Stephen Soldz

Stephen Soldz
Stephen Soldz, c.2008.
Born (1952-11-19) November 19, 1952 (age 71)
CitizenshipU.S.A.
Known forPolitical activism
Scientific career
FieldsPsychology, Psychotherapy

Stephen Soldz (born 19 November 1952) is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, professor, and anti-war activist. Soldz is director of the Social Justice and Human Rights program at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.[1]

He has received media attention as a vocal critic regarding allegations of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. government in its conduct of the War in Iraq and the War on Terror.

In August 2007, Soldz publicly challenged the American Psychological Association to ban the involvement by professional psychologists in the interrogation of 'enemy combatant' prisoners held by the CIA and Defense Department.[2] Soldz, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, publicly accused psychologists attached to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay of developing and applying torture techniques on detainees while advising interrogators on the levels of abuse that detainees could withstand.[3] In November 2007, Soldz coauthored an article on psychological torture at Guantanamo Bay with Julian Assange, published via WikiLeaks.[4]

The American Psychological Association did not pass the ban advocated by Soldz, but instead issued a resolution stating its opposition to torture and restricting its members from participating in interrogations that involved practices that could be defined as torture.[5]

Additionally, Soldz, in his role as the publisher of the Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report web site, has written for Znet website questioning the accuracy in reporting the number of Iraqi civilian deaths since the March 2003 invasion[6] and has challenged claims that the al-Jazeera television network was supportive of Saddam Hussein.[7] He has also written opinion columns on the Iraq war for the Daily Kos web site.

Outside of politics, Soldz and Leigh McCullough co-edited the 1999 book Reconciling Empirical Knowledge and Clinical Experience: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, published by the American Psychological Association. Also in 1999, Soldz and George E. Vaillant published their article "The Big Five Personality Traits and the Life Course: A 45-Year Longitudinal Study" in the 'Journal of Research in Personality. The journal's editors later named the Soldz-Vaillant article as the publication's most important paper for that year.[8]

  1. ^ "Stephen Soldz" Archived 2013-01-02 at the Wayback Machine, academic page, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis
  2. ^ “Psychologists to CIA: We Condemn Torture,” Salon, 15 August, 2007
  3. ^ “Psychologists' feud over aiding military interrogators coming to a head”, San Francisco Chronicle, 18 August 2007
  4. ^ "Guantanamo document confirms psychological torture," Wikileaks, 17 November 2007
  5. ^ "US Psychologists Scrap Interrogation Ban," The Washington Post,## 20 August, 2007
  6. ^ Stephen Soldz "When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth", Znet, 5 February 2006
  7. ^ “Press Freedom or Freedom to Bomb the Press? The Bush Plan to Bomb Al-Jazeera,” Mathaba News Agency, 24 November, 2005
  8. ^ “Soldz and Vaillant Win Annual Award for Most Important Paper”, Journal for Research in Personality, June 2000