Solitude_A Return to the Self Read online

  There are instances of prisoners who signed depositions largely out of sympathy for their interrogators, because they felt that these men would be punished if a proper deposition were not forthcoming. In other words, the warm and friendly feelings which develop between the prisoner and the interrogator may have a powerful influence on the prisoner’s behavior.5

  Even when positive feelings towards the interrogator are not involved, nearly all prisoners will, in the end, sign a deposition admitting what Communist laws define as ‘crimes against the State’, rather than face further interrogation, isolation, and torture.

  These techniques for eliciting confessions were developed empirically over many years. They are refinements of methods employed by the Czarist secret police. Isolation plays a prominent part in the procedure. Firstly, it brings about a partial disruption of mental functioning; and secondly, it encourages dependence upon the interrogator, and thus inclines the prisoner toward compliance.

  Although very few prisoners thus treated refuse to sign a confession, there are some notable exceptions. Dr Edith Bone has left a record of her extraordinary toughness and resilience in her book Seven Years Solitary.6

  Dr Bone was over sixty when she was arrested in Hungary in 1949. A notable linguist, she had been invited to Hungary to translate English scientific books into Hungarian. She herself had joined the Communist Party in 1919. She was accused of being a British agent, but refused to make a false confession or in any way to collaborate with her interrogators. This elderly lady spent seven years in prison before she was finally released in November 1956. For three of those years she was denied access to books or writing materials. The cell in which she was first confined was bitterly cold and had no window. Worse was to come. For five months she was kept in a cellar in total darkness. The walls ran with water or were covered with fungus; the floor was deep in excrement. There was no ventilation. Dr Bone invented various techniques for keeping herself sane. She recited and translated poetry, and herself composed verses. She completed a mental inventory of her vocabulary in the six languages in which she was fluent, and went for imaginary walks through the streets of the many cities which she knew well. Throughout these and other ordeals, Dr Bone treated her captors with contempt, and never ceased to protest her innocence. She is not only a shining example of courage which few could match, but also illustrates the point that a well-stocked, disciplined mind can prevent its own disruption.

  Similar techniques for preserving normal mental functions were employed by Christopher Burney, who describes his imprisonment in France in his book Solitary Confinement.7 He also used imaginary walks and inventories to keep his mental faculties employed. In addition, he noted the vital importance for prisoners of keeping some area of decision, however small, which is entirely their own. Even the prisoner who agrees to be totally at the mercy of his captors can retain some degree of autonomy: by for example deciding whether to eat the bread he is given, or to save it for future consumption. On such apparendy trivial decisions may depend whether or not the prisoner retains any sense of being an independent entity.

  Although, for the most part, prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps were not held in solitary confinement, the importance of retaining some capacity for independent decision-making is also stressed by Bruno Bettelheim. From his own observations when he was a prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim concluded that the prisoners who gave up and died were those who had abandoned any attempt at personal autonomy; who acquiesced in their captors’ aim of dehumanizing and exercising total control over them.

  In the concentration camps, efforts to deprive the prisoners of even the smallest remnants of their autonomy were particularly vicious and all-pervasive. Nevertheless the system succeeded only to various degrees, affecting some aspects of one’s life more than others. In the measure that the prisoner was deprived of autonomy it brought about a commensurately severe personality disintegration, both in his inner life and in his relations to others.8

  Another wonderful example of the deliberate exercise of recall in a well-furnished mind in order to prevent breakdown is given by Yehudi Menuhin. At the end of the war, when the Germans were rounding up the Jews in Budapest, the mother of Antal Dorati, the conductor,

  found herself herded into a small room with dozens of others, where they were kept for many days with no food and no facilities of any kind. Most of the others went out of their minds, but she kept sane by methodically going through the four parts of each of the Beethoven quartets, which she knew individually by heart.9

  Part of the mental disruption caused by imprisonment, and more especially by solitary confinement, is the result of what has come to be known as sensory deprivation. During waking hours, the brain only functions efficiently if perceptual stimuli from the external world are being received. Our relationship to the environment and our understanding of it depend upon the information we gain through our senses. When asleep, our perceptions of the external world are greatly reduced, although significant sounds, like the cry of a child, may still arouse us. We enter the fantastic world of dreams; an hallucinatory, subjective world which is not dependent upon memory in the here-and-now, but which is governed by our previous experience, by our wishes, our fears, and our hopes.

  Research into sensory deprivation began in the early 1950s, as part of an enquiry into Communist methods of obtaining confessions by so-called ‘brainwashing’. Volunteers were confined in sound-proof, darkened rooms, and required to lie still on a bed, except when eating or using the lavatory. In more stringent experiments, subjects were suspended in warm water and required to inhibit all movement so as to receive as little information as possible from the skin and muscles, as well as being deprived of sight and sound. Since the subjects were volunteers, arrangements were made by which they could terminate the experiment at will if they found such conditions intolerable.

  Although the results of such experiments varied to some extent according to the methods employed, the general consequences can be summarized.

