Top US Psychologist: Isolation Research Meant to Study Brainwashing

Donald O. Hebb was a pioneer American psychologist. His paper "Drives and the CNS (Conceptual Nervous System)" was one of the most quoted academic papers of his time, garnering 232 academic citations even in a period from 14-22 years after its publication.

Hebb was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1960.

But Hebb was also a major researcher for the U.S. MK-ULTRA mind-control and coercive interrogation program. His primary interest was in the study of how isolation and sensory deprivation affects mind and behavior. An excellent essay on Hebb's career in this regard is Alfred McCoy's 2007 article for the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, "Science in Dachau's Shadow: Hebb, Beecher, and the Development of CIA Psychological Torture and Modern Medical Ethics" (PDF).

But while secondary source material, and especially that of a first-class historian-researcher like McCoy, is important to get the overall context of the history, original documents can also be extremely illuminating. One such document is Hebb's 1958 American Psychologist article, "The Motivating Effects of Exteroceptive Stimulation."

The essay is a transcription of a speech Hebb gave as Chairman of a symposium held at the 1957 APA convention. The symposium on "Control of Behavior through Motivation and Reward." It is fascinating how unguarded this chief MK-ULTRA researcher could be when he was speaking in a forum of peers.

In his speech, Hebb asserted that "brainwashing," i.e., personality change or deformation, can occur "simply" -- and this "simply" is huge -- the "perceptual environment is "changed" or manipulated. By the time he gave his speech, the CIA and Pentagon were very far along their path of establishing a torture program. The "survival schools", where US soldiers were trained to endure and resist torture (later known as "SERE school"), became laboratories for the study of environmental manipulation and the application of "uncontrollable stress," the latter being the second pillar of US torture policy.

Embedded in Hebb's talk is an irony so deep, it is the Mariana Trench of irony: the Chinese did not practice "brainwashing." The term was created by a CIA-linked journalist because the U.S. was conducting psychological warfare to discredit confessions by U.S. airmen to the effect the U.S. had conducted biological warfare against the North Koreans and Chinese during the Korean War. The U.S. was also covering up the crimes of the Imperial Japanese biological human experimentation program at the same time because they had actually pardoned and brought war criminals like Ishii Shiro into the U.S. biological warfare program. The deal was made because the Japanese promised to give the U.S. the data garnered from their deadly experiments, which had killed thousands, including U.S. POWs.

As one reads the following, reflect upon the fact that this speech was given now two generations ago. It represents a portion of the history of my field -- psychology -- and of US history that is little reflected in the modern discourse on the controversies surrounding torture and interrogation. But history does not go away, and sooner or later the epigones of Hebb, Harlow, West and others must face the evaluations and attendant obloquies that will come from their failure to break from their attachment and collaboration with a torturing State.

One final word: for those who have been fighting to change the inhumane policy of use of isolation and solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, take note that in the pages of the foremost journal of the American Psychological Association over fifty years ago there were discussions about how isolation was used to break down prisoners.

From "The Motivating Effects of Exteroceptive Stimulation":

The infant-environment work shows that the adult is a product both of his heredity and physical environment (as necessary for growth) and of his perceptual experience during the growth period. Once development is complete, does the organism then become less dependent psychologically on sensory stimulation? When a man's or a woman's character is formed, his or her motivations and personality pattern established, is character or personality an entity that exists so to speak in its own right, no matter where or in what circumstances (assuming physical health and reasonable bodily welfare)?

In the Korean war the Chinese Communists gave us a shocking answer: in the form of brainwashing. The answer is No. Without physical pain, without drugs, the personality can be badly deformed simply by modifying the perceptual environment. It becomes evident that the adult is still a function of his sensory environment in a very general sense, as the child is.

I am not going to ask you to listen again to all the details of the experiments that have been done and are still being done in this country and Canada (though the Canadian experiments are over) to investigate the problem. The work of Heron, Bexton,
Scott, and Doane (2, 9, 10) began when the Defence Research Board of Canada asked us in 1952 to find out what we could about the basic phenomena, with the hope that some possibilities for protection against brainwashing might turn up. Now brainwashing, as you know, takes different forms and can involve lack of sleep, fatigue, and hunger; and it makes a lot of use of having the subject write out "confessions" (or whatever you want to call them). Only one aspect was picked out for study: isolation from the environment....

As a postscript, here is a link to the statement of Colonel Frank H. Schwable, Chinese-held POW during the Korean War, charging "U.S. Wages Germ Warfare in Korea". This is the primary example (as Schwable was the highest ranking prisoner to "confess") of the so-called "brainwashing" confessions. I doubt anyone involved in these controversies has ever read Schwable's document before. I find it quite convincing. I believe the breakdown of the prisoner was to get him to cooperate and be used for propaganda purposes. That doesn't mean the propaganda itself wasn't true in its particulars, or largely true. Read it and see what you think.

Help Bring Anti-Torture Documentary "Doctors of the Dark Side" to DVD!

Psychologist and documentary film maker Martha Davis is making a new push to get her important film, "Doctors of the Dark Side," which is about the collaboration of doctors and psychologists with the US torture program, out on DVD. This is an important step towards getting wider distribution as a whole.

Davis, along with actress Mercedes Ruehl (who narrates the film) and Physicians for Human Rights' Anti-torture Program Director Kristine Huskey, have filmed a video appeal for funds. Watch the appeal and then make a tax-deductible donation:



From the film's website, where you can also watch a film trailer:

Doctors of the Dark Side exposes the scandal behind the torture scandal — how psychologists and physicians implemented and covered up the torture of detainees in US controlled military prisons. The stories of four detainees and the doctors involved in their abuse show how essential doctors have been to the torture program. Director Martha Davis (Interrogation Psychologists) spent four years investigating the controversy and produced the documentary with an award-winning team that includes Oscar-winners Mark Jonathan Harris (Writer) and Mercedes Ruehl (Narrator), and Emmy-winner Lisa Rinzler (Director of Photography). Editor M. Trevino (Hidden Battles) led the post-production team of the feature length documentary. The Executive Producers are Thea Kerman and Sergio Rothstein.

(Full disclosure: I was interviewed and appear briefly twice in the movie, as my reporting on some of these issues has contributed to exposures about the depth and breadth of psychologist and physician collaboration with the CIA and Department of Defense torture programs. -- Even so, I heartily recommend this film because I believe it to be an important contribution to the campaign to fully expose the torture scandal, and to also be an important work of documentary cinema.)

Reposting FDL Book Salon: Robert Jay Lifton's new memoir, "Witness to an Extreme Century"

I had a great time hosting Firedoglake's Book Salon this afternoon. The guest was famous psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton. Reposted below is the introductory post I wrote for the occasion. Readers should click though to read the entire exchange between myself, Dr. Lifton, and a number of commenters, touching on subjects from mind control and torture, to the Armenian genocide and the legacy of Hiroshima. Co-author with Dr. Lifton on a couple of books, and recently a blogger on the Wikileaks story, Greg Mitchell shows up in a number of the comments.

We are extraordinarily fortunate to converse today with psychiatrist and psychohistorical researcher Robert Jay Lifton. His new memoir, written after 60 years of professional life, is an amazingly fascinating and entertaining book. Dr. Lifton speaks in his persona of a gifted, intelligent, and rational observer and thinker, a self-described disciple of the Enlightenment and a humanist approach to understanding.

Yet Dr. Lifton was more than a mere witness to history. As his book describes it, his experience working with traumatized returning Vietnam veterans transformed the researcher into an activist as well, and he has continued making outspoken criticisms of U.S. military and interrogation/torture policies ever since. In 2004, he was one of the first medical professionals to speak out against the participation of doctors, nurses, and medics in torture by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Dr. Lifton’s witnessing was always of an active sort, however, seeking to use understanding and intellect to bring light to some of the darkest episodes in recent history. To visit his work is to descend along with him into the most hellish and evil places in modern times, and his work acts like a kind of Virgilian torch for use by we Dante-like pilgrims, visiting hell to discover our own humanity, no matter what uncomfortable truths might await us.

In his book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, one of the most important works of psychology in the 20^th century, Dr. Lifton interviews the victims of a massive “thought reform” campaign by the victorious Chinese Communist Party, undertaken in the aftermath of a terrible civil war, and under the blows of the Cold War and Korean War. In the process of this encounter with totalism – the manipulation of mind and personality by preying upon the fear of death, the power of group pressures and interpersonal pressures to produce false confessions, the internal splitting or dissociative properties of the mind, and the inescapable drama of individual identity formation – Dr. Lifton’s analysis made a tremendous contribution to our understanding of extreme psychological states, and extreme modalities of social and historical experience.

