DOI: 10.1002/aps.1520
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Gaslighting, betrayal and the boogeyman: Personal reflections on the American Psychological Association, PENS and the involvement of psychologists in torture Nina K. Thomas
Abstract The American Psychological Association's (APA's) sanctioning psychologists' involvement in “enhanced interrogations,” aka torture, authorized by the closely parsed re‐interpretation of relevant law by the Bush administration, has roiled the association since it appointed a task force in 2005. The Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force, its composition, methods and outcomes have brought public shame to the profession, the association and its members. Having served on the task force and been involved in the aftermath, I offer reflections on my role to provide an insider's look at the struggle I experienced over loyalty to principle, profession, colleagues, and the association. Situating what occurred in the course of the PENS process and its aftermath within the framework of Freyd's and her collaborators ‘theory of “betrayal trauma,” in particular “institutional trauma,” I suggest that others too share similar feelings of profound betrayal by an organization with which so many of us have been identified over the course of many years. I explore the ways in which attachments have been challenged and undermined by what occurred. Among the questions I have grappled with are: Was I the betrayed or betrayer, or both? How can similar self‐reflection usefully be undertaken both by the association itself and other members about their actions or inactions? K E Y W OR D S
American Psychological Association, interrogation, PENS, torture, trauma
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I N T RO DU CT I O N
As we are well aware, perception and memory are affected by multiple factors. The passage of time has a way of blurring and eliding events. I write these reflections on the PENS (the task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security) process and its aftermath more than 10 years after serving on the Task Force and more than a year since the release of the independent investigator's report. David Hoffman, Esq., the independent investigator, entered into a contract with the American Psychological Association (APA) to examine the possible malfeasance of key officers and staff within the organization and their collusion with the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA. In this account, I attempt to recreate what I remember about the events surrounding the Task Force and the turmoil following it. Despite time and vagaries of memory, despite denial – my own and that of others – bias, and the forces operating on me, there are key moments that remain vividly inscribed in my memory. I will describe several of these in what follows to flesh out what lies behind the gaslighting, betrayal and the “boogeyman” referred to in my title. Int J Appl Psychoanal Studies. 2017;14:125–132. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/aps Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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The APA became my professional home when I was in graduate school. I joined the organization at the urging of my doctoral program's director, a woman who modeled being active within organized psychology. She spoke not only from within the academy but also as someone who stood squarely within the wider scope of the socio‐political dimensions of the field. The APA offered a place where I could develop relationships with people I valued as colleagues, mentors and friends with whom I had long and warm connections. Among them are many I admired, respected and some whose integrity I trusted without hesitation. As it was for so many of us who have been active within the association, being involved provided an opportunity to develop my skills in leadership, policy, and a number of dimensions within the discipline itself including law, research, gender issues, and most of all social justice concerns. When I was invited to participate in the PENS Task Force, I believed that in doing so I had an opportunity to play a role in articulating a balance between the grave concerns for national security that prevailed in the zeitgeist of the United States at the time, and that continues today, and protecting the basic human rights of those who had been identified as a threat based on the “fog of war,” often absent any terrorist act or intent on their part. Our mandate, we were informed, was to review and propose revisions to the Association's Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct as it existed at that time. We were told that psychologists operating within detention centers who were directed to contribute to the design of interrogations (or as they were euphemistically called “information gathering”), were looking for guidance in how to reconcile their professional ethical responsibilities with their role on Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs). We who were civilians were not told before the meeting about the part the DoD and CIA personnel had played in strategizing about what the outcome of the Task Force should be. We were not told that psychologists' contributions on such BSCTs included identifying detainees' weaknesses and fears (fear of dogs or darkness for example; concerns for family who knew nothing about what had happened to them), and enabling interrogators to utilize those fears to elicit information. Additionally, media reports had identified that BSCTs shared medical information with interrogators to further the design of interrogation strategies. Although denied by the