Mind Rape / Literature

Psychic Assaults

• The Afterward: One of the Old God's servants cast a love spell on Sir Terriam. While this would have been a violation in and of itself, Sir Terriam is asexual, and thus the spell had to change her nature and severely damaged her brain. She managed to complete the quest, but retired afterward and is still adjusting when the novel picks up.
• There's a nasty one in The Algebraist by Iain Banks when police, who have been given permission to use whatever methods they think fit to break up a commune which is protesting against certain government policies, switch the total immersion virtual reality game the main character's girlfriend is playing for one which is described as "a nightmare of torture and rape" and leave her trapped in it for several days. She kills herself almost immediately after coming out of it and this event provides the main character's motivation for his betrayal of said government.
• In one Animorphs novel, Tobias is captured by an extremely sadistic Yeerk in the body of a young girl named Taylor and is subject to a torture that draws up his happiest memories and quickly swaps them with very painful ones.
• In the Anita Blake books, there are a few different kinds exhibited by the vampires.
  • First, they use simple brainwashing of a human into a happy automaton with no independent thought (most often used to get people to stand still while they take blood). Not usually used for physical sex, however, taking blood this way is very sexual and is described as metaphysical sex.
  • Then there's dream/magical simulation manipulation. While not used to its full potential, all the characters able to do this are nymphomaniacs and use it to force sex on the unwilling.
  • Thirdly, there's emotional manipulation — this can be either making people hopelessly in love with the vampire or making a person incapable of feeling anything but fear, and both types are shown both with and without physical rape.
  • Finally, there's establishing the Human Servant/Master bond against the servant's will; basically, being a master vampire's human servant is the equivalent in being the wife in a medieval marriage, except the ceremony allows your husband to make you watch any memories he chooses during it and to play with your mind, to some extent, afterwards.
• The eponymous evil cyborg from the future in The Apocalypse Troll (one half of a Terminator Twosome) does this to several people in order to acquire information about present-day Earth. One victim is a schoolteacher who was camping with her husband; the "troll" has its way with her for five hours before finally disposing of her body, and records every moment of the process for its later enjoyment.
• Area 51:
  • The memory-altering technology can cause this by making subjects believe that aliens abducted or tortured them.
  • Lisa later is tortured horribly when Garlin uses the Ark of the Covenant and then brain surgery (with no anesthesia) while retrieving the memories hidden in her brain.
• The Belgariad:
  • Polgara's preferred method for getting information out of captives is to subject them to visions of the thing they fear most.
  • This is also a favorite trick of the Child of Dark after it moves into Zandramas in the Malloreon. The night before the final battle, it digs up the worst possible things to show each individual hero, then makes them spend the entire night dreaming about them. Unfortunately for it, it doesn't quite understand friendship, and doesn't realize that they'd compare notes the next morning...
• The final story arc in Virgin's Bernice Summerfield novels concerns a planet of self-styled "gods" who have this as their hat.
• In The Black Magician Trilogy, it's mentioned several times how horrible it is to have someone forcibly read your mind. A lot of people aren't too keen on truth reads, which you at least have to give your permission for and people can only see what you let them; how true that is is a different matter, as people seem to worry quite a lot if they have secrets, as it will be hard to keep them hidden.
• In Michael Moorcock's The Blood Red Game, the surviving remnants of a dying universe engage in a type of mental competition with an alien race who does this as their primary way of resolving conflict. Since the aliens' physical weapons would obliterate the refugees, the refugees agree to play this game. Basically, whoever does the most Mind Rape on their opponents wins.
• In Carrie, the title character does this to Sue as one final act of revenge for what she feels to be Sue's involvement in her humiliation at prom. Of course, Sue wasn't responsible for what happened — she lets Carrie into her mind intentionally to prove this to her.