There were other such confrontations and discoveries, as Dr. Lifton’s personal intellectual and career journey led him to study another totalistic assault, albeit one imposed by distant technological, yet terrible means, in his study on the victims of Hiroshima, later published as Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. Years later, he wrote, along with Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, an amazing book about U.S. societal reaction to the destruction of the atomic bomb, the psychology of the men who decided to use it, and the collective denial that has captured our society ever since, while the insane destructive fantasy of total nuclear annihilation haunts us still.

Dr. Lifton’s memoir is organized around these fateful encounters, and the works that emerged from them, from the “thought reform” and Hiroshima work, to his massive 1986 study, The Nazi Doctors – about which he speaks at length about the difficult personal toll in undertaking such a work – and his encounters with the traumatized Vietnam veterans, and opposition to the Vietnam War in general (Home from the War: Learning from the Vietnam Veterans).

Dr. Lifton’s work has continued to enlighten in an activist way, from his work on the apocalyptic Japanese cult, Aum Shrinrikyo (Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism) to the extreme ideology of world domination that arose in U.S. ruling circles following 9/11 (Superpower Syndrome). But his new memoir, while it takes the reader on a journey into the dark territory surrounding “an extreme century” is also a moving personal account of personal development, and of those he encountered along the way.

Accompanied by his supportive and accomplished wife, BJ, and sometimes his children, Dr. Lifton had the good luck to encounter and collaborate with some of the best minds of the last century. Those who seek anecdote about the famous will not be disappointed, as Dr. Lifton describes his relationship with his great mentor, the famous psychoanalyst and theoretician Erik Erikson, his meetings with anthropologist Margaret Mead, his confrontation with Nazi doctor and famed ethologist, Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, his friendship with novelists Elie Wiesel and Norman Mailer, among other fascinating people who populate his new work.

Dr. Lifton did not remain in an ivory tower. As he explains in his memoir, stirred by the protests of the 1960s, he became an activist, and was twice arrested for civil disobedience against the Vietnam War. At his Wellfleet, Massachusetts home, he initiated a series of yearly meetings, beginning in 1966, and still continuing today, drawing together an idiosyncratic collection of academics, clinicians, artists and thinkers to discuss what he first characterized as psychohistory, but apparently grew larger into wide-ranging discussions about psychology, history, art, current events, all animated by Lifton’s own personality, rooted in inquiry, honesty, and good humor mixed with intellectual rigor.

As a balance to the dark powers of totalism, which draw upon the deepest roots of human psychological vulnerability and threaten the very planet in its death-defying search for unreachable immortality and omnipotence, Dr. Lifton counterposes a vision of a protean self, of symbolic immortality through embracing the connectivity of all humans throughout time. Proteanism concerns “the self’s capacity to change and transform itself,” its creative capacities, and its many cultural variations.

At a large reception during a conference, a graduate student I didn’t know confronted me in a New York/sixties manner so brash as to be almost charming: “Hey, Lifton, I tried to be a protean man and it doesn’t work.” Again I smiled, this time perhaps with a little more uneasiness. I told him that proteanism was not an absolute – one didn’t have to be changing or reconfiguring one’s psyche every day – but rather a tendency of the self. That was true enough, but I knew it to be only the beginning of an answer. (Witness to an Extreme Century, p. 369)

Modern history has presented us with the gravest questions and dilemmas, but Robert Jay Lifton has presented us with the beginning of some answers, and for this we can be grateful. With that, let’s welcome to Firedoglake, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton.

Doctors of the Dark Side (video)

If the trailer is any indication, writer/director Martha Davis is putting together a stunning documentary about the role of doctors and psychologists in the construction and implementation of the U.S. torture program. The work is supposed to be finished soon, and released this December. -- I should say that I am both supportive of Dr. Davis's work, and have even been interviewed for the film. But this does not weaken my message, it strengthens it. I participated because I believe in the importance of the issue. I recommend making a donation to the filmmakers, who have largely relied on their own pocketbooks to finance this outstanding work.

The following is from the film's website, where you'll also find links to donate, as well as more web-links on the issue of doctors, psychologists and torture.

Doctors of the Dark Side exposes the scandal behind the torture scandal -- how psychologists and physicians devised, supervised and covered up the torture of detainees in U.S. controlled military prisons. Writer/Director Martha Davis (Interrogation Psychologists) spent four years investigating the controversy. Lisa Rinzler (Pollock), award-winning Director of Photography, gives the feature length HD film a dark and haunting quality. Actors demonstrate enhanced interrogation methods and the doctor's role according to declassified CIA and Department of Defense documents. The stories of three detainees and the doctors involved in their torture reveal, both for detainee health care and the integrity of the professions, the cost of putting doctors virtually in charge of detainee interrogations.

Martha Davis, Writer, Director, Producer
Thea Kerman, Executive Producer
Lisa Rinzler, Director of Photography
M. Trevino, Editor

For more information on the film, contact Co-Producer Hermine Muskat at HMuskat@doctorsofthedarkside.com.

Trailblazing Film on Psychiatric Hospital Horrors, "Titicut Follies" Now Online

Long forbidden for public viewing -- the only U.S. film ever banned for reasons other than obscenity or national security -- a copy of Frederick Wiseman's award-winning 1967 film Titicut Follies has been made available online, thanks to egtvonline.com. The film is distributed for public sale on DVD by Zipporah Films.

According to the film website IMDb:

The only American film banned from release for reasons other than obscenity or national security, Titicut Follies was filmed inside the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, a prison hospital for the criminally insane. After the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sued the filmmakers, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the film constituted was an invasion of inmate privacy and ordered the withdrawal of the film from circulation.

Zipporah Films describes the film thus:

The film is a stark and graphic portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. TITICUT FOLLIES documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers and psychiatrists.

Robert Coles at The New Republic wrote of the film:

After a showing of TITICUT FOLLIES the mind does not dwell on the hospital’s ancient and even laughable physical plant, or its pitiable social atmosphere. What sticks, what really hurts is the sight of human life made cheap and betrayed. We see men needlessly stripped bare, insulted, herded about callously, mocked, taunted. We see them ignored or locked interminably in cells. We hear the craziness in the air, the sudden outbursts, the quieter but stronger undertow of irrational noise that any doctor who has worked under such circumstances can only take for so long. But much more significantly, we see the ‘professionals’, the doctors and workers who hold the fort in the Bridgewaters of this nation, and they are all over…TITICUT FOLLIES is a brilliant work of art...

The film carries stark associations for those of us who have lived through the years of Abu Ghraib, Bagram, CIA "black site" EIT torture, and Guantanamo, and in particular have witnessed the collaboration of medical and psychological personnel in the implementation and operation of the torture practices at these sites. It has long been rumored that Bridgewater State Hospital was a site for MKULTRA mind control and drug experiments in the 1950s and 1960s.

While I could not verify the latter in a fashion that was compelling, in the well-regarded book by Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton, Jr., The Mind Manipulators, the authors describe experimental studies in cytogenetics and the brain conducted at Bridgewater in the early 1970s, at least four years after the release of this film. The researchers were looking for ways to identify subjects for psychosurgery to "control violent behavior in some destructive individuals." The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration gave a $79,900 grant (almost $425,000 in current dollars) to Dr. Lawrence Razavi, who would use prisoners at Bridgewater to see if "individuals suitable for psycosurgery could... be identified at reasonable cost by using the filter of routine fingerprints" (pp. 292-294).

The connection with prisoner abuse at Bridgewater -- including widespread use of isolation and nudity, and force feeding of hunger strikers -- is tantalizing since Dr. Robert A. Fein worked there from 1976 to 1985. Dr. Fein is today one of the "three members of the [CIA's] Intelligence Science Board, a panel that reports to the director of national intelligence", and a central consultant for President Obama's plans to reform U.S. policy on interrogations. The other two members of the panel are former Deputy Attorney General and current Harvard law professor Philip Heymann and former CIA official John MacGaffin.