APA, reports in the media indicated that psychologists had been present at and directed interrogations. Absent, the information about the role of DoD personnel in shaping the Task Force, I believed all of us in that room, civilians, representatives of the military (six of the 10 Task Force members), staff observers, invited “experts” from within the APA as well as the military, had a shared task in mind. With the revelations in the Hoffman Report (2015), I realize that the ostensible task was irreconcilable with the design and process of the Task Force. Throughout his report, Hoffman describes the ongoing communications between key APA staff and DoD psychologists about what the DoD was looking for from the Task Force in the ethics code revision process. Amidst the widespread publicity of prisoner abuse in the military's confinement of “enemy combatants,” the imprimatur of the APA for military interrogations could serve to counteract public and, in some cases, Congressional concern. I was unaware of the secret communications between key APA staff and highly placed DoD psychologists to shape the media campaign in response to reports of psychologists involved in interrogations that contravened international law on the treatment of prisoners of war and detainees. The Task Force met over three days during which the entire Ethics Code was to be reviewed. As a consequence, there was little time to attend to the subtleties inherent in the Ethics Code or in the implications of even single words. More than that, although he was not the chair of the meetings, the Director of the Ethics Office was steering them. He ploughed through many items as though there was nothing to discuss. I did not object to the incongruity between our mandate and the process as it was established. In large measure I “bought” the mandate as it was described: we were offering direction to psychologists struggling with the conflict of conscience and responsibility to their “employers,” the DoD. By the time the PENS Task Force was formed, I had pursued research, training, and treatment for those who survived periods of war, ethnic conflict, political repression, torture, and forced migration. I had by then written (Thomas, 1999, 2005a, 2005b, 2006), studied, and worked in post‐war settings alongside mental health workers in Bosnia, Palestine, Azerbaijan and other countries. As a consequence of attending the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, evaluating asylum seekers who had endured torture in their native countries, interviewing survivors to the Bosnian war, and consulting on a class action lawsuit brought against Bush
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administration officials for the abuse of detainees by the United States after 9/11, I was familiar with the profound scarring of survivors' psyches as much from their betrayal by neighbors, friends, and political leaders as by the physical scars survivors bear from their brutal treatment in prisons and concentration camps. Like so many others, I found it horrifying that psychologists were participating in the kinds of interrogations the United States condemned within other countries; not only were similar interrogations sanctioned within the United States, but psychologists were contributing to a methodology that constituted torture. By 2005 I had participated in APA governance for many years, serving as a representative to APA's governing Council of Representatives, on other task forces and committees including those concerned with humanitarian issues and US laws effecting society at large. Thus, the invitation to join the PENS Task Force initially felt as though I could play a role in the challenging task of determining what constitutes lawful and ethical interrogations. Writing this contribution on PENS, torture, and psychologists' role provides me the opportunity to articulate how someone so identified with human rights and social action, as I have been for most of my professional life, could have become a party, even unwittingly, to the deception at the heart of the PENS process. I have remained an APA member throughout this period despite my grave disappointment with many of APA's actions, and even more its inaction in response to the opposition expressed by many of us to psychologists' involvement in interrogations that constituted torture. I remained a member of the APA because I believed it would be possible to effect change from within an organization with which I so identified. As I address later in this paper, utilizing the work of Freyd and her collaborators (Freyd, 1997; Gómez, Smith, Gobin, Tang, & Freyd, 2016; Smith & Freyd, 2014) on “betrayal trauma” and also “institutional trauma,” my conflict over my professional and personal attachments figures prominently in the impact the revelations about the course of the PENS process and its aftermath have had on me. With the publication of the independent investigator's report (Hoffman, 2015), a profound feeling of betrayal settled on me like a dead weight and continues to do so. Reconciling myself to the disingenuousness and what appears in retrospect to have been manipulation by some of those very same people whom I had trusted has been deeply painful. I do not dismiss my part in allowing the “wool to be pulled over my eyes.” It is here that the “gaslighting” in my title enters in.
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“ G A S LI G H T I N G ” … [S]ystemically withholding factual information from, and/or providing false information to the victim – having the gradual effect of making [the person] anxious, confused and less able to trust [his/her] own memory and perception. (The Urban Dictionary, 1999).
