Refugee survivors of torture: Trauma and treatment.

It is increasingly likely that psychologists may be faced with clients who have been tortured, although the significance of this background can be easily unrecognized or mishandled. With the growing incidence of refugees to the United States escaping from organized violence and human rights violations in many parts of the world, the need for psychological assistance in the recovery from torture is well documented. By integrating principles from trauma theory and multicultural theory with a conceptual analysis of power and liberation theory, the author offers an understanding of both the nature of the damage inflicted by politically based torture and strategies to help overcome that damage. In order for the oppressed to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as l imit ing situation which they can transform. (Freire, 1973, p. 34) Politically driven torture may not seem a likely factor in the course of much conventional clinical work, but the unfortunate fact is that the consequences of barbarity inflicted elsewhere are in-creasingly to be encountered within resettlement populations here