Heymann was "the number-two official in Janet Reno's Justice Department," and publicly has spoken about reconciling the need for democratic liberties with counter-terrorism policy. MacGaffin was formerly "number two spymaster for clandestine operations", and later a liaison between the FBI and CIA. According to PBS's Frontline, MacGaffin is

... critical of taking a law enforcement approach to terrorism when there is the possibility that a suspect can be used to gather intelligence about an organization. He argues that during the Cold War, the FBI was very effective at infiltrating the Communist Party inside the U.S. and that it can and should try this approach with terrorist organizations. MacGaffin, along with five other former U.S. national security officials, is the author of a July 2003 article published in The Economist titled "America Needs More Spies.

As for psychologist Robert Fein, there is no reason to believe he was associated with any abuses at Bridgewater. But it would be interesting to know what conditions existed at the prison hospital during Fein's stay there, and how he was affected by it.

One thing is certain: it is difficult to watch the film and not be powerfully affected by it. It is almost a cliche to call it "graphic." It is disturbing and enlightening. Warning: contains scenes of nudity, obscenity, and strong emotional intensity.

Late Summer Reads on Psychology, Anthropology & National Security

For those trying to squeeze in some serious late summer reading, I strongly recommend Dr. Bryant Welch's recently published book, State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind.

Dr. Welch elegantly and succinctly describes the psychological mechanisms behind paranoia and denial, and links them to the mindset of many Americans post-9/11. This societal regression due to fear and uncertainty is exploited by political leaders and charlatans in a process Dr. Welch calls political gaslighting. The term "gaslighting" is derived from the classic movie Gaslight (with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman), where a sociopathic husband subtly manipulates his wife's reality and invalidates her sense of what is real, until she feels she is becoming insane and enters a state of mental breakdown.

From State of Confusion:

When the mind's reality sense is repeatedly manipulated by clever people with devious intent, victims' mental ability to function is effectively eroded, and they become disoriented. Rationality falls by the wayside. People behave erratically, and, because of their own ever increasing uncertainty, they become dependent on demagogues and ideologues who speak confidently and appear to offer escape from the uncertainty. This has happened to millions of Americans who, lured by moralistic bromides, have turned to neoconservative spokesmen, ministers, and politicians and become dependent upon them, even enthralled by them....

Political gaslighting is a sophisticated psychological art form that has combined with mass media techniques to become a very powerful political instrument.... the American mind is being manipulated, making America's national behavior highly dysfunctional and volatile.

The book goes into more detail on the mental and social processes involved in this national regression and experience of mass manipulation, making it clear we live in very dangerous times. Those who seek to fight back against political reaction need to read about and understand the social-psychological processes that inhabit the psyches of those who fall under the sway of such reaction, and I can think of no better introduction than Dr. Byrant's book.

"The "Melding of Science and Commerce"

For those who may not have the time to read a full book right now, there are a few good articles I'd like to recommend.

For those following the controversy at APA, a long-time psychologist has started a website, VirtualAPA, and has produced two articles on the controversies over psychologist participation in torture and coercive interrogations. While I can't say I follow some of his more philosophical musings, his analysis of the dilemma that faces the American Psychological Association and institutional psychology (and by extension, psychiatry and medicine in general) is both sharp and incisive.

Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen are not members of APA and can only be assailed from afar as unethical practitioners or ill informed scientists. The entity of Mitchell, Jessen and Associates can continue to operate and will function according to an entrepreneurial ethic. Their SERE training model is a brand, a product that has been successfully marketed to the military and to private corporate interests. The extension of their model into the detention centers and the “reverse engineering” is a logical business decision. They have increased their market share and can justify their actions, just as any military contractor does, that their efforts are good for the country and good for business.

This melding of science and commerce permeates the entire field.

Embedding Anthropologists?

Finally, over at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Hugh Gusterson has a good article on The U.S. Military's Quest to Weaponize Culture. In the article, Gusterson explains both the rationale and the growing opposition to embedding anthropologists and other social scientists in military operational teams, such as the so-called Human Terrain Team System:

The Pentagon plans 26 Human Terrain Teams--one for each combat brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan. The five-person teams include three military personnel. Each team also includes an anthropologist--or another social scientist--who will wear a military uniform and receive weapons training. Described as doing "armed social work" by David Kilcullen, an Australian expert in counterinsurgency who advises Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, the teams elicit information from villagers for Pentagon databases and provide cultural orientation to U.S. military leaders....

Last year, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a statement condemning the use of anthropologists in Human Terrain Teams....

One cannot grasp AAA's concerns without understanding that anthropologists have a unique research method that brings with it special ethical responsibilities: We engage in what one anthropologist has called "deep hanging out" with people, passing the time with them, often day after day for months, painstakingly earning their trust and getting them to tell us about their worlds. What distinguishes anthropology from espionage (apart from anthropologists' impenetrable jargon) is that we seek the consent of our subjects, and we follow an injunction to do no harm to those we study. According to the anthropological code of ethics, our obligations to those we study trump all others--to colleagues, funders, and nation.

The article continues with an examination of another Pentagon program, Project Minerva, which plans to spend millions of dollars "to mobilize social scientists for open research related to the war on terror."

Meanwhile, U.S. Army personnel are showing up at meetings of anthropologists and taking down names and institutional affiliations of anthropologists who had signed a public pledge not to participate in "counter-insurgency operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the 'war on terror,'" believing that "anthropologists should refrain from directly assisting the US military in combat, be it through torture, interrogation, or tactical advice."

The U.S. ruling class's mobilization of all layers of civil society for the fear-driven defense of the nation against "terror," is leading to the militarization of the society as a whole. We are already far down this path... too far, such that many sober observers would already call the United States "fascistic."

I would stop short of making that judgment, but we may be closer to it than anyone would like to think. What is lacking is an all-out domestic assault against political opponents and organizations the government deems to be a danger to its political rule and ideology. Under fascistic rule, thousands, if not tens, even hundreds of thousands would be jailed, and violent terror against domestic political opponents would become the order of the day.

Let us hope it does not come to that. A portion of the academy is fighting back, as are other sectors of the society. The "hope" presidential aspirant Barack Obama embodies (whether he really intends it or not) is precisely the hope that U.S. society can turn back from the self-destructive path it appears at times determined to follow.

"Why Did the American Psychological Association Do it?"

Dr. Byant Welch has graciously allowed permission to reproduce the following article. I reviewed it in a blog piece last week. The entire article is worth reading, and I thank him for giving that privilege to readers of Invictus.

Why did the American Psychological Association do it?
By Bryant Welch

The regressive effects of current forms of political manipulation that I describe in my new book, State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, June, 2008) have not only affected American politics. They have also taken their toll on psychologists’ national organization, the American Psychological Association. Many APA members were shocked last year when APA twice refused to take an unequivocal stance against psychologists’ participation in the Bush detention centers. The fact that other health care organizations, typically more conservative than APA on humanitarian issues, were very outspoken about the issue made it all the more puzzling.

In human rights groups and liberal organizations around the world the arguments APA spokespersons advanced in support of APA’s position did not pass the red face test for credibility. Instead, their seemingly transparent disingenuousness only made the APA sound embarrassingly like the Bush Administration.

Banning psychologists’ participation in reputed torture mills was clearly unnecessary, it was argued. To do so would be an insult to military psychologists everywhere. Psychologists would never engage in torture. Further, psychologists’ participation in these detention centers was really an antidote to torture since psychologists’ presence could protect the potential torture victims. We psychologists were both too good and too important to join our professional colleagues in taking an absolutist moral position against one of the most shameful eras in our country’s history.

There are two questions that beg for answers. How did the APA form such an obviously close connection to the military? And why did the APA governance-the Board of Directors and the Council of Representatives-go along with the military interests? How could an organization of such bright and ethical people be rendered so incompetent to protect the profession from the horrible black eye they have given us?

I have had ample opportunity to observe both the inner workings of the APA and the personalities and organizational vicissitudes that have affected it over the last two decades. With one interruption, for most of the twenty year period from 1983 through 2003 I worked inside the APA central office as the first Executive Director of the APA Practice Directorate and served in several governance positions including Chair of the APA Board of Professional Affairs and member of the APA Council of Representatives.

