Stephen Soldz

Stephen Soldz, Ph.D., born November 19, 1952, is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, professor, and anti-war activist.

He has received media attention as a vocal critic regarding allegations of the use 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 interrogation of 'enemy combatant' prisoners held by the CIA and Defense Department. 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.

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.

Additionally, Soldz, in his role as the publisher of the Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report web site, has used media forums to question the accuracy in reporting the number of Iraqi civilian deaths since the March 2003 invasion and challenged claims that the al-Jazeera television network was supportive of Saddam Hussein. 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.