The psychological phenomenon of “gaslighting” (Calef & Weinshel, 1981) is taken from the 1944 film Gaslight to denote the kind of mind altering impact of an individual's determined effort stemming, in part from greed (p. 64) to alter the perception of situations so that the intended victim can no longer trust his/her experience as real, indeed, comes to doubt his/her sanity. Throughout the many turns in the process, gaslighting aptly describes my experience building up to my participation and closely following the aftermath of the PENS Task Force. One instance stands out in particular. In my memory, it was while I was a member of the APA Finance Committee that I came upon an expenditure that puzzled me. A conference on “The Science of Deception” was held in 2003 jointly sponsored by the Rand Corporation, the CIA, and FBI to which the APA contributed both funding and participation. I questioned the APA's involvement asking a number of senior staff why such a conference was being held and more than that, why the APA was not only participating but contributing funding. The response I got was far from straightforward. Repeatedly I was told that national security was an area where psychologists had valuable expertise to contribute; that the amount of money involved was minuscule (the figure $25,000 is what I recall). I was not satisfied with this response. When I continued to question APA staff and officers about the reasons for the conference, the APA's involvement, and the monies spent for it, I was given some version of the same response. Although dissatisfied by answers that served only to deflect me from my
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concern for the ethics involved in collaborating with the FBI and CIA and furthermore involving the organization in “spy craft,” I did not pursue the matter. Had I done so, perhaps I would have become suspicious of the APA's involvement and wary of the true intentions behind PENS much earlier. I have asked myself if my presence on the Task Force was intended to provide some sort of “cover” for aligning the outcome with DoD interests rather than the ethical obligations of the profession or the protection of the public (cf. Pope, 2016). The responses I received fell squarely into the “it's not what it seems” domain of gaslighting. My concern was treated rather lightly as if I were being naïve, so too were the questions I raised about the relationship between the CIA and APA. That feeling of “I don't get it,” added to “I must be far more naïve than I knew myself to be,” left me in turmoil over my attachment to the organization and doubting my critical capacity. My confusion over the Science of Deception conference was not the only instance when I felt I had to question my own perceptions. APA staff, in particular the Director of the APA Ethics Office, were very certain about explanations they were offering on a variety of topics that left me troubled and confused. Detainees in places like Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib were being held under conditions condemned by human rights organizations. They were effectively “disappeared” as had been true for those rounded up under military regimes in Latin America and other countries. I expressed concern that APA's public statements about psychologists and torture said little beyond “we oppose any form of torture “or “our policies since 1987 prohibit participation in torture.” By comparison, other professional organizations (e.g. the American Psychiatric Association; the American Medical Association) made clear their prohibition of clinicians' involvement in the operations in detention centers or black sites. When I called APA's statements into question, I was told that, in fact, the statements and policies of other organizations were completely aligned with APA's own. Again I found myself questioning my judgment. Could I have so misunderstood the statements made by the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association? How could those clear and unequivocal statements laying out other organizations' policies parallel those of the APA, when, to my eye, the APA's pronouncements lacked the definitiveness of theirs? I must have misread or misinterpreted. The responses from those people whose ethics and positions I respected suggested that I had to work harder to understand. Another moment from the PENS Task Force proceedings was even more disturbing. When the question about the revision of Ethics Code 1.02 regarding the law or governing regulatory authority to which APA member psychologists were to be held was being discussed there was heated debate (see Boulanger in this issue for a fuller discussion of ethical standard 1.02 and the protracted debate that surrounded it). The argument from the military psychologists and APA officers was that there was no other relevant law save for that of the United States. All of us on the Task Force were well aware of the legal memos from Bush administration lawyers re‐interpreting the laws defining torture in an international context (Bybee, 2002; Yoo, 2002). These carefully crafted interpretations were being used to shield interrogation techniques that by any international measure constituted torture. Three of the civilian members of the task force, of whom I was one,1 argued vehemently that international law as specified in international treaties and covenants to the Geneva Conventions (United Nations, 1949, 1984) was the standard to be met. The tension mounted and continued for some time when, finally, one CIA psychologist addressing his remark to me said: “We don't disagree with your politics. We do have to remember who our employer is.” That remark alone, not to mention the fervor of the discussion, should have alerted me to the fact that what was going on in the PENS process was not what it was purported to be. Yet it did not. I wanted to believe that we all had the shared mission of articulating what defined the ethical behaviors of psychologists even when national security was at issue. As a civilian member, I felt both outnumbered and outranked. I felt as though I were an “outlier“ to the proceedings experientially and literally. The task force members were arrayed around a large conference table. The military members were grouped together within a subcircle, the three civilian members scattered at points where only two of us could have direct visual contact with one another. What subtle signals might have been expressed among the military members, often essential in delicate or difficult discussions, were impossible for us? It seemed to me as though despite our natural “sub grouping” we civilians had little opportunity for similar “sidebar” communication with one another to further advance our separate agenda. Although I had worked in post‐conflict settings and was