When the torture issue broke last year, the answer to the first question about APA’s military connection seemed obvious to me. Since the early 1980’s APA has had a unique relationship with Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye’s office. Inouye, for much of that time, has served as Chair of the Subcommittee on Defense for the Senate Appropriations Committee. The Subcommittee has responsibility for all U.S. defense spending. One of Inouye’s administrative assistants, psychologist Patrick DeLeon, has long been active in the APA and served a term as APA president. For over twenty-five years relationships between APA and the Department of Defense (DOD) have been strongly encouraged and closely coordinated by DeLeon. It was DeLeon acting on behalf of Inouye who initiated the DOD psychologist prescription demonstration project in the late 1980’s that began psychology’s efforts to secure prescriptive privileges.

For many APA governance members, most of whom have little Washington political experience, Dr. DeLeon is perceived as a canny politician and political force on Capitol Hill. The two most visible APA presidents on the torture issue, Ronald Levant and Gerald Koocher, based on personal discussions I have had with them in recent years, clearly hold DeLeon’s political savvy in high regard.

While I personally got along well with DeLeon and never doubted his commitment to psychology, his view of psychology and his sense of priorities were quite different from mine, and I did not share the positive assessments of Dr. DeLeon’s political prowess. I felt his priorities often had more to do with the status of psychology as reflected in comparatively minor issues that were often unconnected to issues that were of true importance to practitioners and patients. Rightly or wrongly, I often felt that an accurate sense of context was missing from his political analysis and objectives. It’s the same feeling I have now when I look aghast at what APA has done on the torture issue. Except this time, it is not something relatively innocuous.

Some people attempt to explain APA’s recent seemingly inexplicable behavior by assuming that large sums of money changed hands on the torture issue. I could certainly be wrong, but I think the more likely (and more remarkable) explanation is that those APA leaders making the decisions simply exercised judgment that was both that bad and that insensitive to the realities of the human suffering they were supporting..

Regardless, there is no question that APA had formed a strong relationship with military psychologists and the DOD through its connections with Inouye’s office.

But it is the second question that is probably more difficult to understand from afar. How could both the APA Board of Directors and the APA Council of Representatives support the military on this issue and subject the profession to such embarrassment by supporting a policy that is anathema to the vast majority of psychologists?

The moral decay and functional regression of an organization does not rise or fall with any single event any more than the fall of Rome truly occurred in 476 AD. What is clear to me, instead, is that the pluralistic and multi-faceted governing process that I witnessed when I first entered the APA in the early 1980’s was sharply curtailed during the 1990’s. Differences of opinion stopped and the APA suffered a terrible regression. Increasingly inbred, under the administration of Raymond Fowler, the association agenda was primarily and at times exclusively financial, focusing on making money both through real estate ventures and through what many of us felt was a an unwarranted, financially harsh treatment of APA employees.

More peculiarly, Fowler’s “agenda” for APA was encapsulated in the phrase “working together” a noble idea that to the best of my knowledge was never attached to any actual substantive agenda. Instead, it served as a means of social control, a subtle injunction against raising any of the conflictual issues, challenges, or ideas that need to be addressed in any vital and accountable organization. The APA became placid and increasingly detached.

The result was that much of the activity of the APA Council of Representatives turned away from substantive matters into an odd system of fawning over one another. Many members appeared to me to simply bathe in the good feeling that came from “working together.” For some, the bath was a narcissistic one and organizational regression became more debilitating. In other instances during this period, isolated dissent from rank and file members was stifled either with heavy handed letters from the APA attorney threatening legal action or by communications from prominent members of the APA governance threatening ethical action if policy protests were not discontinued.

The inept ability to deliberate on the torture issue was but the shocking denouement of an organizational process that was really set in motion in the early 1990’s largely to serve the convenience of a very small number of individuals.

As a result of the lengthy era of regression, the governance of APA was ill prepared for thoughtful deliberation on a matter as important as the torture issue. As I have written in State of Confusion when people are confused they are eager to be told what is real. The governance was simply over its head in trying to effectively deliberate on such an issue when there was organized support on the other side coming from the military interests supported by Koocher and Levant and possibly DeLeon.

When the torture issue arose, the Council, despite the efforts of several council members, fell victim to some of the very silly arguments described above. Council members were told that to oppose psychologists participation in the detention actions was to cruelly suggest that our colleagues might engage in torture. In a fashion chillingly characteristic of the gaslighter it was implied that those who raised concern about torture, were themselves torturing their colleagues who were working in the military. One prominent member of the APA governance gratuitously raised the ethnicity of one of the military psychologists seemingly opening the possibility that the opponents to torture were racist.

These arguments were then followed with the grandiose closing argument that psychologists presence at the detention centers was critical to make sure torture did not recur. We psychologists had a moral duty to prevent immoral behavior. The piano player once aroused to the possibility of what was going on upstairs was now necessary to prevent it. Yes, these were the arguments that carried the day in APA deliberations and enabled the military to have its way with the APA. In the more discerning eyes of the world, they have very little credibility.

But the gaslighting is not over, even now. There is one more step in the process. History will show this to be a despicable period of American history. The people who have supported APA’s position on this issue obviously do not want their legacy at APA to include that they supported a policy that failed to indict the detention centers. The recent history must be revised. In a seeming gesture of reconciliation the APA has offered to continue negotiating the matter with the dissident groups. In this fashion the historical revision has already begun. It may well be the final policy APA adopts will ultimately read the way it should have last summer and much, much earlier when it actually mattered. APA will “get it right” shortly before or shortly after George Bush leaves office. In leaving a final written policy that is like our sister organizations’ original policies, APA’s shocking failure at the critical time will appear never to have happened.

Such is the work of a regressed and chronically manipulated organization. Despite being an organization of psychologists, APA has been subjected to very little analysis. Psychologists are amongst the most moral and ethical people I know. They deserved better from their national organization, just as Americans have deserved better from their government.

This article originally appeared in Psychologist-Psychoanalyst, the newsletter of the Division of Psychoanalysis, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3 (Summer 2008), pp. 6-10.

Bryant L. Welch, JD, PhD is the author of the new book State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, June 10, 2008). He established the American Psychological Association Practice Directorate serving as its first executive director and currently lives and practices psychology on Hilton Head Island, SC. He can be reached directly via e-mail at welchfirm@aol.com.

Why I'm Leaving APA

I’m sending a letter off to the American Psychological Association (APA) explaining my decision to resign membership from that organization. The text of the letter follows below (with hypertext links added here to assist the reader with context).

January 27, 2008

Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.
President, American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4232

Dear Dr. Kazdin,

I hereby resign my membership in the American Psychological Association (APA). I have up until now been working with Psychologists for an Ethical APA for an overturn in APA policy on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations, and I greatly respect those who are fighting via a dues boycott to influence APA policy on this matter. I hope to still work with these principled and dedicated professionals, but I cannot do it anymore from a position within APA.

Unlike some others who have left APA, my resignation is not based solely on the stance APA has taken regarding the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations. Rather, I view APA’s shifting position on interrogations to spring from a decades-long commitment to serve uncritically the national security apparatus of the United States. Recent publications and both public and closed professional events sponsored by APA have made it clear that this organization is dedicated to serving the national security interests of the American government and military, to the extent of ignoring basic human rights practice and law. The influence of the Pentagon and the CIA in APA activities is overt and pervasive, if often hidden. The revelations over the constitution and behavior of the 2005 Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) panel are a case in point. While charged with investigating the dilemmas for psychologists involved in military interrogations in the light of the scandals surrounding Guanatamo’s Camp Delta and Abu Ghraib prison, it was stacked with military and governmental personnel, and closely monitored and pressured by APA staff.

I strongly disagree with APA’s current position on interrogations, and am unimpressed with recent clarifications to that position that allows for voluntary non-participation in specifically defined cases where torture and abuse of prisoners is proved to exist. I have discussed my reasoning for this elsewhere, both blogging on the Internet and in public. In 2007, I was a panelist in the “mini-convention,” which examined the dispute over interrogations held at the APA Convention in San Francisco, presenting my findings on secret and non-secret psychologist research into isolation, sensory deprivation and sensory overload.

I will briefly review my objections to APA policy and practices, then place them in the context of current APA institutional objectives and goals. I find the latter to be antithetical to the ideals of an ethical and beneficent organization promoting psychological knowledge and practice.

*** APA’s position on non-involvement in torture allows psychologists to work in settings that do not allow the basic right of habeas corpus, in addition to practices of humane confinement as delineated in the Conventions of the Geneva Protocols and various international documents and treaties.

