On Sun, 30 May 2004, Chuck Grimes cited the CIA's Kubark Interrogation manual:
> http://www.phttp://www.parascope.com/articles/0397/kubark06.htm
>
> It is a fundamental hypothesis of this handbook that these techniques,
> which can succeed even with highly resistant sources, are in essence
> methods of inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier
> and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance and the
> inculcation of dependence. All of the techniques employed to break
> through an interrogation roadblock, the entire spectrum from simple
> isolation to hypnosis and narcosis, are essentially ways of speeding up
> the process of regression. As the interrogatee slips back from maturity
> toward a more infantile state
This was also the theory advanced for "truth serum," aka sodium amytal. It ultimately flowed from "narco-analysis" which was experimented with in the 60s and 70s as a way to speed up and deepen "hypno-analysis" -- which was psycho-analysis was originally built on and departed from.
There's just one huge problem with this theory: even if you do return people to the infantile state, there's one thing everyone agrees about that theoretically constructed state: that people, when in it, can't tell the truth from fiction.
Besides being the basic point of Freudian departure in the first place, and being raised during the MKULTRA hearings in the 1970s (see http://www.parascope.com/ds/documentslibrary/documents/mkultrahearing/mkultraHearing04.htm)
this point also surfaced in big way in the 1980s during the infamous "recovered memory" scare. Much "recovered memory" was produced during such narco-hypno-analysis. When it was brought into court, it didn't hold up.
One last point. To the extent that stress positions aim at the same mechanism as narco-analysis -- bringing people to an infantile state where their "defenses" have been destroyed, so that when you ask them a question they are unable to deflect you -- there was a famous experiment by Redlich at Yale in 1951 that proved that at least with narco-analysis, this isn't true. When people had something they wanted to hide, and concocted a plausible cover story for it, they were perfectly capable of maintaining it under the influence of sodium amytal.
A citation for Redlich and a discussion of this points are all found in the following note:
http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume6/j6_1_3.htm
Michael