Psychologie und Folter

To this date torture is a global problem that carries a lot of requirements and responsibilities for psychology, aside from therapy and counselling. Psychological knowledge helps to develop refined definitions for torture and ill-treatment and keeps them up-to-date and assessable, and thereby contributes to prevention. For that it is important to understand how human needs are attacked by different forms of torture - physical, sexual, or psychological. Different methods are combined to form a torturing system. Torture constitutes an extreme situation, that has direct and severe impact on the victim. This extreme situation leads to long-term impairment, such as psychological illnesses and changes in behavior, in cognition and in the neurovegetative nervous system. Adding to that are deteriorations in the psychosocial and social circumstances of the victim and their relatives. To make torture assessable and keep the definition of torture up to date is another task for which psychological knowledge is needed. Furthermore, it is important to understand why people torture others. Keeping that in mind psychology needs to intensify the prevention of misuse of psychological knowledge. The APA-Scandal and the Operative Psychology of the Ministry for State Security of the German Democratic Republic are examples for the abuse of psychological knowledge. In this chapter overlaps between psychology and torture will be introduced and their current status discussed.