*** APA maintains in private communications that relegating various modes of psychological torture (sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, isolation) and the use of drugs in interrogations to something less than outright prohibition in recent APA position papers does not mean APA had any intention of providing a “loophole” for interrogators in the practice of coercive interrogations. APA also promises to clarify its position on these matters in an “ethics casebook.” When it has found it exigent, as on the PENS resolution, to step outside normal procedure to clarify its position, it has done so. I find it noteworthy that recent APA clarifications of its position are treated as something requiring less than direct organizational expression.

*** APA continues to propagate a position that it knows is not true, specifically that psychologists operate in interrogation settings to prevent abusive interrogations. While sometimes citing the compelling conclusions about context and behavior outlined by Zimbardo, and stemming from his famous Prisoner Experiment, it twists the representation of this research by making psychologists into a quasi-police force monitoring abusive interrogations. On the contrary, the Zimbardo research leads to a more unsettling conclusion, i.e., that human beings in general are susceptible to participation in abusive behavior based upon contextual factors. In fact, the Zimbardo research argues, as Dr. Zimbardo himself has done, against participation in these kinds of interrogations.

*** APA has shown precious little interest in the many revelations regarding psychologist participation in torture, or in psychologist research into abusive or coercive interrogations. Excepting only a brief period in the late 1970s, when widespread and public exposure of CIA mind control programs raised considerable scandal, APA has shown little inclination to confront the history of psychologist participation in such research, nor of its own institutional role in this research.

*** Finally, recent APA activities, such as the joint CIA/Rand Corporation/APA July 2003 workshop in the “Science of Deception,” point to questionable current participation in unethical practices and illegal governmental activities. I queried relevant actors and APA leaders as to what actually occurred at this workshop, which the APA Science Directorate described as discussing how to use “pharmacological agents to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?” Also considered was the study of “sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors,” with workshop participants asked, “How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?” I never received any answer from relevant APA personnel, including the current director of ethics, about what was going on at this workshop.

The latter episode captures the terrible trap into which APA has fallen. When making agreements with state intelligence and military agencies, it is usual that secrecy agreements are signed. This makes it impossible to reasonably assess and monitor the activities of psychologists in national security settings. Furthermore, the subordination of military psychologists to the chain of command of the armed forces also allows for ineffective if not impossible oversight of psychologist activities. But the problem with secrecy does not end there. Major researchers, including even a former APA president, who contracted with the government, or had their work utilized by the military, as for the latter’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape or SERE program, have told me they are unable to discuss matters beyond a certain point, or tried to restrict discussion of these matters, no doubt due in part to secrecy restrictions. Summing up this point, governmental secrecy and scientific enterprise are in direct opposition to each other, and secrecy negates the promise of effective oversight, not to mention the distortions it renders upon the scientific process itself.

In the recently APA published book, Psychology in the Service of National Security (APA Press, 2006), the book’s editor, A. David Mangelsdorff, wrote, “As the military adjusts to its changing roles in the new national security environment, psychologists have much to offer” (p. 237). He notes the recent forward military deployment of psychologists, their use in so-called anti-terrorism research, and assistance in influencing public opinion about “national security problems facing the nation.” L. Morgan Banks, himself Chief of the Psychological Applications Directorate of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, and a member of the controversial PENS panel, wrote elsewhere in the same book about the “bright future” (p. 95) for psychologists working with Special Operations Forces. Never mind that SOPs have been implicated in torture in Afghanistan, including receiving instructions in such coercive procedures from psychologists from some of the same psychologists, by the way, that attended the APA/CIA workshop noted above.) Nowhere could I find in the entire book a discussion of ethical problems surrounding these issues, nor certainly of political and social questions implicit in such outright support of governmental initiatives and military policy. Additionally, and curiously, there is no discussion of psychologist participation in military interrogations anywhere in the book.

In my opinion, and despite the otherwise notable and positive stances and activities of APA on other aspects of social note, such as work against prejudice against gays and lesbians, or against race prejudice, it is an unfortunate but urgent fact that APA as an institution has become subordinated to the state when it comes to military matters. In other words, when it comes to interrogations and psychologist military activities in general, APA acts as an arm of the Pentagon and a support agency for the CIA. The differences around interrogation policy APA has with the Bush Administration is itself a mirror of differences with the administration itself, and within different governmental departments. In such instances, APA acts as the instrument of one or another faction within government, but not as an independent actor and representative of the profession and its ideals and goals.

I would suggest the following remedies, if any are still possible, in turning around the degeneration of APA into a willing instrument for U.S. military and intelligence interests:

1) A full opening of all APA archives related to research and participation in activities with the military, including its intelligence arms; and a call for the government to declassify all documents related to the same;

2) The disestablishment of Division 19, the Society for Military Psychology, from the APA;

3) The immediate recission of APA’s Ethics Code 1.02, which was changed from earlier formulations in 2002 to permit adherence “to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority” when there is otherwise a conflict between the law and psychologists’ ethical practice. Opponents of 1.02 have rightly compared it to the Nazi defense of “following orders” at Nuremberg;

4) A call for the formation of a civilian, cross-disciplinary investigatory panel to examine the past history and current collaboration of scientific and medical professionals with the government, especially its military and intelligence agencies, to encompass fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, with a goal of producing recommendations on interactions between government and the scientific and medical communities;

5) A moratorium on research into interrogations;

6) Sever the link that ties APA’s definition of “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment” in its various resolutions from the Reagan-era Reservations to the UN Convention Against Torture, which seeks to weaken that definition by relying on suspect interpretations of U.S. law rather than international definitions;

7) The immediate cessation of all support for involvement of psychological personnel in participation in any activity that supports national security interrogations.

The sordid history of American psychology when it comes to collaboration with governmental agencies in the research and implementation of techniques of psychological torture is one that our field will have to confront sooner or later. In a larger sense, the problems I have presented here are inherent in a larger societal dilemma regarding the uses of knowledge. This problem was recognized by the first critics of untrammeled scientific advance, and represented powerfully by Goethe’s Faust, and Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein. Human knowledge is capable of producing both good and evil. The scientist, the scholar, and the doctor hold tremendous responsibility in their hands. That they have not shown themselves, in a tragic number of instances, to ethically wield or control this responsibility has meant that the 21st century opens under the awful prospect of worldwide nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, while a sinister, behaviorally-designed torture apparatus operates as the servant of nation-states wielding these awful weapons of mass destruction.

It’s appropriate that I close with a statement about the problem of serving powerful national interests from a former president of the APA, a leading and important pioneer in our field, and also, for awhile, a member with top secret clearance in the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control program, Carl Rogers. One wonders, along with the authors of a recent study on Dr. Rogers’ CIA collaboration (see Demanchick & Kirschenbaum (2008), Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 48, pp. 6-30), if Rogers’ exposure to the world of secret government military projects didn’t inform his feelings about psychologists and government, as expressed in his famous debate with another seminal psychologist, B. F. Skinner:

To hope that the power which is being made available by the behavioral sciences will be exercised by the scientists, or by a benevolent group, seems to me a hope little supported by either recent or distant history. It seems far more likely that behavioral scientists, holding their present attitudes, will be in the position of the German rocket scientists specializing in guided missiles. First they worked devotedly for Hitler to destroy the U.S.S.R. and the United States. Now, depending on who captured them, they work devotedly for the U.S.S.R. in the interest of destroying the United States, or devotedly for the United States in the interest of destroying the U.S.S.R. If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science, it seems most probably that they will serve the purposes of whatever individual or group has the power. (Rogers & Skinner (1956), “Some issues concerning the control of human behavior. A symposium.” Science, 124, p. 1061.)

Sincerely yours,

J------ K------, Ph.D.
San Francisco, CA

My APA Paper on Isolation, Sensory Deprivation & Sensory Overload

The following is the text of a paper I presented on Sunday, August 19, 2007 to an audience of about three hundred at the American Psychological Association (APA) convention in San Francisco, California. It is, in fact, an abstract of a much longer paper now in the final stages of preparation. Its brevity was dictated by the very short time speaking time allowed. I have included my bibliography here for those interested.

As many are no doubt aware, the APA Council of Representatives passed a resolution on psychologist participation in coercive interrogations that was long on rhetoric, but far short on substance. In essence, the APA legitimized psychologist practice in settings where indefinite detention occurs, along with sensory and sleep deprivation, sensory over-stimulation, and use of drugs (as long as not for the purpose of eliciting interrogation).

