The melancholic torturer

Abstract

The thesis explores the proposition that Australia's abusive treatment of refugees and asylum seekers can be traced back to a denial of foundational violence of colonisation. This is a foundational denial that, like a noxious weed, sends out runners across the country and time and politics to reappear in the denial of abusive and degrading treatment of asylum seekers (see chapter five), a denial of their humanity (see chapter six) and finally a denial of public responsibility for the machinery of abuse (see chapter seven). In the closing chapters it explores what could happen when that foundational denial is derailed by reality. Adopting a psychoanalytic frame, the research explores three questions; is Australia engaging in cruel, degrading and humiliating treatment of asylum seekers, treatment that devolves into torture. If so, how is this operationalised, and finally, what does the abuse satisfy within the state? The thesis uses Freud's work on Mourning and Melancholia and Melanie Klein's work on the paranoid/schizoid position to describe the psycho-affective terrain from which this abuse emanates. In a rare development it takes this psycho-affective terrain as the foundation and then investigates the impact the privatised detention regime has had in enabling the known/unknowability of the abuse and mechanisms at work within media practice to create "torturable subjects". It concludes by asking, what is to be done? As a former journalist, the Candidate uses a hermeneutic approach to examine the available evidence of abuse and torture. Interviews have been conducted with medical professionals who have treated those subjected to the immigration regime for over 20 years. The interviews range around questions concerning the nature of the abuse, its impacts and concludes by asking, if Australia were a patient, how would they treat it?

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English