• In Castle Hangnail, any mind control beyond simple confusion and sleep spells completely breaks the target's mind. It's considered a Moral Event Horizon even by professional evil minions. Eudaimonia did this to her mother, though it's unclear whether she understood how nasty it was when she did the magic.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has an "island where dreams come true". What visitors don't understand is that by "dreams," we mean all dreams. And Lord Rhoop was stuck there for seven freaking years.
  • In The Silver Chair, the captive Prince Rilian was bewitched into forgetting his identity. Worse, the spell only affects him during the daytime, but his captor always pre-emptively binds him to the silver chair before nightfall. In his enchanted state, he lets her do this, under the impression that he'll go berserk and turn into a monstrous snake unless he's properly restrained. When the enchantment lifts, he's lucid all night but can't do anything about it. Rilian's captor similarly tries to bewitch the heroes into forgetting their own background, and she apparently used some kind of magical mind control on her Slave Mooks too.
  • In The Last Battle, a talking cat loses its sapience at the shock of seeing the Calormene god Tash. Likewise, in the book's Gainax Ending, the divine lion Aslan strips away the sapience of the talking animals who turn away from him during the apocalypse.
• In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a villain gives doubting Linden a brief demonstration to prove that True Evil does indeed exist. Touching mind-to-mind with said purely evil entity leaves her in a coma.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: This is how Feyre responds to the situation when she catches Ianthe about to actually rape Lucien.
• The practice for machine-life is so frighteningly simple to accomplish in The Culture that the mental privacy of organic sentients is the closest that society gets to having a law. Any machine being found to be even reading a person's mind is given the apt title Meatfucker and is ostracized from the Culture. One of the protagonists of Excession is one such perpetrator.
• In the prologue of A Dance with Dragons, Varamyr describes how skinchanging into human beings is considered an ultimate taboo — this in a culture that glorifies rape. He uses it as a last resort to live (and fails). Later in the book, we see that sweet, innocent Bran has picked up the habit of warging into Hodor and is unaware just how bad what he's doing really is (thought he does make the effort to calm him and after a few times it has become somewhat easier on them).
• Perryn of the Deverry books is capable of this. He knows that if he smiles and thinks in a certain way, women will be instantly attracted to him; he usually winds up sleeping with them. (He uses the same power to steal horses.) The real problems start when he decided Jill is the girl of his dreams, regardless of her being in a committed relationship with Rhodry. Perryn uses his power to make her go (and lie) with him, even though she specifically tells him to leave her alone (until the power simply overwhelms her mind). The kicker is that the power is a form of dweomer that not only slams Jill's own semi-latent abilities into overdrive, but the mere use of it is slowly killing Perryn. Part of the problem is that his current incarnation was born into the wrong race (it's complicated). It's no surprise that when Jill saw Perryn some time after that, she was ready to kick the crap out of him.
• Discworld:
  • In Wyrd Sisters, the legendary witch Granny Weatherwax strips away Lady Felmet's self-deceptions and forces her to see how vile she truly is. Unfortunately, Lady Felmet is sociopathic enough to be proud of it after only a moment's shock.
  • Later, in Maskerade, Weatherwax goes into loving detail about how far she could go, how she could leave the villain of the book 'hearing colours and seeing smells', twisting his mind about what his shape is that he'd beg to be turned into a frog, or simply making his own muscles break his bones. She could do all of that... if she was bad. She's not, of course — though sometimes, you might wish that she was...
  • Lords and Ladies: The Fair Folk can deliver a psychically enhanced "The Reason You Suck" Speech that overwhelms the victim with self-loathing and can even drive them mad.
• In Dragonlance, Kitiara is Mind Raped in her final moments when she discovers that her servant, Lord Soth intends to kill her and make her serve him as his banshee for all eternity.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Mucking about for any reason in someone's head (no matter the intent) will usually cause permanent mental damage. There's a reason why people who do it are usually summarily executed.
