Torture in Couple and Family Therapy

Introduction

Health, psychological, social, and legal services the world over are increasingly confronting the need to provide services to survivors of torture in their own countries or arriving a third country as asylum seekers or as part of refugees waves, alone or with their families. Professionals are therefore in need to capacitate in treatment for the victims of torture as well as for their families. The latter are the “hidden victims” of the torture, as their lives have been drastically affected not only by their exposure to the collective experience of terror, oppression, or exile but by the relational turmoil stemming from the long-term effects of torture on the survivors. The clinical challenge involves working not only with human beings that have survived extreme experiences affecting the constitution of their subjectivity and their worldview but also spilling over to include the enactment of pervasive disruptions in their intimate interpersonal ties, who may constitute...