Enforced Disappearances and Torture Today: A View from Analytical Psychology 2. Torture Survivors and the Unthinkable: A Hyper-Present Body in the Therapeutic Process: 2. Torture Survivors and the Unthinkable: A Hyper-Present Body in the Therapeutic Process1

In very rare cases, individuals survive the atrocities of abduction, imprisonment and torture that are part of the hallmark of enforced disappearances. Cases of people who survive torture and seek asylum in a third country help us understand some important aspects related to the crime of enforced disappearance. In the psychotherapy of torture survivors, at an early stage and for a long time, words often do not convey the core of the patient's experience. Survivors usually have tormented bodies in which individual and collective violence, hatred, anger, guilt and shame are painfully inscribed. Corporeal countertransference becomes the only possible way for a therapist to get in touch with a survivor's experience through a kind of body-to-body communication. The centrality of the body in these therapies suggests that the body is the involuntary recipient and container of mass political atrocities and, for this reason, the place where, in the case of horrific social violence, the possibility of social "knowing" is stored and can be retrieved. Thus, when it comes to forced disappearance, the determination of the relatives to get to the truth through the discovery of the remains of their disappeared demonstrates the importance of the body as the final witness of what happened, beyond any possible manipulation.

The making of a tragedy: perversion in the perception of truth

A type of wilful blindness can pervert an individual's perception of truth or reality, not because that reality is too much to hold, but because it is distasteful. Undesired. The case of Adam will be used to explore perversion as it twists an analytic process, affecting the transference and countertransference in ways that are difficult to see. Theorists of Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and Jungian traditions are drawn from to explore potential roots to this perverted turn, and the way it can rigidify an individuation process. The anxiety that haunts this case echoes Jung's anxiety as he wondered if the stone saw him or he saw the stone. Object and observer blend when both analyst and patient hide from themselves and one another, knowing the truth of what is being discussed but blind to it.