  First, intellectual performance deteriorated, especially if subjects were asked to undertake anything new or ‘creative’. Many reported difficulty in concentration, and were unable to pursue a connected train of thought. Some complained of insistent, obsessional thoughts which they could not control. Others abandoned any attempt at coherent thought and gave themselves up to daydreams.

  Second, suggestibility was greatly increased. In one experiment, susceptibility to propaganda was shown to increase eightfold as compared with subjects under normal conditions exposed to the same material. When a person is receiving very little information, what he does receive makes a more powerful impression; a fact well appreciated by totalitarian regimes which control the Press.

  Third, many volunteers experienced visual hallucinations, and a few reported auditory or tactile hallucinations.

  Fourth, a number of volunteers experienced panic attacks. Some suffered from irrational fears; for example, of becoming blind. Others became convinced that the experimenters had abandoned them. One volunteer demanded early release because his mind became flooded with such unpleasant memories of childhood that he could not bear it. Not even voluntarily chosen isolation is always tolerable.

  At Princeton, where some of the most extensive studies of sensory deprivation were carried out on their own students, the researchers ran out of volunteers during the summer, when most Princeton students were away. Volunteers were recruited from other colleges which, unlike Princeton, ran summer schools. This venture proved a failure. In spite of being paid for their time, the volunteers from outside Princeton nearly all demanded early release from the conditions of sensory deprivation. Whereas the Princeton students knew and trusted the experimenters who were in charge of the investigation, the volunteers from further a field had no such confidence.

  This last point is worth emphasis. It illustrates the fact that the same conditions of isolation or sensory deprivation can have a very different impact according to circu
mstances.

  Certain kinds of illness or injury demand treatment which involves reduction of sensory input. This may cause mental distress of a severe kind. For example, the treatment of a badly burned patient may involve complete immobilization and extensive bandaging, sometimes including bandages over the eyes. Patients in this condition may have to have all their physical needs attended to by nurses. Psychotic episodes have often been reported in such patients.

  Eye surgery is well known to provoke psychiatric symptoms, especially when both eyes have to be covered, and when immobilization is also required, as after repair of a torn retina.

  Heart surgery sometimes involves prolonged immobilization, helplessness, and being connected to a number of life-support machines. Oxygen tents may isolate the patient still further from normal sensory input. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that delirious states have been reported.

  Blindness and deafness have both been recognized as causal agents in mental illness. Deafness, especially, is apt to provoke paranoid ideas of being talked about, disparaged, or cheated. In contrast, partial sensory deprivation of this kind, by compelling the subject to look inward, may produce positive effects similar to those described by Admiral Byrd.

  Beethoven’s deafness probably began in 1796, when he was twenty-six years old. It took some time for it to become severe, and Beethoven continued to perform in public, with increasing difficulty, until around 1814. He began to use an ear trumpet in 1816. The Conversation Books, used so that visitors could communicate with him in writing, date from 1818. During the first two or three years of the nineteenth century, Beethoven went through agonies of anxiety about his hearing and his health in general, which he expressed in letters to friends and in the famous Heiligenstadt Testament of 1802, addressed to his brothers, and found amongst his papers after his death.

  But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back.10

  Beethoven’s deafness increased his mistrust of other human beings, his irascibility, and his difficulty in making close relationships. However, one of his recent biographers writes:

  But there may be a sense in which deafness played a positive role in his creativity, for we know that deafness did not impair and indeed may even have heightened his abilities as a composer, perhaps by its exclusion of piano virtuosity as a competing outlet for his creativity, perhaps by permitting a total concentration upon composition within a world of increasing auditory seclusion. In his deaf world, Beethoven could experiment with new forms of experience, free from the intrusive sounds of the external environment; free from the rigidities of the material world; free, like the dreamer, to combine and recombine the stuff of reality, in accordance with his desires, into previously undreamed-of forms and structures.11

  Some of Beethoven’s later experiments are discussed in Chapter 11.

  Goya is another example of a creative man of genius whose art owed a good deal of its originality to deafness. Born in 1746, Goya became the most fashionable and successful artist in Spain; a court painter, and deputy director of painting at the Royal Academy of Madrid. But, in 1792, Goya contracted an illness which left him deaf. He turned from painting portraits to works in which, as he himself wrote, he found more scope for invention and phantasy. His satirical etchings, Los Caprichos, were succeeded by Los Desastres de la guerra, representing his reaction to the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion. During 1820–23, he decorated the walls of his house, the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man), with the so-called ‘black paintings’ now in the Prado. André Malraux writes:

  To allow his genius to become apparent to himself it was necessary that he should dare to give up aiming to please. Cut off from everyone by deafness he discovered the vulnerability of the spectator, he realized that the painter has only to struggle with himself and he will become, sooner or later, the conqueror of all.12