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reasonably well versed in the use of torture to silence a populace within repressive societies as well as the United States' complicity with doing so (Belen‐Fernandez, 2014), I had never experienced the immediacy or heat of war. Nor, for that matter had I known the distress that arises when orders contravene core principles. Silently I deferred to the greater experience of the military members of the task force despite my conviction that, in the words of the Conventions against torture (United Nations, 1984), “no circumstance whatever may be used to justify the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”.2 I was not the only task force member to enact a deferential posture. One observer was accorded far more reverence than the others by the military task force members. Melvin Gravitz, a CIA contracted psychologist considered the “father of operational psychology“, played a significant role though observers typically take a back seat in task force meetings unless invited to speak. According to the Hoffman Report, Gravitz’ had considerable influence on drafting documents from the Task Force. It was only with the publication of the Hoffman Report that the motives for establishing a special task force became clear. I was sadly mistaken in my understanding of its purpose. Far from providing guidance to psychologists on BSCTs, we were expected to further the guild interests of psychology by ensuring that psychologists became the “go to” resource for the military and CIA in pursuing “national security” (cf. Pope, 2016, for further elaboration of guild versus professional ethics). I put “national security” in quotation marks with specific intention to call into question the decisions that are made under the guise of “homeland security” that effectively justify an array of assaults on civil and human rights as has been demonstrated in the torture debate flowing from the post 9/11 world.
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BETRAYAL
I have described earlier that several among the APA staff and governance members present at the Task Force meetings were friends among whom were some whose ethics I believed at the time to be above reproach. However, when the Hoffman Report was published with its extensive detail of the chicanery involved by some of those same people who pursued the goal of making psychology and psychologists attractive partners in the military's “enhanced interrogations” including involving psychologists in the interrogations, dismay does not denote my reaction. I felt profoundly betrayed. These were people who in all respects presented themselves as friends, providing the kind of listening friends offer one another. I could not fathom what I did not see or had overlooked; how could I have been so taken in? Who was this person I thought I knew? However, it was not the individuals alone by whom I felt betrayed. Equally important was the feeling that I had been betrayed by an organization in which I had taken pride; to which I had devoted so much time and energy, and participated in its leadership. Gómez et al. (2016) give voice to a theory of betrayal that describes my experience in the PENS process and afterward. They note that the expectable reactions to institutional betrayal include dissociation, withdrawal, and feelings of shame and distrust. They propose that the “victim“needs to ignore the betrayal in the service of maintaining the relationship. When I say that I felt betrayed in the aftermath of PENS, I mean that my attachments to the people involved were important components of my interpersonal life, to my identity as a psychoanalyst, and to what I felt my role in the organization of the APA had been. When I say that I trusted and admired and valued the relationships with a number of the people involved, I mean that I believed there were reciprocal feelings of trust, admiration and respect. In the aftermath, I feel distinctly misused. In an early paper focusing on betrayal trauma, Freyd (1997) notes that “a focus on betrayal is implicitly a focus on interpersonal power” (p. 28). Of course, that is certainly clear in particular instances of sexual abuse. In the instance of institutional power, as played out in this period, I am focusing less on a power differential than I am on the failure of mutuality in the relationships involved. Smith and Freyd (2014) speak as well to “betrayal blindness,” the failure to be aware of the ways in which power is used to undermine the experience or to bolster the gaslighting of the “victim.” As they assert, maintaining the relationship takes precedence over attention to the betrayal. The betrayal is dissociated from consciousness (p. 577).
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Certainly I was “blind” to the possibility that something other than what I thought was going on was in fact occurring. The questions I have repeatedly asked myself, referring to those who doggedly pursued bringing the malfeasance of many in the APA to light, have been: “how did others know?” “How did I not know?” The dissociation Freyd describes shockingly became apparent to me in the course of my deconsructing both on my own and with colleagues, the experience of my service on the PENS task force. For example, I was asked about the role of a key APA staff person whose conflict of interest in his role regarding the PENS process went undisclosed until the publication of the independent investigator's report. In a late night conversation with my colleague shortly after the PENS meetings, I responded to his questions about the staff person's participation by saying with absolute certainty “he wasn't even there!” It was not until the next day, thinking over our conversation, the storm that had arisen over the PENS process and my distress over who was saying what about whom that I remembered the staff member in question not only had been there but had had a lot to say. How and why had I erased him? What in the process had contributed to my doing so?
