In September of this year, the American Psychological Association reversed a longstanding policy by voting to prohibit its members from participating in interrogations or acting in an advisory capacity at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere after revelations that some psychologists have been involved in so-called intensive interrogation sessions. The ban belatedly brings the APA into line with the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Stanley Fish asks a provocative question: Why did psychology, generally considered to be one of the most liberal of disciplines, lag behind its sister professions regarding one of the most troubling consequences of the so-called War on Terror — the Bush administration’s approval of the use of torture and enlisting health-care professionals in and out of uniform into helping extract information from terrorists and other so-called enemy combatants?

Joining Shaun Mullen in discussing this issue is Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a The Moderate Voice associate editor, fellow columnist and friend. Dr. E is a psychoanalyst who has been in clinical practice for 38 years and specializes in post-trauma recovery, often including veterans, as well as being a poet and author whose books have been published in 32 languages. Mullen is a veteran and career journalist who has covered Vietnam and other wars, and has written extensively on what he calls the Bush Torture Regime.

SM: Is Fish onto something in saying that your fellow psychologists have lagged behind doctors of medicine and psychiatry in addressing torture? And that by implication those are exclusively healing professions but yours is not?

Dr. E: The charge is an important one. Why did it take so long — well over a year after the issue was brought before its national convention — before the APA finally banned members from participating in not only interrogations, but advising the CIA and military on the effects of torture, including literally advising how much assault a person’s body, mind and spirit might be able to sustain before they became entirely undone.

For myself, coming from a refugee and deportee immigrant family, all of this stank of another time and place – Adolph Hitler, who long before the death and torture camps for murdering Jews ordered the extermination of German children if they were lame, developmentally retarded or had other disabilities. He tried to enlist German physicians and pediatricians to write the orders for the death or use in experiments of children confined to institutions.

Even though a majority of German doctors — and the clergy – loudly refused to participate in so-called “mercy killing” programs led by Philipp Bouhler (photo, left), some doctors complied and well over 40,000 young innocents were sent to their deaths at Brandenburg, Hadamar Institute, Grafeneck and elsewhere. Thousands were kept alive for experimentation who had Down Syndrome, what we would now recognize as autism, lead poisoning, and brain damage from accidents and beatings.

I am not one to use the Hitlerian trope to condemn people. But at Guantánamo and elsewhere, psychologists were enlisted to participate in torture and the slowness of the APA to ban such activities is stunning to people of conscience.

I wrote about how the APA was lagging in a December 2007 The Moderate Voice post. At that time and long before, the voices of many others in my profession were being raised vociferously, yet the APA did not insist on an end to these practices that are so egregiously antithetical to the principles of protecting, helping and healing human life. Ours is supposed to be a healing profession — psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, all. We are not separated by institutional memberships, but rather held together as brothers and sisters who are called upon to mediate and help the suffering of this world.

SM: The APA’s foot dragging is even more troublesome in these historic and contemporary contexts. Is Fish’s suggestion that at least by implication yours is not necessarily a healing profession accurate or are he and I painting you and your colleagues with too broad a brush?

Dr. E: Yes, too broad a brush. Differentiations have to be applied to any group, but sad to say our worldwide group of healers does have some members that definitely do not have their hearts attached to their minds in a way that would deem them true healers.

I know as a practicing Catholic that when the crimes of priests who sexually intruded on children came to light, as well as the crimes of the bishops and cardinals who protected these pedophiles way beyond what is called “spiritual care of the sinner,” that one of the Church’s most frequently used defenses from on high was a laconic and bitter: “Well, pedophiles are everywhere and in every religion and we shouldn’t be singled out.”

It would have been far better for the church, and also for the APA, to say that to have integrity you have to question your integrity.

Regarding Dr. Dobson and others who have a high profile in the helping professions, and there are quite a few, they are often in competition with one another for who is the most important, famous, has the largest readership and listenership, and so on. But I, too, have a sense that when a person has “fame” that the Devil shows up immediately, offering all kinds of perks and variances from what others are not only disposed to do in life, but in many ways ordered to do by law. “Special passes” are often offered and sometimes taken by “famous” healers, people who look a little weasel-like from time to time.