  • Also, White Court vampires usually do perform both the Mind and regular varieties, though their preference varies by family. Vampires from House Skavis cause people to feel despair until they commit suicide, those from House Malvora cause fear until people die of a heart attack, and the Raiths cause lust, usually seducing and feeding off people's souls during sex. Lara Raith both mind-rapes and regular-rapes her own father so hard that his mind is completely destroyed. To be fair, he had done the same to her, and he really had it coming.
  • In Grave Peril, Murphy ends up being mind-raped from a nightmare demon. It's so bad that in the next book, Murphy suffers from paranoia, insomnia and substance abuse, and Harry outright states that she was raped. It takes a while for her to overcome it, and even in "Aftermath", around a decade later, she still has a near-paralyzing fear of mind magic.
  • Also in Grave Peril, Harry witnesses victims of some form of Mind Rape involving wrapping the mind and soul in something that manifests itself to his Sight as similar to barbed wire. The victims are catatonic and in constant pain.
  • In Small Favor, Mab mind-rapes Harry to keep him from using fire magic, which would draw Summer's assassins down on him immediately. When he discovers this, he actually collapses into full on catatonia.
  • In Turn Coat, Dresden encounters something sufficiently nasty that merely looking at it with his Third Eye instantly mind-rapes him bad.
  • Not to mention the traitor on the White Council having about three-quarters of the younger Wardens of the Council in the grip of mind control, and subtly influencing the thinking of the entire Senior Council through enchantments and potions for years. Said traitor even turns this into actual rape, to a degree. Luccio was only sleeping with Harry because said traitor's mind control was amplifying her attraction to Harry in the first place. It's stated that there had to be something to work with to begin with, but it's clear from the beginning of the book that their relationship is on shaky foundations, with the one thing they entirely agree on is what to do to monsters, which is given additional context after The Reveal. Harry is heartbroken, and Luccio is clearly very unhappy, though they end up as Amicable Exes in very short order.
  • Another example: Thomas getting taken apart physically, mentally and emotionally by the Big Bad. Mind Rape seems to be a theme in Turn Coat.
• The Edge Chronicles: Amberfuce is a master of Mind Rape. Telepathy is a rather common power among Deepwoods creatures, but Amberfuce possesses something most of them don't (or at least don't use): the power to erase, or rather freeze one's memories (and likely all emotions as well), which he uses to create perfectly obedient slaves. This is described as a painful process, compared to the touch of cold fingers inside your mind.
• The Empirium Trilogy: Angels can easily take over a human's mind and damage it beyond repair. Simon experienced this at the hands of both the Prophet and Corien, each for different reasons.
• In End of Watch, Brady Hartsfield is able to use his mental projection ability to plant thoughts in people's heads that drive them to destructive behaviors, and is eventually able to overwrite people's minds, leaving him in control of their bodies.
• The Expanse: In Leviathan Falls, when Tanaka is trying to describe what's going on with her mentally to a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist actually thinks she's suffered an "intimate assault" and is struggling to process it. What's actually happening is she's being steadily assimilated into Duarte's Hive Mind, a process that's described as being horrifically intimate and akin to being ceaselessly raped.
• The Fionavar Tapestry features a brutal combination of mental and physical rape exacted on one of the characters.
• In The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, the wizard Mithran tries this on Sybel, in an attempt to destroy who she is, and ultimately turn her into a happy servant of King Drede. The horrific assault gives her her first serious taste for revenge.
• The White Watch in The God Eaters conduct mental "Surveys" in which a member of the Watch is searching a person's mind for magical ability or for information. Often, the Surveys are described as painful Mind Rapes, and in some cases used as instruments of torture. The galling part is that later, you find out that it's entirely possible to do it painlessly, they just don't care or weren't trained to do so.
• In The Godless World Trilogy, it is strongly suggested this is what some of the na'kyrim were capable off before the War of the Tainted.
• Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi: One of the protagonist's Asshole Victims is driven so insane that she attacks her lover and bites his private parts off and then accidentally kills herself attempting to do the same to the wooden leg of a chair.
