Abstract EN:

The practice of torture represents the ultimate extremity of the intention to dehumanize human beings and submit them to a position where they are "beyond social relationships". It overturns the individual's being-in-the-world (that is to say, the way in which the subject opens up to the world). In order not to consider the subject as being responsible for the symptoms he subsequently shows, torture must be considered to be a social-political event and no longer in the light of a merely psychic problem. Using this point of view, this thesis aims to analyze the torturing system, its logic, the issues involved and its effects. Using a crossed analysis of case studies consisting of semi-directive interviews with former patients who were encountered as a psychologist, we will see that the human being cracks at specific breaking points : the torturing system alters the subject's possibilities of being both subject of his history and at the same time interacting with others. The subject no longer creates outside worlds but closes up into his own. His abilityt to express himself is blocked : this in turn has an impact in terms of his language and transforms the poetic dimension of thinking (the ability to give shape and meaning to one's environment). The impact of the torturing system leaves a permanent trace both on the human beings who have perpetrated it and also on those who were subjected to it. For the latter, getting away from the long term effects of the torturing system requires a real avoidance strategy and they will be durably affected by melancholic relationship with others.