ABOUT PARENTAL TORTURE, LOSS OF IDENTITY, HUMAN DIGNITY AND PSYCHOLOGIST'S PRACTICE

Video: ABOUT PARENTAL TORTURE, LOSS OF IDENTITY, HUMAN DIGNITY AND PSYCHOLOGIST'S PRACTICE

Video: ABOUT PARENTAL TORTURE, LOSS OF IDENTITY, HUMAN DIGNITY AND PSYCHOLOGIST'S PRACTICE
Video: Justice with Michael Sandel - BBC: Justice: Torture and human dignity 2024, March
ABOUT PARENTAL TORTURE, LOSS OF IDENTITY, HUMAN DIGNITY AND PSYCHOLOGIST'S PRACTICE
ABOUT PARENTAL TORTURE, LOSS OF IDENTITY, HUMAN DIGNITY AND PSYCHOLOGIST'S PRACTICE
Anonim

When I was a teenager, the parents of one of my friends were extremely categorical about herself, her leisure time, her friends, her desires, often showing severe rigidity. It always seemed to me that this outwardly prosperous family lacks cordiality, warmth, forgiveness, understanding, the ability to understand other people and oneself. The kingdom of the medieval inquisition and the witch hunt.

At a certain point, my friend's parents demanded that she "give up" all her friends and make a "vow of loyalty to high family ideals." She was not allowed out of the house, was not allowed to talk to the phone, in short, she was put under house arrest, sometimes, when her parents were absent, she could use the phone and talk to us, her “unworthy” friends. Several weeks passed in this way; one day, while her parents were at work, we were waiting for her to call in the apartment of one of our friends. There was no call. We got worried, we missed, we missed our friend, we felt sorry for her. Plucking up the courage, we ourselves dialed our friend's phone number. Our main fear was that we would "run into" her parents. In this case, it was necessary to quickly hang up the telephone receiver. But our friend replied, who cut off aloof: "Don't call me anymore, I won't communicate with you, my parents are dearer to me."

For several days I was in a daze, resentment, disorientation. Later I kept asking myself the question: “What should have been done with her? How does she feel now, there, inside herself?"

After about 16 years, I met my ex-girlfriend, who called me herself and entered into a friendly conversation. After three minutes of our communication, it began to seem to me that I was talking not with the girl with whom I was once friends, but with her mother - the same intonations, assessments, complaints, views … And then she very proudly reproduced the conversation with her preschool daughter age, which ended in an incredibly "creative" and "full of love" phrase: "Do you want? Do you want to! ". “If you want to,” - probably, just like you once did not want to be friends with your girlfriends, to walk with them, to get into all sorts of adventures typical of a young age with them, to share secrets and be frank, - I thought.

Torture is actions aimed at undermining bodily, psychological, social boundaries; it is aimed at breaking down personal values and at the disintegration of identity, which was formed in the process of separating oneself from others and assilimating cultural values. Torture is purposeful violence, with the clear intention of destroying human qualities and functions to pieces, and in addition to destroying a sense of wholeness.

The executioner is always aimed at breaking the victim's personality, destroying her beliefs, cutting off emotional ties, turning her inner world into hell. The torturer wants to destroy everything that is valuable to his victim. And the more the victim loses touch with the world, the more the executioner enjoys his power, his dominance over the life of the victim.

Coercion to confession, to "extradition" is very closely connected with torture. But! In fact, the point of torture practice is not to get information; these methods of destruction are only a visible ruse, serving to squeeze out remnants of dignity and self-esteem, diminish the sense of belonging to the group and efforts to demarcate oneself.

The brainwashing methods used by the medieval Inquisition, the NKVD and the Nazis served primarily to annihilate personal, political and religious values.

Then, more than twenty years ago, I did not know how often I would have to face such totalitarian parents as my friend's parents were. Today they bring to me, like a puppy on a leash, children (sometimes such “children” are people who have reached the age of majority), who must “confess,” “refuse,” “take an oath,” etc. A psychologist is “hired” by such parents into a “group executioners "who fail to break the victim, or it seems to them that they did not break it enough, in order to get another way to" shake the soul "out of the victim. Dehumanizing the thinking of such parents leaves them no chance to somehow figure out who a psychologist is and what he actually does.

Meanwhile, the goal of torture is diametrically opposed to the goals and values of psychology. Respect for personal boundaries? Autonomy? Self-esteem and dignity? What are you about?!!!

- Let her confess that she slept with this idiot! Stop making a fool of me! I already know everything! Why did she lower her eyes ?! Speak!

The cited monologue of the mother eloquently demonstrates that between the executioner, as the subject (mother) and the victim (daughter), sadistically reduced to the object, the limits of the role of each are set unambiguously and indestructible. A squeezed confession is the culmination of a process of humiliation and dependence. To speak, to confess - means to approve the executioner in the status of a master. Recognition "rams" the last rebuff, alienates the last that was felt "like".

The torture of such parents sadistically turns any belief in value into decay, and the belief in human dignity is perverted. The collapse of life history can radically change the personality and value system. History knows facts when the destruction of personal values led to their transformation into the opposite. When the boundaries of the personality are destroyed, “identification with the aggressor” occurs (this is the phenomenon I observed when meeting with my girlfriend 16 years later), the loss of identity is accompanied by one's own sadistic motives (“Do you want?

The torture is arranged in such a way as to cleverly turn people into reptiles, conforming conciliators.

Torture is a kind of attack on everything active and creative within the self, on the independence of thinking, on the ability to withstand ethical collisions, on identity.

And here it is obvious that the goals of torture are opposed to the goals of psychotherapy. If the ability to confront the other constructively in conflict is a value for any therapeutic direction, then the purpose of torture is precisely to destroy this ability. Where there was previously a structure consisting of differentiated contents, delimited from each other, after the experience of torture, "scorched earth" remains.

Such children are well known to psychotherapists; some of them have enough strength after many years of feeling “dead”, aimless or exhausted by their own destruction, to step over the threshold of the office in search of meanings directly opposite to those that came from their parents.

Psychologists are not servants of parental violence, vanity, narcissism, sadism, totalitarianism and all kinds of "whims." Your problems, dear parents, children, very often reflect, no matter how difficult it is for you to admit, it is your all kinds of psychological "curves". And often it is not your child who has to change unilaterally, but you yourself.

Psychologists respect the dignity of every person with whom they work. And the respect of a specialist does not depend on who is the parent to whom and who pays for the services.

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