

Post script: After posting this I realized that, for Freud, all moral systems are imposed from outside.  He had a powerful belief in the primacy of the primitive and saw it as needing to be contained by powerful, external forces.  Since his time, we have learned a lot about affiliation and attachment - internal forces that connect us to each other and that also contribute, from within the organism - to inhibiting behavior that might cause harm to others.  We don't hit others (at least when we are more mature than I was with my brother) not just because we fear punishment, but because we have empathy for them.  There is a tension, then, in our ethical systems between what is imposed or borrowed from the outside - the APA borrowed heavily from the Hippocratic oath in its principles -

and what emerges from within.  The issue as framed by the Hoffman report is that those guarding our actions - the ethics committee of APA - worked to give us latitude and, when we give ourselves latitude - as an organization or as individuals - when we are feeling our aggressive impulses constrained, we are likely to act on those impulses and to rationalize them.  We really need concrete, clear help and guidance - to articulate what is right and wrong when powerful feelings are being stirred and we are in ambiguous situations.

Btw, for a similar analysis (in so far as I can understand it) from a more systemic perspective, please see this brief posting in the BMJ.  A more personal self-analysis, from the point of view of an early whistle blower can be viewed in Forbes Magazine.  To see some of the long term political maneuvering behind the APA ethics code, look here.  For a more recent article about torture being ineffective, look here.

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