Elliot was 11 years old and playing happily at summer camp when he accidentally bumped into a pretty and popular girl. “She got very angry,” he recounted later. “She cursed at me and pushed me.” He froze, shocked, completely lost as to how to respond. Everybody was watching. “Are you okay?” asked one of his friends. Elliot couldn’t speak or move. He felt humiliated. He barely talked for the rest of the day. “I couldn’t believe what had happened.” The experience made him feel like an “insignificant, unworthy little mouse. I felt so small and vulnerable. I couldn’t believe this girl was so horrible to me, and I thought it was because she viewed me as a loser.” As he grew into his teens, continually rejected and bullied by the cool school elites, Elliot never forgot the incident. “It would scar me for life.”

Ted was a gifted scholar, arriving at Harvard University at age 16. One day, he applied to take part in an experiment led by the prestigious psychologist Professor Henry Murray. Ted was instructed to spend a month writing an “exposition of your personal philosophy of life, an affirmation of the major guiding principles in accord with which you live or hope to live” and an autobiography containing deeply personal information about subjects including toilet training, thumb sucking, and masturbation. What Ted didn’t know was that Murray had a history of working on behalf of secretive government agencies. This would be a study of harsh interrogation techniques, specifically the “effects of emotional and psychological trauma on unwitting human subjects.” Once he’d detailed his secrets and philosophies, Ted was led into a brightly lit room, had wires and probes attached to him, and was sat in front of a one way mirror. There began a series of what Murray called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks on his personal history and the rules and symbols by which he lived and hoped to live. “Every week for three years, someone met with him to verbally abuse him and humiliate him,” Ted’s brother said. “He never told us about the experiments, but we noticed how he changed.” Ted himself described the humiliation experiments as “the worst experience of my life.”