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Tortured and broken in the prisons of the Syrian regime, detainees are stripped of their humanity. Devastating traumas and challenges in reintegration: psychoanalysis and the humanities shed light on the mechanisms of inevitable dehumanization and outline the difficult paths of reconstruction, at the crossroads of the personal and the political.
Under the reign of the Damascus Butchers’ Dynasty, the atrociously orchestrated detention conditions inflicted upon prisoners have caused devastating physical and psychological consequences. Tortured, humiliated and deprived of their most basic rights, these men and women have had their integrity profoundly shattered. The bodies and psyches of prisoners are coldly exploited for purposes of intelligence gathering, retribution or elimination. The raw images circulating on social networks are horrifying, forcing viewers to confront a human being reduced to a mere scrap, plunged into an archaic regression of utter despair. These images compel the voyeur we become to imagine the unnameable: the grinding down of dehumanized bodies by the pathological invention of infernal machines, steamrollers that crush annihilated beings.
Sigmund Freud revolutionized the understanding of psychological trauma. He demonstrated how an event of extreme violence could overwhelm the ego’s defense mechanisms, leaving indelible traces in the unconscious. For tortured prisoners, the relentless repetition of abuse shatters the protective mechanisms that typically shield the psyche. Unable to flee, fight or integrate an experience beyond their resources, the individual is left in a state of helpless indigence.
This traumatic intrusion, a true “breach in the psyche” as Freud termed it, overwhelms the individual with an influx of uncontrollable excitations. The usual defense mechanisms are overrun, leading to profound upheaval. The traumatized person is haunted by the perpetual return of the traumatic scene, imposed through flashbacks, recurring nightmares and intrusive recollections. This recurrence of the unspeakable marks the failure of psychic integration processes and keeps the individual trapped in a past that remains ever-present. Once released, reintegration into society and family circles proves extremely difficult, as the traumas endured have severely destabilized their mental balance.
Freud also emphasized how trauma undermines the narcissistic foundations of the individual, deeply shaking their self-confidence. In the face of the extreme powerlessness experienced during torture, the sense of identity continuity wavers. The ego, the reference point for adapting to reality, is gravely weakened at its core.
Jacques Lacan extends and complicates this understanding of trauma. He emphasizes the brutal encounter with a reality “impossible to articulate, impossible to represent.” Trauma signifies a rupture in the symbolic order, a void in the fabric of meaning where the subject is plunged without recourse. This confrontation with the unnameable propels the individual into abyssal anxiety, leaving them “destitute,” stripped of their position as a desiring and speaking subject.
Torture specifically targets this subjective destitution, annihilating the symbolic foundations of being. By reducing the prisoner to a suffering body, a bare life exposed without limits to sovereign power, the torturer attacks the roots of their humanity. Their existence as a subject is denied in a radical dehumanization campaign.
In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva introduces the concept of abjection to describe the destruction of boundaries between self and other, human and inhuman. The experience of torture confronts this intolerable abjectness. The abuse shatters the boundaries of intimacy, exposing a vulnerability without recourse. The torturer penetrates the victim’s innermost self, defiling their body and mind in a dangerous and repugnant proximity. Reduced to waste, to a dehumanized remnant, the victim loses all bearings and self-esteem.
With the well-known concept of the “banality of evil,” philosopher Hannah Arendt explains how this dehumanization process is facilitated by systems that transform ordinary individuals into obedient cogs and active accomplices in a machinery of terror. The torturers in Syrian prisons, like those elsewhere, blindly follow orders, disrupting their moral conscience to the point of adopting their masters’ blind hatred toward prisoners. This normalization of cruelty, meticulously organized, amplifies the unimaginable nature of the endured abuse.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault analyzes how the prison system aims to control and discipline bodies, producing docile and malleable subjects. This domination and normalization enterprise reaches its peak in Syrian detention centers. Through a calculated balance of arbitrary punishments and false promises, jailers seek to reduce prisoners to degraded and humiliated objects. Everything is designed to break their identity, even stripping them of control over their bodily functions.
But we must not believe that these torturers are extraordinary beings, unlike us who are incapable of committing such acts. The unconscious of every human being is a reservoir of diverse and conflicting drives, including destructive, cruel and violent impulses. Under certain conditions, we may find ourselves unable to control our inner savagery, despite initial resistance.
Experiments in social psychology have extensively proven this.
• In 1963, Stanley Milgram’s experiment (depicted in Henri Verneuil’s film I… For Icarus) invited volunteers to act as “teachers” under the authority of a university figure, encouraging them to administer electric shocks of maximum intensity (450 volts) to “students” when they answered questions incorrectly. The results shocked both experimenters and consulted psychiatrists, who never anticipated such findings: 62% of participants administered the maximum shock, despite clear signs of the learner’s suffering.
The conclusion is clear: ordinary individuals can commit cruel acts when submitting to authority, even against their personal morals. Subsequent repetitions of this experiment worldwide yielded the following troubling results:
Minimum submission rate: 50%
Maximum submission rate: 87.5%
Average submission rate: 71%
• Another, even more astonishing experiment in the United States, was Philip Zimbardo’s prison simulation. Ordinary college students quickly adopted sadistic, abusive behavior as “guards,” reveling in the suffering inflicted on their peers playing “prisoners.” Like in Milgram’s experiment, both victims and perpetrators were dehumanized, forcing the experiment to end prematurely due to its unbearable outcomes (depicted in Tim Talbott’s film The Experiment).
In The Island of the Doomed, Swedish activist writer Stig Dagerman expresses the same observation: “Two things fill me with horror: the executioner within me and the axe above me.” In other words, the executioner is not only external but coexists with an internal other – the unconscious perverse child within every individual, ready to resurface under certain conditions.
For Sibel Agrali, director of the Primo Levi Center for the care and support of torture and political violence survivors, one cannot heal or erase the horrors endured. However, patient, multidisciplinary therapeutic work can help victims gradually regain their footing and internal security. Medical and therapeutic support, social and legal assistance, and mediation by interpreters are integral facets of holistic care.
For these broken individuals, therapy is long and arduous. The initial challenge is often to articulate the unspeakable, to attempt to symbolize an experience beyond representation. When speech emerges, it marks a first step toward reclaiming the self. Extracting traumatic events from the mute paralysis in which they imprison the subject is essential.
Through a “co-construction” between therapist and patient, the individual regains agency and gradually rebuilds confidence in their resources. By reclaiming their role as a subject in symbolic exchange and renewing the bond of mutual recognition, the victim can rediscover a position of desire.
Ultimately, the political, social and collective dimensions are crucial for restoring a sense of shared belonging and humanity. It is up to society to acknowledge the scale of these atrocities and mobilize to ensure torturers, their masters and accomplices are held accountable. Only firm and just condemnation of these crimes can restore victims as full subjects.
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