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THE BOOGEYMAN
Like many another child of that age, when I was six, seven or eight years old I was unshakeable in my conviction that monstrous creatures lurked under my bed ready to grab me if I were less than exquisitely cautious about how I approached getting under the covers. As a consequence, I regularly took a flying leap from the middle of my room onto my bed lest I fall victim to these “boogeymen.” I share this seemingly tangential personal detail to suggest that likely we all have our “boogeymen” against whom we must take similar precautions. The names and dangers they represent vary as do the bases for our fear of them. What we believe about these fearsome creatures determines how we approach them, whether by a “flying leap” to avoid them, by denial, disavowal, dissociation, or even more deriding or excoriating them. Merely speaking their names aloud can evoke anxiety or terror depending on our relationship to the “boogeyman.” As with all our psychology, we bring our past to our current encounters with them. Simply put, we bring our subjectivity and our psychology to everything we do. I mention these seemingly obvious points to underscore how much context and subjectivity, assumptions and preconceptions, influence our interactions and perceptions. What I call the “PENS debacle” occurred at a time not unlike the present, when the prospect of terrorism was uppermost in the minds of many. In that environment, there were plenty of “boogeymen.” I offer an example from a moment during the APA Council of Representatives meeting in August 2006 to illustrate my point. Former Surgeon General Major Gen. (now retired) Kevin Kiley addressed Council in what has been called an effort to persuade its members not to ban military psychologists from playing a role in interrogations (Kiley, 2011). In that talk he described those held in detention at Guantanamo as “confirmed jihadists … the worst of the worst”,3 this despite the fact that at that time only about 10 of the more than 700 of those who had disappeared into this black hole had been charged with any offense. I suggest that “boogeymen” were actively if unconsciously present in the PENS process and in its aftermath, particularly where “boogeymen” are the signifiers of our worst fears, however their personifications may play out in reality. They are our projective identifications incarnate. To the extent that such “monstrous creatures” color our perceptions of one another, we eliminate the subjectivity of the other. In such a context of, as Benjamin (2004) names it “doer and done to,” the possibility of intersubjectivity is erased and dialogue impossible. At times it appeared that among the “boogeymen “in the room during the Task Force deliberations were some among the military psychologists themselves. Even without the information about the roles several had played in strategizing in advance of the meetings their intentions were readily suspect in their personae as “military “and the positions they espoused. To the extent that we civilian members symbolized an interference to the military's agenda, we became equivalent “boogeymen.” We were less individuals with strongly held beliefs than we were the category we represented. As time went on and the PENS Task Force became a focus of the opposition to APA practices in Guantanamo and the black sites, and the proof of APA's venality, I too became one of the “boogeymen“of the protesters, identified as
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being in “cahoots“with those members of the APA who were deemed untrustworthy. Assumptions were made about me based on my resume and rumor absent any direct interaction. I had served on several committees with former or current APA officers. It appeared as if that fact alone defined who I was to some critics of the process. When personal interaction did occur it was colored by preconceptions about me. I regret my role in not having invited direct exchange with one of the other civilian Task Force members with whom I did in fact agree. When we interact on the basis of stereotypes based on persona (Jung) rather than person we block our knowing him/her. Much of what I am reporting of my post‐PENS internal process involves distinguishing persona from person (Jung, 1940, p. 221), something I failed to do as well, thereby participating in the impediment to true dialogue. The tensions – not the arguments but the apparently irreconcilable heat in the argument – among the parties to the dispute over psychologists' roles in supporting the US government's “national security” agenda arose at least in some measure from the projections all of us made onto the other. There was little in the process that actually promoted dialogue. The “work“of the task force, that is revising the Ethics Code, took precedence over a prior process needed to accomplish it. That would have been to establish a basis for dialogue requiring that we actually appreciate the real concerns of the individual members. We encourage at least that much in the clinical work we do. We should at least do the same with one another.