• Harry Potter:
  • Coming near a Dementor will cause a Mind Rape-like effect to occur; they are used as guards in the Wizard prison of Azkaban to sap the prisoners' will to escape. That's just when they are standing near you; if they actually attack, they can suck your soul right from your mouth.
  • Boggarts do something similar, picking your greatest fear out of your mind and then assuming that form.
  • This seems to be what happened to Ginny in the second book in regard to Riddle's diary. It was one of Voldemort's Horcruxes. Get a little too attached to one and it'll start playing hobnob with your head. That's what happened to Ron after wearing Slytherin's locket (another Horcrux). It started picking at his fears, to the point that Ron broke off from Harry and Hermione for a while, only to come to his senses at the last moment and pull off the save.
  • It also happened to Dumbledore in Half-Blood Prince after he drank the potion in the cave. Although the potion is supposed to burn your throat something terrible, it mainly seems to attack the psyche with your worst recollections.
  • Not to mention the possession scene from the finale of the film version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This scene is, of course, an embellishment of what happened in the book (which was a rather quick bout of unendurable pain), but seems to fit the trope well.
  • And of course there's also what Snape does to Harry during their Occlumency lessons. It's most likely not intentional on Snape's part, but the undertones are undoubtedly there.
• Most of the characters in Hell's Children experience this sooner or later. Not to mention the readers.
• In Heralds of Valdemar, Herald Talia is a sweet, benevolent person who nearly always uses her powerful empathic abilities to the benefit of all around her. The other .01 percent of the time, you learn why it doesn't pay to piss her off. The most dramatic (and literal) example was the time she forced a rapist to relive his victim's experience in a neverending loop, until and unless he could acknowledge that he'd done wrong.
• His Dark Materials: The way Lyra describes how it feels when an attacker touches her daemon in The Golden Compass, she could very well be describing a rape. To further exemplify this comparison, her lover Will does the same thing on purpose — only this time, she enjoys it. Context is everything.
  It was as if an alien hand had reached right inside where no hand had a right to be, and wrenched at something deep and precious. She felt faint, sick, dizzy, disgusted, limp with shock. ... It wasn't allowed. Not supposed to touch. Wrong...
• Zero of the H.I.V.E. Series, as the clone of Otto, has the ability to control electricity, except to a much higher degree with finer control. This allows him to control minds and elicit hallucinations. He uses it extensively on Laura, who undergoes serious psychological scarring due to the incident. Nero offers to let her go home because of it.
• In the Hurog duology, the villains use potions and magic to make Ward insane — if murder doesn't fit in with the politics, this is the second-best method to remove someone from the playing field, so to speak. It doesn't work; they don't manage to fully break him, and he recovers in time.
• In Fury Born: Commander George Rendlemann has knowledge of a conspiracy. Tisiphone (a refugee from the Greek Myths with minimal moral compass) rips the knowledge she needs from his mind via computer link. Instead of the catatonia you'd expect, he goes berserk.
• In "It's a Good Life", this is what Anthony did to Amy Fremont:
  She was a tall woman, thin, a smiling vacancy in her eyes. About a year ago, Anthony had gotten mad at her, because she'd told him he shouldn't have turned the cat into a cat-rug, and although he had always obeyed her more than anyone else, which was hardly at all, this time he'd snapped at her. With his mind. And that had been the end of Amy Fremont's bright eyes, and the end of Amy Fremont as anyone had known her.
• Ixia and Sitia: In Magic Study, a character is accused of being a spy and subjected to this. She later states to her accuser that it is worse than rape, and she would know.
• The basilisk in the Knight Life Series reveals that a basilisk's gaze doesn't kill you in and of itself: it lets you see yourself for who you are, everything about yourself, even the things that are hidden from you. Most victims, faced with everything they didn't want to know about themselves, willingly submit to being eaten.
• The Clockwork Three in Knights of the Borrowed Dark do a serious number on Grey, eventually forcing him to obey their orders and betray the Order, and when Simon overhears part of the process he assumes it's someone being tortured. It's mentioned most other people the Three have tried this on died of the sheer strain, and Grey eventually tries to Mercy Kill Vivian and Denizen to spare them the same fate.
