From: Andrew Phelps <no-action@cwnet.com>

To: SOCIALJUSTICE@LISTS.APA.ORG

Subject: Re: [SOCIAL] Fwd: Torture and the Strategic Helplessness...

Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:56:43 -0700

Cc: Www, Bbb

 

Indeed.

This writing exposes the contradiction in the APA. There's an interesting direction regarding "learned helplessness" not being addressed here, however.

I suggest people look at the work of Tom Scheff on how to engage "shame." E.g. his new book Goffman Unbound.

The APA leadership has shamed us and our profession with its strategic helplessness.

Unacknowledged shameful behavior such as unethical support for interrogation torture involvement by [some] psychologists has been "brought to the surface" by the good work of the "Ethical APA" group. But the article raises a new layer of the "resistance" involved.

It is time for the APA to clarify that psychologists may not ethically support in any way abusive or coercive interrogation tactics in any settings.

Still, in a climate of "unacknowledged shame" and a rich history of developing "positive psychology" to oppose "learned helplessness" in a clinical/treatment framework, I submit Seligman in 2002 was entitled to take the protestations of the CIA/SERE people "at face value," pending seeing what they meant. If he'd continued on that path, then the blogger complaints about him as "2nd APA Pres. on the torture track" might have merit.

It is also time to identify and hold publicly responsible the individual psychologists who have created the institution that the APA has now become.

Yes.

It is time to hold these psychologists accountable for developing the widespread and systematic moral failures in the organization’s current infrastructure.

To do so would seem to require looking at the "clinical gaze" practicum embraced by the APA Practice Organization and see how behavior management - far from supporting creative maladjustment as Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated to the APA - often supports deliberately or incidentally practices accommodating "normality" by training 'clients' to "learned helplessness."

Where is the boundary with "reverse SERE?" These discussions (so far) have not addressed nor defined that as a problem, to the extent required. And I question that the institutional protections needed are in place.

Indeed, if we do not do this, then we, too, are complicit with torture.

Exactly. And then it's necessary to regain the trust of the "client/survivor" people who have had the acquaintance/experience of "treatment can be torture."

Italian Democratic Psychiatry has been looking this question "in the eye" for decades.

 

Andrew Phelps, Ph.D. (mathematics)

Berkeley, CA