They are forcibly robbed of their sleep and their dreams so as to become warped in time and space, empty-headed though crazed by rumination and fear starved for contact and comfort. With nobody and nowhere but the torturer to turn to for solace, and disabled in their capacity to distance, deny, detach and defend against the always looming temptation to helplessly surrender, victims of torture, in that state of regression, may develop what is called a traumatic bond with their torture. The torturer and his schemes, being friendly today and brutal tomorrow, have become the center of the victim's universe. And he often represents the only source of hope. Torture attempts to annihilate the privacy and secrecy of the captive's mind by invading the openings and surfaces of the body win all thinkable ways.
Torture operates on the principle of reversal, which includes the perversion of all cultural taboos.
The body, previously inscribed into traditional value systems and regulated by sacred practices is being profaned, debased to a piece of flesh, uprooted, anonymously depraved. When traditionally sacred long hair is being shaved off, and the torturer's emblem burnt into the skin where a tattoo had marked the tribal belonging, the captive body risks falling prey to the other and being divested of emotional ownership. Torture thus aims to draw the entirety of the victim's experience into the field of the desire of the other, the torturer, from where it is not only totally controlled, but in which it becomes, often irrevocably, forever alien and estranged. They had forced me to come with them to identify the other terrorists. All of a sudden I heard this explosion in my back.