The ‘living dead’ — Survivors of torture and psychosis

SUMMARY

Regardless of all differences between patients who have suffered from psychotic breakdowns and those with the sequelae of torture, our experience have shown that some common features can be recognized. We can attempt to understand patients' experience of being ‘living dead’ in terms of regression to the ‘psychotic core’ in the personality, and in terms of actualisation and enactment of archaic relations to primary objects. The major difference between thee two categories of patients deals with a located, limited, and concrete traumatic event in the life of the torture-survivor, whilst in the schizophrenic individual the trauma also emanates from within through own destructiveness and rage. Regressive forms of relations toward distorted, aggressively cathected and persecutory primary objects are reestablished in both cases, leading to a more or less stable reorganisation of the ego. Difficulties in psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients and torture-survivors are here discussed as a consequence of the patients' persistently holding onto the distorted and regressive forms of relating to primary objects, when the projections of the patients' own destructiveness and hate is followed by a strong tendency to symbiotic merging.