My paper was written with the intent to document the long history of behavioral science collaboration with abusive interrogation research, particularly around the subject of sensory deprivation (SD). I did not have time in this paper to address the strong observational and naturalistic evidence of the debilitating effects of isolation and SD, and readers will have to await my longer, published paper.

It is also worth noting that the negative effects of SD are powerfully amplified by the overall context of the coercive and abusive environment in the prison or detainee environment. In fact, as regards interrogation or conditions of prisoner incarceration, SD is never used alone, but in combination with other coercive techniques.

++++++++++

Isolation, Sensory Deprivation, and Sensory Overload: An Historical Overview

“The abuse of knowledge causes incredulity.” – Rousseau

The use of isolation and sensory deprivation at U.S. foreign prisons, the detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, and the Charleston Naval Brig in South Carolina has been well documented. Physicians for Human Rights has an excellent pamphlet called “Break Them Down” that offers an overwhelming amount of documentation. The important thing to understand about the use of psychological torture is that the conditions of detention are inexorably intertwined with the techniques of interrogation.

This presentation is a historical look at the research project that was sensory deprivation, conducted 35-50 years ago, in which psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists worked for the CIA and the Pentagon to understand the effects of sensory deprivation, and which ended in making sensory deprivation, and later sensory overload, an integral part of the U.S. coercive interrogation paradigm. One obvious problem with this research is the lack of any controlled experiments upon actual prisoners. A less obvious but even more serious problem concerns lack of access to classified materials and studies, especially given that much of the research was done by intelligence and military entities and kept secret.

The beginnings of concentrated psychological research into the manipulation of sensory and perceptual stimulation began early in the Cold War in the late 1940s-early 1950s. Donald Hebb, a past president of the American Psychological Association and an important theoretician in psychology, was an early researcher into sensory deprivation’s effects upon adult human beings.

Dr. Hebb explained his involvement at a Harvard symposium on sensory deprivation in June 1958.

The work that we have done at McGill University began, actually, with the problem of brainwashing. We were not permitted to say so in the first publishing.... The chief impetus, of course, was the dismay at the kind of “confessions” being produced at the Russian Communist trials. “Brainwashing” was a term that came a little later, applied to Chinese procedures. We did not know what the Russian procedures were, but it seemed that they were producing some peculiar changes of attitude. How?

One possible factor was perceptual isolation and we concentrated on that. (Solomon 1961)

Marks (1979) describes the atmosphere in behavioral and psychiatric research in the 1950s and early 1960s:

Nearly every scientist on the frontiers of brain research found men from secret agencies looking over his shoulders, impinging on the research.

University of Virginia bioethicist Jonathan Moreno, wrote recently (Moreno 2006):

To a great extent, modern psychology and social science were founded on the financial support they received from national intelligence agencies during and after World War II.... These close ties remained after hostilities against the Axis powers ended. In the early 1950s, nearly all federal funding for social science came from the military, and the Office of Naval Research was leading sponsor of psychological research from any source in the immediate postwar years. The CIA found ways to support a large number of Ivy League academics, often without the professors’ knowledge, as its funds were passed through dummy foundations that often gave grants to other foundations. (p. 65)

Besides Hebb’s research at McGill, other centers of extensive research on sensory deprivation during the period under consideration included many U.S. and Canadian sites, including, but not limited to: Princeton University; the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland; Boston City Hospital and Harvard University; the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland; the University of Manitoba; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the Research Center for Mental Health at New York University; Cornell University; various VA hospitals, and many others.

By the mid-1970s, however, there was a steep drop-off in published literature on sensory deprivation. The reason for this is unknown, but could be due to controversies over revelations of these and other programs by the military and CIA (Greenfield 1977). The decline in research is also coincident in time with the cancellation of the CIA’s MKSEARCH program, the successor of MKULTRA, in June 1972.

In any case, the use of isolation and sensory deprivation was continued by U.S. intelligence agencies, as evinced by the CIA’s 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (HRETM) (CIA 1983). What follows is a selection of relevant quotes, presented here as giving an intelligence operational view of the effects of sensory deprivation and overload:

The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the subject regresses, his learned personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. He begins to lose the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships, or to cope with repeated frustrations. (CIA 1983, p. K-1)

As regards deprivation of sensory stimuli, the CIA training manual explains:

Solitary confinement acts on most persons as a powerful stressor. A person cut off from external stimuli turns his awareness inward and projects his unconsious [sic] outward. The symptoms most commonly produced by solitary confinement are superstition, intense love of any other living thing, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, hallucinations, and delusions...

Deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress and anxiety. The more complete the deprivation, the more rapidly and deeply the subject is affected...

Some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects. (CIA 1983, pp. K-6, K-7)

The conclusions of the anonymous authors of the CIA manual are congruent with many of the findings of psychological and psychiatric researchers over the previous three to four decades. Princeton psychologist Jack Vernon examined the effects of sensory deprivation and isolation on a group of 18 volunteer graduate students and reported the results in 1958. He found that sensory deprivation had “a significant and essentially deleterious influence upon the subjects”, as measured by tests measuring rotary pursuit ability, color perception, motor coordination, mirror tracing, body weight, and galvanic skin resistance (Solomon 1961). The longer the period of sensory deprivation, the more marked the influence.

In the early research literature, one outstanding feature was the variability of results across experimental conditions. One important and misunderstood variable concerned the presence or absence of hallucinations in different individuals. This variability was due, in part, to a lack of standardization of variables, of controls, of definitions, in addition to personality and neuropsychological factors.

One finding that held across multiple experiments was the susceptibility of the deprivation subject to suggestibility (Solomon, 1961; Zubek 1969; (Hebb 1970). One researcher, Peter Suedfeld, concluded:

Susceptibility to external influence, including both primary suggestibility and persuasibility, is clearly increased by SD. The data indicate that this phenomenon originates with the lack of information anchors in the SD situation: the subject is at loose ends, without guidelines for his behavior, unable to concentrate, and in a state of stimulus- and information-hunger… (Suedfeld 1969, p. 166)

The question of personality variables and their influence upon isolation and deprivation results was tackled early on. Goldberger and Holt (Solomon 1961; Goldberger 1961) found that the ability to handle primary process internal stimuli, as well as other measures of ego-strength, differentiated individuals better able to adapt to sensory deprivation and isolation environments than individuals who scored low on these variables. The government found the influence of personality variables to be very important in planning interrogations, and a large part of psychologist participation in interrogations is related to personality assessment (CIA 1963).

Over the years, researchers discovered other effects of the sensory deprivation situation. One researcher concluded that the evidence was substantial: “both simple and complex measures of visual and motor coordination are adversely affected by sensory and perceptual deprivation” (Zubek 1969). Cognitive tests show “considerable impairment… on unstructured behaviors” (p. 165).

A fairly robust finding was that sensory deprivation increases sensitivity to pain, at least in its initial stages (Solomon 1961). At a symposium held in April 1956 by the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, researcher Harold Wolff reported:

We also have reason to believe that the painful experience is one that has a highly symbolic significance and is closely linked with feelings of isolation and rejection, especially when imposed by other human beings under hostile circumstances. (Vernon 1956)

In their paper from the 1958 Harvard symposium, Ruff, Edwin and Thaler (Ruff 1961) described various reactions to reduced sensory input. Examining both military and civilian volunteers at experiments done at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, they described a series of experiments utilizing varying levels of sensory deprivation and conditions of isolation. They found that by the last experiment, in which the conditions allowed the least specific amount of structuring of time duration, communication, or other activities, that a high number of subjects terminated the experiment early, unable to tolerate the conditions of the procedure and displaying “impending or partial breakdown of defenses” (p. 76).

In his article for the book The Manipulation of Human Behavior (Biderman 1961), Lawrence Hinkle, Jr. (1961) described how isolation and sensory deprivation could produce a state of disordered brain function (DBF) similar to that produced by disturbance of brain homeostasis through fever, hypothermia, dehydration, blood abnormalities, shock, hemorrhage, vomiting, and starvation. Individuals with DBF experience thinking difficulties, along with “illusions, delusions, hallucinations, and projective or paranoid thinking” (p. 26).

Hinkle concluded:

It is well known that prisoners, especially if they have not been isolated before, may develop a syndrome similar in most of its features to the “brain syndrome” [see also (Grassian 1983)]... They become dull, apathetic, and in due time they become disoriented and confused; their memories become defective and they experience hallucinations and delusions…. their ability to impart accurate information may be as much impaired as their capacity to resist an interrogator...

