September 7, 2007

Psychologists, Under a Historian's Lens

By THOMAS BARTLETT

A scholar asserts that key figures in the discipline had ties to torture

As the American Psychological Association debates whether its members should be involved in so-called coercive interrogation, Alfred W. McCoy is trying to get psychologists to own up to their past.

Mr. McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Inter­rogation From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan Books, 2006). The