(Compiled from a few different articles about torture with slight manipulations for the words Master and slave.)
There is one place in which one’s privacy, intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed – one’s body, a unique temple and a familiar territory of sensa and personal history. The Master invades this shrine. He does so publicly, deliberately, repeatedly and, often, sadistically and sexually, with undisguised pleasure. Hence the all-pervasive, long-lasting, and, frequently, irreversible effects and outcomes of torture.
In a way, the tortured slave’s own body is rendered her worse enemy. It is corporeal agony that compels the slave to mutate, her identity to fragment, her ideals and principles to crumble. The body becomes an accomplice of the Master, an uninterruptible channel of communication, a treasonous, poisoned territory.
It fosters a humiliating dependency of the slave on the Master. Bodily needs denied – sleep, toilet, food, water – are wrongly perceived by the slave as the direct causes of her degradation and dehumanization. As she sees it, she is rendered bestial not by the sadistic bullies around her but by her own flesh.
The concept of “body” can easily be extended to “home”. This intends to disrupt the continuity of “surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others. A sense of cohesive self-identity depends crucially on the familiar and the continuous. By attacking both one’s biological body and one’s “social body”, the slave’s psyche is strained to the point of dissociation.
“As the gap between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ deepens, dissociation and alienation increase. The slave that, under torture, was forced into the position of pure object has lost his or her sense of interiority, intimacy, and privacy. Time is experienced now, in the present only, and perspective – that which allows for a sense of relativity – is foreclosed. Thoughts and dreams attack the mind and invade the body as if the protective skin that normally contains our thoughts, gives us space to breathe in between the thought and the thing being thought about, and separates between inside and outside, past and present, me and you, was lost.”
Torture robs the slave of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, is the equivalent of cognitive death. Space and time are warped by sleep deprivation. The self (“I”) is shattered. The tortured have nothing familiar to hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. Gradually, they lose their mental resilience and sense of freedom. They feel alien – unable to communicate, relate, attach, or empathize with others.
Torture splinters early childhood grandiose narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability, and impenetrability. But it enhances the fantasy of merger with an idealized and omnipotent (though not benign) other – the inflicter of agony. The twin processes of individuation and separation are reversed.
Torture is the ultimate act of perverted intimacy. The Master invades the slave’s body, pervades her psyche, and possesses her mind. Deprived of contact with others and starved for human interactions, the slave bonds with the Master. “Traumatic bonding”, akin to the Stockholm syndrome, is about hope and the search for meaning in the brutal and indifferent and nightmarish universe of the torture cell.
The Master becomes the black hole at the center of the slave’s surrealistic galaxy, sucking in the slave’s universal need for solace. The slave tries to “control” her Master by becoming one with him (introjecting him) and by appealing to the master’s presumably dormant humanity and empathy. This bonding is especially strong when the Master and the slave form a dyad and “collaborate” in the rituals and acts of torture (for instance, when the slave is coerced into selecting the torture implements and the types of torment to be inflicted, or to choose between two evils).
Obsessed by endless ruminations, demented by pain and a continuum of sleeplessness – the slave regresses, shedding all but the most primitive defense mechanisms: splitting, narcissism, dissociation, projective identification, introjection, and cognitive dissonance. The slave constructs an alternative world, often suffering from depersonalization and derealization.
Sometimes the slave comes to crave pain – very much as self-mutilators do – because it is a proof and a reminder of her individuated existence otherwise blurred by the incessant torture. Pain shields the slave from disintegration and capitulation. It preserves the veracity of her unthinkable and unspeakable experiences.
This dual process of the slave’s alienation and addiction to anguish complements the Master’s view of his quarry as “inhuman”, or “subhuman”. The Master assumes the position of the sole authority, the exclusive fount of meaning and interpretation, the source of both evil and good.
Torture is about reprogramming the slave to succumb to an alternative exegesis of the world, proffered by the Master. It is an act of deep, indelible, traumatic indoctrination. Torture has no cut-off date. The sounds, the voices, the smells, the sensations reverberate long after the episode has ended – both in dreams and in waking moments. The slave’s ability to trust other people – i.e., to assume that their motives are at least rational, if not necessarily benign – has been irrevocably undermined. They feel anxious because the Master’s behavior is seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable – or mechanically and inhumanly regular.
“The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the slave by bringing a superior outside force to bear on her will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the slave regresses, her learned personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. She begins to lose the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, or to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships or repeated frustrations.”
Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, slaves feel helpless and powerless. This loss of control over one’s life and body is manifested physically. This is often exacerbated by the disbelief many slaves encounter, especially if they are unable to produce scars, or other “objective” proof of their ordeal. Language cannot communicate such an intensely private experience as pain.
“Pain is also unsharable in that it is resistant to language … All our interior states of consciousness: emotional, perceptual, cognitive and somatic can be described as having an object in the external world … This affirms our capacity to move beyond the boundaries of our body into the external, sharable world. This is the space in which we interact and communicate with our environment. But when we explore the interior state of physical pain we find that there is no object ‘out there’ – no external, referential content. Pain is not of, or for, anything. Pain is. And it draws us away from the space of interaction, the sharable world, inwards. It draws us into the boundaries of our body.”
Okay. So it’s shocking, scary, unbelievable. And makes me twitch and drool. That’s what I want. That’s what I almost had. That’s what I’ll have again.
Mark my words.
I’m a determined little cunt.
And to whoever left that last deleted snarky comment? Fuck off. I’m done playing with you people. Don’t like me? Hit the X. Don’t agree with me? Hit the X.
I’m done explaining things. I’m done coddling the lightweights. You want education, go to wikipedia. You want happy shit, go to Disney world.
This is what I do. This is what I write. Don’t want to read it? X on out of here, bitch.
kaya
1 person likes this post.
Uncategorized | kaya | 
Saturday October 25th, 2008 12:17pm | 
Comments (16) 
