The tortured, not the torturers, are ashamed

by David Shapiro

The Tortured and the Torturers

PRIMO Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, tells us that survivors of the Nazi camps felt shame about their experience (1989: 73). Levi calls that shame "absurd" and "paradoxical"; he says that "on a rational plane, there should not have been much to be ashamed of, but shame persisted nevertheless" (77). Paradoxical though it may be, it is apparently common among victims of torture or violent coercion. According to Dr. Murat Paker, director of clinical programs at the New York-based Safe Horizons/Solace Program for Survivors of Torture and Refugee Trauma, shame is a major psychological issue for survivors of torture. Reports or evidence of such shame have also come from numerous other sources. It is well known that women who have been raped are often, perhaps typically, deeply ashamed of the experience. Even those women willing to talk about their rape before the South African Truth Commission did so behind a screen (Hayner, 2002: 78). The Algerians of the National Liberation Front who were tortured by the French military during the Algerian struggle for independence were reportedly advised to avoid speaking of their experience because they felt ashamed (Schatz, 2002: 53). The reaction was apparently known, also, among former American slaves: one, interviewed in North Carolina in 1937, is quoted by Cornel West: "My folks don't want me to talk about slavery. They's shame niggers ever was slaves" (Gates, 2003). Survivors of torture in Chile under the Pinochet regime are described by Chilean psychologists as fearing "being devalued for having gone through such an experience" (Cienfuegos and Monelli, 1983: 50) and they are treated with the aim of "restoration of serf-esteem" (43). In general, of course, people are reluctant to speak directly of feeling ashamed, since to acknowledge shame is (in their eyes) to admit that there is something to be ashamed of. So we must sometimes rely on indirect indications of shame, or efforts to dispel it, to identify it. The defensiveness or the exaggerated and extremely sensitive pride that I will describe in more detail later are indications of that sort.

When Levi speaks of the irrationality of shame in this connection, he is speaking of people who of their own choice have done little or nothing to be ashamed of, but on the contrary have suffered the shameful acts of others. It is true that they have been forced to endure experiences or perform actions that in themselves might be considered shameful. But, in Levi's phrase, "on a rational plane" the fact that these actions were coerced and were in no way carried out at their own initiative might be thought to obviate shame. Not at all. It seems that the very condition of subjugation has the opposite effect; it intensifies or adds to feelings of shame. In other words, it is not only the experiences these people were forced to endure or the actions they were forced to perform but their very helplessness and inability to resist that is reason for shame. It is the fact of subjugation itself that is damaging to self-respect. The shame of this kind of subjugation can extend even to those who identify themselves closely with the torture victim. The daughter of a former camp inmate tells us that on learning of her father's having been beaten and humiliated, she thought, "How could my father, so tall, so strong, let that happen?" (Epstein, 1979: 62) The idea that prisoners in the Nazi camps simply "let that happen" is, as we know, not rare and something of that idea seems to be present in the victim's own shame.

As for the perpetrators of torture, the rapists, the enforcers of apartheid, the Nazi medical experimenters, and the rest, there is little evidence of shame. A former police torturer in what was then Rhodesia seems to be typical; when asked if he felt any guilt (in this case we may assume that the question was understood to include shame), he "acknowledged none and showed none" (Conroy, 9000: 93). Torturers under the junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974, report that, after training, acts of torture came to seem routine; it "became a job" (Conroy, 9000: 94). Robert Lifton's interviews with former Nazi medical experimenters indicate the same attitude: the process of selection became "almost routine," after some initial disturbance (Lifton, 1986: 175).An Argentine officer says simply, "I was (at the time) totally absorbed in my career" (Verbitsky, 1996: 55).

Writing of his interviews with the German doctors who had 30 or 40 years earlier conducted medical experiments on prisoners in the camps, Lifton says it was his impression that many of them "retained pockets of guilt and shame, to which they did not have awareness" (Lifton, 1986: 8). But he adds on the same page that "none of them--not a single former Nazi doctor I spoke to-arrived at a clear ethical evaluation of what he had done." No one can say of course that shame was totally absent in these men, certainly not if we allow for the possibility of such feeling beneath conscious awareness, but Lifton's report does not show evidence of it. If shame is present in any intensity beneath consciousness, one would still expect its occasional appearance in consciousness, or the appearance of clear defensive efforts to avoid it. There is some discomfort, of course, as could hardly be avoided by people who had in the meantime faced harsh criticism and moral condemnation, but it does not seem particularly of the sort that reflects significant underlying shame. One of the German doctors, for example, says he would feel "a little awkward" wondering what people would think (Lifton, 1986: 106). But others recall satisfaction about their work and even boast. One doctor is still proud that after a pathology department was established at the killing center, "the Berlin Institute gave recognition to this ... work." Another doctor, 37 years old at the time, wrote home: "Our work here is very interesting ... I told [my superior] I could handle it all by myself" (Lifton, 1986: 140).

It has been said that shame or the threat of shame acts to sanction and inhibit uncivil behavior, that "normal shame is necessary for the regulation of all human interaction" (Schiff, 1987: 222). If that is indeed its aim, it has, in these instances at least, badly missed the target.

Shame and Self-Respect

Guilt is concerned with what one does; shame has to do with what one is. Obviously, the distinction is not sharp. We do call particular actions shameful, but the shame attached to those actions generally reflects their significance for what one is; a shameful act shows the one who performs it to be cowardly, weak, selfish.

Shame is usually regarded as an essentially social reaction, a sense of exposure of one's failings to others and a reaction to the image or imagined image in the other's mind. The person who is ashamed lowers his eyes obsequiously and wants to hide. Nevertheless, shame is a social reaction only in a limited sense. It is a defensive reaction; it anticipates contempt or criticism from the other. But the anticipation of contempt from the other arises when respect for oneself is already diminished, perhaps to the point of contempt. It is in this already self-conscious state of mind that the person who is ashamed feels vulnerable to exposure. It follows that the one before whom the serf-conscious person feels exposed is not a clear and separate figure at all, but is at that moment experienced like the largely unseen audience by an inadequate stage performer. And in fact an actual audience need not be present at all for the serf-conscious person to feel shame.

Normal self-respect is largely transparent. It is like physical health in this way. Illness or malfunction commands our attention, but health generally does not. It is doubtful that conscious, lasting positive feelings of esteem or respect for the self are an important part of subjective life, aside from their simulations in certain kinds of psychopathology. It is damage to serf-respect, in the form of shame or humiliation, that is subjectively compelling. We experience, of course, transient feelings of pride and satisfaction in connection with particular achievements or recognition, but the closest approximations we know of lasting or continual serf-appreciation are easily recognized as compensatory efforts, unconvincing and only half-believed by the subjects themselves. Those individuals we describe as serf-confident or possessed of self-respect seem to be characterized not so much by a feeling of esteem for themselves as by the relative absence of concern with themselves. This is confirmed in psychotherapy patients who are treated successfully. In these people a low serf-esteem or feeling of inferiority is gradually replaced not by an equally self-conscious pride or serf-appreciation, but by diminished interest in measuring themselves.