Abstract

This article presents a qualitative study aimed at assessing the impact of the oral testimonies of torture victims on professionals who worked for the Chilean National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture in 2003-2004. Life stories were developed with 22 professionals who worked for this Commission based on 3 meetings with each of them. The results reveal that the impact of listening to torture testimonies articulates elaborative processes from different dimensions-emotional, biographical- narrative and institutional-regarded as a background of coordinates which frame their motion. Such processes are heavily influenced by the meanings and senses that the professionals construct about their personal and familial histories and about their social history.