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Read other letters about this article
ondelette (October 6, 2008 10:09 PM ):
I told you, I am willing to entertain that her ideas that the behavior arises from treatment they received in childhood if, and only if, we are talking about the people at the top of the food chain, and if we are talking about particular (and apparently somewhat irregular) propagation of techniques and very specific orders downward. That singles out the Bush people in a very small group. Even the Gestapo, though often alleged to have been top down on torture, was not, according to Rejali.
So if you want to talk about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Addington, et al.'s childhood, fine. If you want to talk about the implementing torturers in the prisons, then respectfully, no.
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What?
By what strange logic do you conclude that Bush could be warped enough by his childhood traumata to order torture and watch the videos thereof, but that Charles Graner, one of the implementers of that torture, could not be similarly warped by similar childhood traumata?
I'm also somewhat flabbergasted by your clear implication that unless brutal child-rearing practices include identical forms of torture as those employed by professional practitioners of torture in government prisons, those child-rearing practices cannot issue in the behavior of said professional torturers.
One of Miller's conclusions from her twenty years of psychoanalytic practice is:
This perfect adaptation to society's norms [becoming an obedient child]--in other words, to what is called "healthy normality"--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience.
He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology. Since authoritarian parents are always right, there is no need for their children to rack their brains in each case to determine whether what is demanded of them is right or not.
And how is this to be judged? Where are the standards supposed to come from if someone has always been told what was right and what was wrong and if he never had an opportunity to become familiar with his own feelings and if, beyond that, attempts at criticism were unacceptable to the parents and thus were too threatening for the child?
If an adult has not developed a mind of his own, then he will find himself at the mercy of the authorities for better or worse, just as an infant finds itself at the mercy of its parents. Saying no to those more powerful will always seem too threatening to him. (Emphasis added)
Does the above help to clarify Miller's thesis that brutalizing children, even in "socially acceptable" ways, damages their psyches in such a way as to make them vulnerable to manipulation by their "superiors" and to violent acting out of their rage against surrogates of their abusers when they are given permission or orders to do so?
Does it help to clarify the possibility that Rejali, the political scientist, is offering an essentially sociological description of torture, and that Miller, the depth psychologist, is offering a psychological explanation of it?