From the interrogator’s viewpoint it has seemed to be the ideal way of “breaking down” a prisoner, because, to the unsophisticated, it seems to create precisely the state that the interrogator desires: malleability and the desire to talk, with the added advantage that one can delude himself that he is using no force or coercion…. However, the effect of isolation on the brain function of the prisoner is much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved, or deprived of sleep.

Hebb (1970) succinctly described the effects at a presentation at the 1970 APA convention: sensory deprivation can produce “an acute disturbance of the normal personality”. It is an “atrocious procedure,” which “raises the whole question of the relation of man to his sensory environment”. Hebb noted, “making the isolation more drastic produces motivational and emotional disturbance more quickly”.

Sensory Overload

While there was for many years a multitude of studies on isolation and sensory deprivation, studies on excessive sensory stimulation were far fewer, and less focused (however, see Lindsley, 1961). Lipowski (1975) conducted a literature review of the research extant some 30 years ago. He reported on some of the work of the Japanese researchers at Tohoku University, whose reports echoed the methodological difficulties of the deprivation researchers in the U.S. Their results, however, were significant.

The Tohoku workers exposed their experimental subjects to intense auditory and visual stimuli presented randomly in a condition of confinement ranging in duration from 3 to 5 hr. The subjects showed heightened and sustained arousal, found sensory overload more aversive than deprivation, and had mood changes in the direction of aggression, anxiety, and sadness. Two subjects reported “hallucinationlike” phenomena. (Lipowski 1975)

Other U.S. researchers have replicated these results. Use of sensory overload has been a technique utilized by SERE schools, and has reportedly been transmitted to use by U.S. military and intelligence interrogators abroad (Streatfeild 2007).

In conclusion, sensory manipulation is well studied; its effects on interrogation have been known for over a generation. The belief that we don’t have enough research on these matters is unfounded. The use of sensory deprivation and overload constitutes torture, is outlawed by international treaties and agreements, and illegal under U.S. law. Active psychologist participation at facilities where it exists constitutes a war crime and should be abandoned immediately.

J------ K-----, Ph.D.

San Francisco, CA

August 19, 2007

Bibliography

Biderman, A. D. Z., Herbert, Eds. (1961). The Manipulation of Human Behavior. New York, John Wiley & Sons.

CIA. (1963). "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation." Retrieved August 15, 2007, 2007, from http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/01-01.htm.

CIA. (1983). "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual." Retrieved July 30, 2007, from http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/02-01.htm.

Goldberger, L. & Holt, R. R. (1961). A Comparison of Isolation Effects and their Personality Correlates in Two Divergent Samples. New York, Research Center for Mental Health, New York University: 1-52.

Grassian, S. (1983). "Psychopathological effects of solitary confinement." American Journal of Psychiatry 140: 1450-1454.

Greenfield, P. (1977). CIA's Behavior Caper. APA Monitor: 1, 10-11.

Hebb, D. O. (1970). "The Motivating Effects of Exteroceptive Stimulation." American Psychologist 25(4): 328-336.

Lipowski, Z. J. (1975). "Sensory and Information Inputs Overload: Behavioral Effects." Comprehensive Psychiatry 16(3): 199-221.

Moreno, J. D. (2006). Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. New York Dana Press.

Ruff, G. E. L., Edwin Z.; & Thaler, Victor H. (1961). Factors Influencing Reactions to Reduced Sensory Input. Sensory Deprivation: A Symposium Held at Harvard Medical School. P. Solomon, et al. , Eds. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press: 72-90.

Solomon, P., Kubzansky, Philip E., Leiderman, P. Herbert, Mendelson, Jack H., Trumbull, Richard, & Wexler, Donald , Eds. (1961). Sensory Deprivation: A Symposium Held at Harvard Medical School. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Streatfeild, D. (2007). Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control. New York, Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press.

Vernon, J., M. Meltzer, D. Tyler, Weinstein, E. A., Brozek, J., & Woolf, H. (1956). Factors Used to Increase the Susceptibility of Individuals to Forceful Indoctrination: Observations and Experiments. Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Asbury Park, NJ, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry.

Zubek, J. P., Ed. (1969). Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen Years of Research. New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, educational division.

Heart of Darkness: Sensory Deprivation & U.S. Torture -- Where From Here?

Many students and college graduates who have taken a psychology course have probably heard of Jerome S. Bruner. One of America's most famous psychologists, he helped found Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies. Under Lyndon Johnson, Bruner ran the National Institute of Child Health and Development. His book, The Process of Education, became a classic in the 1960s, with its far-reaching program of school curriculum reform.

Today, Bruner is 91, and still active as Research Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow in Law, at New York University. What's not commonly known is that during World War II, he was conscripted, as so many behavioral scientists were, into the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS). Or that in the later 1950s, Bruner was involved in research in sensory deprivation, much of which was funded by the U.S. government in an attempt to counter so-called Chinese brainwashing, and as part of the U.S. mind control and interrogation programs. Bruner, it seems, was unaware of his role in the latter, as we shall see.

Brainwashing Fascinates the Academy

As part of a massive U.S. program to understand what appeared to some U.S. intelligence observers to be a large brainwashing program by the Russians and the Chinese, U.S. intelligence and the military began recruiting and sponsoring psychiatrists and psychologists to do research on "brainwashing" methodology, including use of hypnosis, drugs, sleep deprivation, and isolation (solitary confinement). But there was a separate and new line of mind control research, whose headquarters were at McGill University in Montreal. There, the famous psychologist Donald O. Hebb, later president of the American Psychological Association, crafted the first large experiments on sensory deprivation from 1951-53.

Hebb's famous article, Drives and the C.N.S. (Conceptual Nervous System), and his pioneer experiments on sensory deprivation, spawned a great deal of interest in the military. And, through the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the money started to flow, reaching numerous universities and medical/psychology departments. Some of the biggest names in the field of behavioral science and medicine became witting and unwitting recruits in a research program that would culminate in a new paradigm of torture interrogation, as exemplified in the CIA's now-famous (and still partly censored) KUBARK interrogation manual of the early 1960s.

As historian Alfred McCoy described it in his book, A Question of Torture:

Although Hebb later admitted, with some sense of remorse, the clandestine source of his funding, he still incorporated findings from the sensory deprivation experiments, without any apparent regrets, into the theoretical relections that contributed to his rising scholarly reputation. In his Essay on Mind, published in 1980 after all the revelvations about CIA funding and Dr. Ewen Camerons's abusive research [at McGill University], Hebb wrote that his "so-called sensory-deprivation experiment" demonstrated "that the integrity of the mind at maturity continues to depend on... the sensory stimulation of the normal complex environment." These tests, Hebb concluded, "supported the prediction that... such [sensory deprivation] conditions would have a disorganizing effect on thought"... (p. 220) [emphases added, not in original]

While Hebb may have been involved, others in the academic research community may not have understood all the implications. Jerome Bruner is an example of the latter. Although he was not without experience in interrogations, having been involved in OSS interrogations during the period surrounding D-Day, Bruner came to a Harvard symposium with a new paper on the effects of early sensory deprivation, which was a special interest of his. Perhaps it was personal: Bruner had been blind for the first two years of his life.

The Harvard Symposium on Sensory Deprivation

According to McCoy, the 1958 Harvard symposium on sensory deprivation was funded covertly through an ONR contract -- Nonr 1866 [29]. Other government agencies had funded much of the individual research done, including the Army, Air Force, and the National Science Foundation. The papers from this symmposium were edited and printed up in a volume that one can still purchase, used, online: Sensory Deprivation, A Symposium Held at Harvard Medical School. One of the book's editors, Philip Kubzansky, was also a an author of an essay entitled "The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior: A Review", which appeared in another book from the same period, one I've previously reviewed, The Manipulation of Human Behavior. (Kubzansky was also Chief Psychologist at Boston City Hospital at the time.)

Jerome Bruner appears to have been interested in the developmental aspects of sensory deprivation, especially as they affected the neurological and cognitive aspects of a child's maturation. His essay for the symposium as reprinted and can be read entirely on-line (one of the reasons for using it as the centerpiece of this article) by anyone who is interested. It appeared as a stand-alone article in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, Vol. XXI, No. 2, in 1959. As a primer in the topic of sensory deprivation, you couldn't ask for a better introduction.