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C O N CL U S I O N
The context of the Task Force meetings and what followed was distorted by the secret agendae and manipulations by some of the participants and staff of the APA during this time. As such, when my sense of some of the players, based on long and what I believed to be fruitful relationships, was challenged I had little recourse other than to doubt the quality of my own thinking, to dissociate or to become confused. I was trying to reconcile my knowledge of the players from having worked closely and extensively with some of them and having personal relationships that extended beyond APA with others. As in all instances of betrayal trauma, I psychically defended those attachments. I was unable to make affective “sense” of the charges and counter‐charges across the parties in conflict. Finally, as Gómez et al. (2016) and others note, the betrayal led me to withdraw in the face of the collapse of my ability to hold the discordant experiences in mind. The gaslighting by those I had trusted combined with my own cast of boogeymen and being cast in that role as well contributed to my deep disappointment with the APA and everything that attached to the PENS process and its consequences. ENDNOTES 1
The Task Force chair was also a civilian but she played a minor role in the discussions and deliberations of the Task Force.
2
I have asked myself if my presence on the Task Force was intended to provide some sort of “cover” for aligning the outcome with DoD interests rather than the ethical obligations of the profession or the protection of the public (cf. Pope, 2015).
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I was present at that Council meeting as a representative from the APA Division of Psychoanalysis. There is no recording of his remarks other than my own notes of it. Hence I am unable to refer readers, should they want to check it, to a published reference.
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Gómez, J. M., Smith, C. P., Gobin, R. L., Tang, S. S., & Freyd, J. (2016). Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 17(5), 527–544. Hoffman, D. (2015). Hoffman report. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/independent‐review/ Jung, C. G. (1940). Concerning rebirth. In G. Adler & R. F. C. Hull (Eds.), Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 9 (Part I): The archetypes and the collective unconscious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kiley, K. (2011, May 25). Lt. General “Coverup” Kiley: From abused detainees to neglected soldiers. Huffington Post. Retrieved November 31, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art‐levine/lt‐general‐coverup‐kiley‐_b_42596.html Pope, K. (2016). The code not taken: The path from guild ethics to torture and our continuing choices. Canadian Psychology/ Psychology Candienne, 57(1). Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587. Thomas, N. K. (1999). Bosnia postwar: A psychoanalyst's experience providing pro bono service. The Psychoanalytic Activist, Issue 2, Fall. Thomas, N. K. (2005a). An eye for an eye: Revenge in the aftermath of trauma. In D. Knafo (Ed.), Living with terror, working with trauma: A clinician's handbook. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Press. Thomas, N. K. (2005b). The use of the hero. In Y. Danieli & R. L. Dingman (Eds.), On the ground after September 11: Mental health responses and practical knowledge gained. Binghamton, NY: The Haworth Press. Thomas, N. K. (2006). Efforts to prevent terrorism: Impact on immigrant groups. In P. R. Kimmel & C. E. Stout (Eds.), Collateral damage: The psychological consequences of America's war on terrorism. Westport, CT: Praeger. United Nations. (1949). Geneva convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war. Retrieved July 24, 2016, from http://ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/TreatmentOfPrisonersOfWar.aspx United Nations. (1984). Convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Retrieved November 31, 2016 from http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/ProfessionalInterest/cat.pdf Yoo, J. (2002). Memorandum for William J. Haynes, III, general counsel to the Department of Defense, January 9. Retrieved December 6, 2016, from http://www.antiwar.com/rep/020109_yoomemo_1‐10.pdf
Nina K. Thomas, PhD, ABPP, FAPA, CGP, is Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor and Clinical Consultant/ Supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis where she also serves as Chair of the Advanced Specialization in Trauma and Disaster Studies. She has contributed papers and book chapters on trauma stemming from ethnic conflict, war and political repression. She was awarded the 2016 Social Responsibility Award by the American Group Psychotherapy Association. She also serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Group Psychotherapy. She is in private practice in New York City and Morristown, NJ [
[email protected]]
How to cite this article: Thomas NK. Gaslighting, betrayal and the boogeyman: Personal reflections on the American Psychological Association, PENS and the involvement of psychologists in torture. Int J Appl Psychoanal Studies. 2017;14:125–132. https://doi.org/10.1002/aps.1520