• This is step one of making a new vampire in the Laura Caxton series. The vampire enters the victim's head and tears them apart mentally, hammering away until the victim is Driven to Suicide. That suicide turns the victim into a vampire. Arkley suffered this for a moment and is not sure if killing himself would cause him to come back as a vampire now; Caxton is brutalized for days this way, to the point it's a guarantee she'll turn if she ever does herself in, and then a piece of the vampire's mind got stuck in her head after she killed him.
• Legacy of the Dragokin: Abyss uses Psychic Powers to invade her target's mind, find their worst memory, and uses it to break them psychologically.
• In Legends of Dune, the cymeks take brains from their human bodies (literal mind rape?), stick them in jars and turn the "thoughtrode" settings to make the minds feel pain. Then they are left on a shelf in their own little silent hell... for centuries.
• The Arisians in the Lensman novels do exactly this to interlopers who enter their space uninvited or in violation of previous warnings. All the bad, wrong or evil things they have ever done are dredged up to haunt them, and they can adjust the intensity. Helmuth gets off light with only a brief dose, but he's still shaken from the experience and heeds their warning not to come back. On the full dose, people go insane to the point that they kill themselves. And for those races too cold-minded to be Mind Raped, they can skip the pleasantries and turn them into People Puppets. Note that the Arisians are the good guys. A higher-up on the side of the bad guys does something similar (along with physical torture) to render a protagonist a blind, limbless, drooling idiot, figuring that it will be more demoralizing for the heroes to have to take care of what's left of a survivor than it would be for them to bury a corpse.
• This happens to Mercy Thompson, and is combined with genuine rape. The villain uses a magical fairy goblet to force her to do his will, including having sex with him and even loving him. It backfires on him, as he is wearing a sheepskin that prevents his enemies from hurting him. As at that moment, she loves him, it doesn't protect him from her, and she beats him to death. Two books later, she's still not fully recovered, although she notes that beating her rapist to death probably helped. She wonders if it will become a recognized therapy technique.
• Occurs with surprising frequency in the Midnighters series, starting in the backstory when the 12-year-old Rex and Melissa shatter Rex's abusive father's mind, and going on through Madeline's meddling that enabled several of the midnighters to even be born, Melissa's forcible ripping-open of Dess's mind, and ending up with what Melissa, Rex and the darklings in Rex's head finally do to Madeline in Blue Noon. As the series goes on, it's increasingly emphasized that mindcasters are not nice people at all.
• In The Midwich Cuckoos, a bluff, self-confident and slightly obtuse police Chief Constable is reduced to a vomiting, grovelling, weeping wreck in a matter of seconds by one of the Children, after attempting to intimidate him.
• Done to Slick Henry in Mona Lisa Overdrive as punishment for, of all things, car theft.
• Moon (1985): Jonathan Childes involuntarily glimpses a similarly psychic Serial Killer's extremely gruesome career. Having noticed Childes's extrasensory observation, the killer deliberately subjects him to more such horror.
• In the short story "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" by Cordwainer Smith, the Norstrillian defense system consists of amplifying and directing the psychic energies of specially bred insane minks in order to kill someone via Mind Rape.
• In the Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mysteries, Caroline Bingley finds herself subjected to this when her husband gives her a ring that allows him to control her actions and he forces her to keep trying to kill herself.
• Murder for the Modern Girl: Ruby uses her telepathic abilities to force herself into Ferry's mind, savagely attacking it and heavily distressing him physically and mentally.
• The villain in Neuropath puts many people through this.
• The necromancer Vargûl Ashnazai from Nightrunner has the ability to force visions on people. The hero Alec is held captive and treated nightly to the mutilated bodies of his dead friends taunting him and blaming him for their deaths; later, he watches the man he loves get murdered, and the illusion includes spilled blood that does not disappear when the vision is over.