According to Bruner's paper, "The Cognitive Consequences of Early Sensory Deprivation", the whole issue stemmed from a new understanding of the development of perception in the maturing organism. Bruner was conscious of his precursors in the field, and explained their primary discoveries:

For bringing this matter into a proper empirical perspective, we must be grateful for the work of Hebb and his students in investigating the effects of early sensory deprivation in animals. I do not propose to review the work, for it is well known. In general, an impoverished environment, one with diminished heterogeneity and a reduced set of opportunities for manipulation and discrimination produces an adult organism with reduced abilities to discriminate, with stunted strategies for coping with roundabout solutions, with less taste for exploratory behavior, and with a notably reduced tendency to draw inferences that serve to cement the disparate events of its environment...

But Bruner was not just concerned with the effects of early sensory deprivation, as he was aware that the early SD experiments were almost all conducted on adults, and there were effects, usually reversible, that were still psychologically profound. Bruner continued:

... let me remind you of the parallel findings on prolonged sensory deprivation in adult organisms that have the effect of disorganizing cognitive function, upsetting the constancies, even disrupting the perception of continuous contours that extend beyond the immediate focus of attention at the center of the visual field. I remind you of these matters in advance of setting forth some speculations to underline the likelihood that perception and cognitive activity generally depend upon a dynamically stable though ultimately disruptible equilibrium that depends, even in adult life, upon contact with stimulus heterogeneity and a shifting environment. [emphases are mine]

This was something akin to Philip Kubansky's observations of the effects of isolation and sensory deprivation upon an interrogation detainee, as written in The Manipulation of Human Behavior:

The boredom, restlessness, irritability, and other mood changes observed also may well apply. The stimulus-hunger and increased suggestibility which have been observed may make an individual more vulnerable to revealing information he might otherwise withhold, particularly when accompanied by the social uncertainty induced in the interrogation situation. Unprepared for these consequences of isolation and deprivation, like many experimental subjects, an individual may become apprehensive and indeed panicked by his reactions. The appearance of hallucinatory-like phenomena and their emotional accompaniments have often been quite anxiety provoking. (p. 90)

Why Are We Doing This?

Yet, at this Harvard symposium, at the school where he worked for so long, Bruner looked at the other contributions of the behavioral scientists and seemed befuddled. An essay by the psychoanalytic researchers Holt and Goldberger on the personality correlates of response to sensory deprivation flumoxxed him. He wrote:

The work reported by Goldberger and Holt in this symposium on "individual differences in reaction to experimental interference with reality contact" and also by Bennett on the effect of sensory isolation in high altitude flying suggests that people respond differently to the initial stages of isolation, some finding it exciting and even intoxicating, others, terrifying and disrupting. I do not know what bearing this has on our present problem, save that when one is isolated from external stimulation one is thrown on internal resources, and people differ in the degree to which they live comfortably and confidently with their inner impulses and cognitive models.

Bruner seemingly did not see or understand what all this research was reaching for. With his own personal interest in the then-new field of cognitive psychology, and his passion for developmental themes, he overlooked the sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research. After all, it was common enough in those days to have military sponsorship of one's psychological research. Goldberger's work on psychological types had been sponsored, for instance, by the Air Force. But there was a point. The work on isolation and sensory deprivation was to be used in formulating a "scientific" model of interrogation, which in the end amounted to psychological torture.

This new scientific model delineated profound and disturbing vulnerablities in human nature and the ways human beings construct reality. As the physicists did with atomic physics, the psychologists and psychiatrists researching isolation, sensory and sleep deprivation, responses to various drugs, and to hypnotism, had discovered some important aspects to the workings of our minds and bodies... and they would use it to construct technologies of destruction and governmental control.

In brief, what did they discover? According to Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist writing 10 years after Bruner's paper, in a retrospective on SD research, these behavioral scientists had discovered "a manipulation that made a difference -- unlike so many pallid experimental situations, a difference you could almost taste." (Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen Years of Research, ed. J. P. Zubek, Appleton-Century-Crofts, NY, 1969, p. 3)

Sensory deprivation research touched on more than deprivation, it covered aspects of human psychological and physiological functioning under conditions of isolation, sensory blurring, near-total deprivation, personality and drug interactions, among other potential effects. It posited human beings as sensation-seeking organisms (and not just humans, but higher animals). In fact, the need for stimulation was raised to the status of a human drive or instinct. Along the lines of the cognitive psychologists, like Bruner, who were coming into prominence at this time, the patterning of stimuli and perception was seen as linked to some kind of relatively stable environment. As Bruner pointed out, if that environment, or the cognitive map a person had made of an expected environment were to change radically, or become random, or unfocused, the organism/nervous system responded maladaptively. Negative changes took place along a number of psychological dimensions: cognitive, emotional, stress tolerance, susceptiblity to persuasion, etc.

As Hebb pointed out at the 1958 Harvard Symposium, the whole SD research project began as an attempt to understand and counter what was believed to be a Russian and Chinese Cold War project to control others' behavior and minds. They called it "brainwashing". In the end, they twisted it into a form of coercive interrogation that was utilized by the CIA and military up to the present day.

From Harvard Yard to Guantanamo Bay

From PHR's essential book, Break Them Down:

A legal memorandum prepared by Lt. Col. Diane E. Beaver in October 2002 considered the legality of the techniques proposed for use at Guantánamo. The memorandum approved the use of waterboarding, isolation, sensory deprivation, removal of clothing, hooding, and exploitation of detainees’ phobias. (p. 46)

Not surprisingly, behavioral specialists were called upon to monitor and consult on these torture techniques. Psychologists were utilized because they had special expertise in areas such as... well, sensory deprivation!

Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the head of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, described to General Taguba how that worked in practice.

If the interrogation plan falls within the outline set by LTG Sanchez then the O5 Deputy Director or myself approve the plans. Those interrogation plans include a sleep plan and medical standards. A physician and a psychiatrist are on hand to monitor what we are doing.
. . .
Typically, the MP has a copy of the interrogation plan and a written note as to how to execute. There should also be files in the detainee files as to what is going on when an exception is needed. The interrogator uses these files to keep a record as to what has happened to the detainee. The doctor and psychiatrist also look at the files to see what the interrogation plan recommends; they have the final say as to what is implemented.... At Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, “behavioral science consultation teams” (hereinafter BSCT), composed of psychologists and psychiatrists, were formed with the purpose of facilitating interrogation. (p. 46-47)

None of this was really new. The old CIA KUBARK manual, which directed its interrogators in counterintelligence "interviews" made clear that "experts" were often needed, and that sensory deprivation, among other psychological forms of torture, was to be utilized.

As this selection from the CIA's "Interrogator Checklist" makes clear, psychological knowledge of the type we have been discussing here, is necessary in the torture chamber:

6. Does the interrogators selected for the task meet the four criteria of (a) adequate training and experience, (b) genuine familiarity with the language to be used, (c) knowledge of the geographical/cultural area concerned, and (d) psychological comprehension of the interrogatee?

7. Has the prospective interrogatee been screened? What are his major psychological characteristics? Does he belong to one of the nine major categories listed in pp. 19-28? Which? ....

41. As above, for confinement. If the interrogates is to be confined, can KUBARK control his environment fully? Can the normal routines be disrupted for interrogation purposes?

42. Is solitary confinement to be used? Why? Does the place of confinement permit the practical elimination of sensory stimuli?

43. Are threats to be employed? As part of a plan? Has the nature of the threat been matched to that of the interrogatee?

44. If hypnosis or drugs are thought necessary, has Headquarters been given enough advance notice? Has adequate allowance been made for travel time and other preliminaries?

45. Is the interrogatee suspected of malingering? If the interrogator is uncertain, are the services of an expert available?

An Action Call

In other postings, I have called for the public to place pressure upon the American Psychological Association to stop its members from participating in coercive intelligence interrogations, i.e., in torture! Because a portion of the APA membership is fighting for such a moratorium, the American public is in a unique position to vote, in a manner of speaking, on the use of torture by the U.S. government, by calling and writing APA top office holders and telling them "We don't want any participation in torture or coercive intelligence or military interrogations."

For more details on this campaign, click here. Or go ahead and write directly to the President of the American Psychological Association by clicking through to this link, which the APA calls "Ask the President".

We can make a difference. The history of science and psychology cannot be hijacked by a group of militarists and jingoists in order to maintain an immoral interrogation program of torture and inhumane treatment. Ask yourself, what have I done to change this barbarous practice, then do something about it!