  Goya had a horrific imagination. His isolation, induced by deafness, impelled him to record his nightmare visions, his despair at human folly and wickedness, his hatred of tyranny, and his compassion for human suffering, with an intensity achieved by no other artist. His ghastly picture of ‘Saturn devouring his Children’ adorned a wall of his dining-room. It is difficult to understand how a man obsessed with such horrors could live with himself; but Goya was as tough a man as has ever existed. At the age of eighty-two he wrote that he could neither see nor write nor hear: ‘I have nothing left but the will – and that I have in abundance.’13

  We saw earlier that, under conditions of partial sensory deprivation, doubts about the integrity of persons to whom one has entrusted oneself as patient or as paid volunteer are easily aroused. It is therefore not surprising that enforced solitude imposed by enemies often has devastating effects. Intense anxiety and uncertainty about the future combine with fear of torture and isolation to disrupt the normal functions of the mind. The effects of such disruption may persist for months or years.

  In Northern Ireland, sensory deprivation was deliberately used as part of the technique employed in the interrogation of suspected terrorists. The procedures were as follows. The heads of the detainees were covered with a thick black hood, except when they were being interrogated. They were subjected to a continuous, monotonous noise of such volume that communication with other detainees was impossible. They were required to stand facing a wall with legs apart, leaning on their fingertips. In addition, they were deprived of sleep during the early days of the operation, and given no food or drink other than one round of bread and one pint of water at six-hourly intervals. If they sought rest by propping their heads against the wall they were prevented from doing so. If they collapsed, they were picked up and compelled to resume the required posture.

  Sound-proof, light-proof rooms of the kind used in research into sensory deprivation are very expensive; but the techniques employed in Northern Ireland proved to be effective substitutes. The hoods prevented the men from receiving any visual information. A machine ensured that they received no auditory information other than a loud, monotonous noise. The posture against the wall reduced kinaesthetic information from skin and muscles. Thus, the detainees were effectively isolated and perceptually deprived, in spite of being subjected to these techniques in the same room as others.

  The effects were devastating. Partial starvation, which causes rapid loss of weight, combined with deprivation of sleep and an uncomfortable posture are by themselves enough to cause extreme stress and some disruption of brain function, even without additional deprivation of auditory and visual information. Subject to breaks for bread and water and visits to the lavatory, some men were kept against the wall continuously for fifteen or sixteen hours. Many experienced hallucinations and believed that they were going mad. Afterwards, some said that they would prefer to die rather than face further interrogation.

  Psychiatric examination of these men after their release revealed persistent symptoms: nightmares, waking tension and anxiety, suicidal thoughts, depression, and a variety of physical complaints like headaches and peptic ulcers which are commonly considered to be connected with stress. Responsible psychiatric opinion considered that some, at least, of the hooded men would never recover from their experience.

  When the facts about these interrogation procedures began to be known, protests were made from many sides by people who were deeply shocked that Britain should be employing methods of breaking down detainees which amounted to torture. It appeared that the use of such methods had developed gradually, without official authorization. Eventually the Prime Minister (then Edward Heath) forbade any further employment of these techniques in the interrogation of prisoners or suspects.

  Although in Britain and similar countries long prison sentences seldom involve long periods of solitary confinement, they do deprive t
he prisoner of most of the stimuli from the outside world which make life worth living, and can therefore be said to enforce some degree of sensory deprivation in the widest sense. The monotonous environment of the prison, the limited access to exercise and to the open air, the invariable routine, the absence of both social and sexual intimacy with loved ones – these are all deprivations which, in the case of long prison sentences, have a permanently deleterious effect upon the mind of the prisoner.

  Until recently, ‘life’ sentences were usually terminated by parole after a maximum of nine or ten years’ incarceration, because it was realized that longer periods of confinement made it unlikely that the prisoner, when released, would be able to cope with life outside. In Britain, those who have received life sentences can be released at any time, but remain on parole licence until death. This means that, during the remainder of their lives, they can be recalled to prison if the authorities consider it necessary. Today, many judges, when sentencing offenders who have committed heinous crimes like rape or murder, recommend that the criminal should be confined for twenty years or more. Such recommendations are taken very seriously. If they are implemented, it follows that an increasing number of offenders will be permanently disabled and rendered unfit to live in the community.

  Deprivation of external stimuli is particularly severe in prisons in which ‘maximum security’ is enforced, because the prisoners contained there are regarded as dangerous or likely to attempt escape. These, of course, are also the prisoners who are most likely to have received extended sentences. Although there are a few instances of prisoners serving very long sentences who have survived intact, like the Birdman of Alcatraz, deterioration and ‘institutional neurosis’ is common. Long-term prisoners become withdrawn, apathetic, and uninterested in their own appearance and surroundings. In their book Psychological Survival, Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor give an excellent review of these effects, based upon their study of long-term prisoners in the maximum security block of Durham prison, now fortunately abolished. The authors had been recruited to give weekly classes in social science to long-term prisoners. Although the classes aroused considerable interest in those inmates who had not been in prison very long, few prisoners who had already served many years attended. However, one prisoner who had served fourteen years came regularly. Afterwards he wrote to the authors: