The Biscuit Breaker

Before he became a psychologist, Steven Reisner didn't know much about the long history between spies and shrinks. Soft-spoken and cerebral, he'd spent seven years as a theater actor and director, switching to psychology as a profession in 1989. But the ties go back decades, to the early years of the cold war when psychologists helped the CIA experiment on U.S. citizens with mind-altering drugs. The relationship has warmed and cooled over the years, heating up whenever defense or intelligence officials wanted better mind-control methods, ways to direct people's behavior or detect deception. Since 9/11 military and civilian psychologists at Guantánamo Bay and other sites have often watched through the glass when detainees have been interrogated, part of a secret program about which few details have ever emerged.

Reisner first read about the program in a newspaper article in 2004. The 54-year-old psychoanalyst is convinced that some of the techniques used in those interrogations amounted to torture, and he has made it his mission since then to get psychologists out of the business of helping the military as they break down prisoners. Reisner's crusade has been waged largely within the American Psychological Association—in the minutiae of association bylaws and on the pages of internal listservs. Last week, balloting began for a new APA president in what for many is a referendum on the relationship between psychologists and the military. Among five contenders, Reisner has staked his candidacy on the issue.

The APA is the only remaining professional health association not to have shunned the contentious interrogations in the years since Guantánamo was opened in 2001. Two civilian psychologists helped introduce techniques like waterboarding into interrogations, drawn from the military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) schools where troops are taught to withstand torture. Since 2002 psychologists have observed interrogations and suggested specific ways to exploit the weaknesses of detainees, including Mohammed Jawad, whose disturbing case is now being heard by a military tribunal in Guantánamo. The military claims the psychologists have only helped to make interrogations "safe, legal and effective."

Judging by recent internal votes, APA members have grown uncomfortable with the interrogation business. Reisner has received endorsements from a few big-name psychologists, including Stanford University's Philip Zimbardo. (The four other candidates in the race for president—two clinical psychologists, one professor and a researcher—have mostly campaigned on the bread-and-butter issues of the profession, such as gaining prescription-writing authority for psychologists.) If he wins, Reisner says he will use his authority to expose the precise role individual APA psychologists have played in the interrogations, not only at Guantánamo but at the CIA's "black" sites around the world. He says wrongdoers will be brought before an ethics board; like doctors and other caregivers, psychologists are bound by a do-no-harm principle. But for Reisner the main point is to air the details publicly, in a kind of truth-and-reconciliation process. "The discussions … need to have a public venue so that we can learn the lessons and not let it happen again," he says.

Reisner's passion for this issue is not only professional. He traces his interest in psychology to his parents' reluctance to talk about their experiences in World War II. Both are Holocaust survivors. Reisner found out when he was only 10 from a family friend that his mother had spent time in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. He came to know her full story—she fled a death march in the waning months of the war—when she addressed his high-school class. "I always wanted to know how people went into the darkest places and came out of them," he says.

As a psychoanalyst Reisner says he's attuned to the deeper truths people conceal when they tell their stories (his sparse office in a Chelsea walk-up features an analyst's armchair and a leather couch where the patient, in traditional Freudian fashion, faces away from the psychologist). That instinct led him to believe that there was more to the relationship between psychologists and interrogators than what had appeared in initial media reports. He began collecting documents in a file on the subject that now takes up a large chunk of his computer's hard drive.