Torture: The Catastrophe of a Bond

Abstract

Drawing on his personal experiences of torture in Paraguay as well as his training as a psychiatrist, Carlos Alberto Arestivo explores torture’s interpersonal dynamics and its embeddedness—as a political strategy, a set of techniques, and lasting scars—in societal institutions and ideologies. That the focus of torture is on dissemblage of the victim’s social world and the destruction of his or her personality reveals that in its terrible, intimate encounters, torture makes personal the desire of one worldview to vanquish another. Perhaps most devastatingly, Arestivo’s essay concludes that when all other social bonds have been destroyed through torture, the last one remaining to the tortured is the one that has involuntarily been made with the torturer.