• No Gods for Drowning: Glories like to mentally destroy their prey by luring them into traps and then blinding them and destroying their minds to turn them into Empty Shells.
• This is how Sorrow pushes people over the Despair Event Horizon in Of Fear and Faith.
• In On a Pale Horse, Luna Kaftan, the main female character, confesses, "I have fornicated with a demon of Hell." She doesn't reveal until much later in the novel that the demon violated her mind and soul, but not her body.
• In The Others Series, there are certain species of Others known as Harvesters. When they feed, victims are struck by sudden weakness, followed by the definite sensation that their skull is sweating (on the inside), much to their distress.
• Conquest from Pact is an Anthropomorphic Personification of the effect of breaking down what has been defeated, and therefore favors torture both mundane and mental. His usual method is to turn a person into one of his People Puppets by means of magic, conscious and able to act but completely unable to disobey him, and then force them to do tasks for him, wearing them down over the course of years to stretch out the suffering, but he later displays the ability to locate and manipulate the psychic echoes of traumatic events, seek out the person that they happened to, and then force that person to relive them.
• Parahumans: Many characters in Worm and its sequel Ward have superpowers that inflict Mind Rape or are capable of doing so if used in a certain way. Of note:
  • Heartbreaker can permanently alter the emotions of anyone nearby and used this power to commit literal rape, muder, torture, and various other heinous crimes.
  • Heartbreaker's children, collectively known as the Heartbroken, were all abused by him in various ways as they grew up and most of them eventually gained powers that allowed them to affect other's emotions or bodies. Of note:
    • Jean Paul (a.k.a. Regent) can slowly take control of a person's central nervous system, eventually allowing him to gain complete control and treat that person as a puppet, and force them to do anything he likes, while they maintain full consciousness.
    • Cherie/Cherish can sense the emotions of others and alter them. Her range is much longer than her father's and she gets more information than he does (like their location relative to her) but her changes aren't as permanent as his.
    • Roman causes others to experience consuming, violent rage and attack him recklessly, though he also feels the same rage towards them when he uses the power.
  • Panacea/Amy Dallon/Red Queen gains complete control over the biology of any living being she touches, including their brains, although she has a self-imposed rule against altering a person's brain until she is driven to break the rule by Jack Slash... and keeps finding herself in situations where she really, really wants to change someone's mind.
  • Khepri instantly gains complete control of the body of anyone within 15 feet or so of her, leaving them helpless while she does whatever she thinks necessary with them.
  • Imp's power, which causes everyone to forget that she exists, can easily be used to gaslight people and psychologically torture them.
  • Gallent's power allows him to "see" emotions, and then hit people with emotion-altering blasts. As he tries to be a hero, he downplays the second part of his power and acts like it's an effect of his equipment, to avoid freaking people out about the implications of what he could do to their minds if he wanted.
  • Mama Mathers can induce sensory halucinations in anyone who has sensed her—auditory halucinations if you've heard her voice, visual if you've seen her, physical sensations if she's touched you. Additionally, this power re-activates every time the victim thinks about her. The hallucinations themselves can be of whatever she wants them to be but are usually torturous.
  • Valefor inflicts compulsions on his victims, who remain aware meanwhile. However, he can also compell people to forget that they've been compelled, leading to people later committing horrible acts that they can't stop and don't know why they're doing them.
  • One of Rain/Precipce's powers creates a subtle aura of self-doubt and regret around him.
  • Glory Girl/Victoria Dallon/Antares has an aura that causes enemies to fear her and allies to feel awe around her.
  • Among her several powers, Bianca/Goddess/The Lady in Blue has an unusual form of mind control that works only on other superpowered individuals. Called "Alignment", it re-arranges a person's mind to make Goddess, and whatever she wants, their number one priority. The victim retains their old personality, wants, needs, and aversions, and they're aware that they are controlled, but find that they want to do whatever Goddess wants, they are okay with being controlled by her, and every decision is colored by the consideration of whether it would be good for Goddess or not.