Regarding health-care professionals participating in torture at Guantánamo and elsewhere, I don’t believe we have the entire story yet.

There are some ugly matters that will have to be considered, questions that need to be asked that are repulsive. These include who and what kind of mind is attracted to and even excited by being involved in procedures that cause people to scream in pain, have death-vision attacks, to be traumatized for the rest of their lives? What kind of person is that? What is the makeup of a shrink who desires to be a part of harming other human beings?

I do not know the answers to these questions. I only know that we need to ask questions about the psychological fitness of those who bend so low as to join in harming others, innocent or guilty, knowing or unknowing. We might derive some clues by studying the well-documented lives and psychological ideas and nationalistic notions of those who wrote the protocol for Nazi torture, human medical experimentation and death dealing.

SM: An aside and then a final question.

Dr. E: I’d concur with military interrogators who have lived it and who have a balanced view. In post trauma and critical incident after-care, I’d verify after these many years, that we see people who, for example, have beaten or battered children while witnesses are present. But they deny that they ever touched the child in anger. No amount of badgering or threatening the person who battered a child will bring the truth forward. I know it may sound unusual to a layperson, but a combination of expressed understanding for the tensions a parent can feel when overwhelmed, but a firm holding to the bright line of “no harm to vulnerable others” brings far more revelations and far more truth from the person who harmed a child.

The issue of using torture may be difficult for laypersons who have a strong belief in “severely punishing and getting it over with,” and who sometimes misunderstand a revelation process that involves being patient as “coddling the criminal,” which of course it isn’t. In the inner circle of interrogators, there sometimes is a kind of impatience to bypass this laborious and time-consuming process to carefully find and assess the actual facts. In some cases, there also is another phenomenon, as well, something that is rarely spoken about publicly: The competition between individual interrogators or interrogation teams to be “the one” who “broke” a suspect. The situation for all is far more complex than “Tell us the truth or we near-murder you, make you wish, via physical and psychological pain, that you’d never been born.”

Regarding whether psychologists who have verifiably participated in torturing human beings should have their licenses revoked, I have a sense that this will depend on what President-Elect Obama does about Guantánamo and other facilities. There may be lawsuits by detainees against the federal government. Lawyers bringing suit tend to include everyone who might possibly be culpable. This would no doubt include not only civil and criminal law suits, but also grieving against the licenses of those psychologists alleged to have been involved in unethical or criminal activity.

Grievances against psychologists’ licenses are decided by each state’s regulatory board, as it is the states that examine and grant the license to begin with.

Thus, there would be hearings to determine a grievance’s merits, including whether there have been ethical and legal violations. However, if criminal charges are brought against a psychologist, the licensing organization often will give precedence to those charges being decided first. A psychologist’s license may be summarily revoked or suspended even as a criminal investigation proceeds. Ironically, the root ethic of the state boards and the helping professionals’ organizations is public safety. That is: Do no harm.

In summary, it is important to strongly note that the APA has done massive and dedicated social justice work for many decades via various committees and individual members. Many members are leaders in the most humane interventions to bring better treatment to the vulnerable. Forcing the APA to draw the bright white line against participation in torture came from within the association first and foremost. These were brave souls of conscience who stood up against powerful or sometimes just loud members who thought otherwise. Many outside the APA then took up the hew and cry, as well.

Those who spoke out and kept speaking out while taking hits from their colleagues are to be commended and blessed. That the APA allowed such a scurrilous and inane “debate” to go on so long without clear moral assertion to stop its members involvement in torture is a stain, one that likely will only be expiated, as in the aftermath of World War II, by remorse, apology, self-study and reparation not only at the legal level but at the soul level.

I personally believe it can be done. It was a heinously wrong turn. With mercy it can be made more right. There is such a thing as a “good psychologist,” and they are legion.