  • The Simurgh uses this as one of her primary weapons: everyone with a few miles' radius around her is subjected to a psychic "scream" that randomly shifts and alters itself so the mind cannot filter it out. It gets more intense the longer one hears it. At the same time, she causes other auditory hallucinations that poke and prod at the victim's insecurities and traumas, intending to demoralize, traumatize, and panic them. These hallucinations also become more targeted and tailored to the individual as time goes on and the Simurgh learns more about them and their history. People frequently go insane within minutes of exposure, and begin lashing out at everything around them, allies included.
• In "The People of the Black Circle", a princess is forced to relive all her past lives — many of which, it is implied, suffered actual rape among other degradations.
• In the Quadrail Series, the main Big Bad is a parasite that infects people's brains and brings them unknowingly into a group-mind. It can also take full control of the body at will once the infection is advanced enough.
• Realm of the Elderlings: In the Farseer trilogy, the Pretender King and his agents use mind rape to forcefully help themselves to whatever a person's mind can give them, be it information, loyalty, control of the body or simply for the sadistic pleasure of it. Oddly enough, the conclusion of the trilogy sees Fitz use much the same technique back on "King" Regal, in a way that is not portrayed as even slightly anti-heroic. Then again, Fitz is the narrator, so...
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe has the Total Perspective Vortex, which shows the victim the vastness of the universe and how tiny and irrelevant he is in relation to it. It destroys the mind of anyone subjected to it except Zaphod, who really is the most important person in the universe because the universe where he meets it is a fake built specifically to save Zaphod from the real TPV.
• The Riddle Master Trilogy has several cases, but most notably Morgon's year in Erlenstar Mountain with Ghiselwichlohm, which leaves Morgon with a very large grudge and a fear of darkness, among other things.
• The Rifter: What John unintentionally did to Saimura by drawing on Saimura’s magic power. John had no idea what he was doing. To Saimura, it felt like an intimate violation, and even though he knows it wasn’t on purpose, he has a hard time being around John for a few weeks.
• In the Schooled in Magic series, there is a great deal of magic that assaults the mind, some of it having permanent effects. At one point in the story Emily has her mind read by the Grandmaster of the school and it leaves her feeling completely bare and vulnerable to him. Another time, Void magically forces Lady Barb to act as a female (sex?) slave in order to infiltrate a wizard's tower, causing long-term enmity between them.
• Second Apocalypse: The Prince of Nothing series has the Cants of Compulsion, a type of sorcery that allows the sorcerer to reprogram someone's beliefs and desires, completely altering their personality. It's a temporary effect, so everyone who undergoes it has to live with the trauma of having done things that they themselves would never do, even though they remember wanting to do it at the time. The only people who are immune to this effect are Mandate Schoolmen, since they already have an alternate personality living inside them.
• In Second Foundation, the First Foundation (scientific) creates a device which causes intense pain in those who have active telepathic abilities (such as the Second Foundation).
• Sepulchre: Bodyguard Liam Halloran is, on entry to psychic charge Felix Kline's lodge house, overwhelmed with traumatic memories. Kline later attacks him with telepathically induced pain.
• In The Silkie by A.E. van Vogt, the Always Chaotic Evil Kibmadine don't just take a form that turns you on and then eat you alive post-coitus — they take over your mind to make you want to be eaten alive.
• The Southern Reach Trilogy: During her encounter with the Crawler in Annihilation, the biologist experiences being mentally turned inside out by the creature while drowning in light, then getting spat out again.
• The Spirit Thief: The Master tries to break Nico by torturing her with visions and bending her mind to his will.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Lost Era novel Well of Souls, the non-corporeal consciousness Uramtali forces her way into the minds of several characters, causing considerable damage.
  • The Mirror Universe version of Counselor Troi in the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Dark Mirror does this both as part of her Cold-Blooded Torture technique, as well as just For the Evulz. It's explicitly compared to being molested to really bring home the Squick.
• Star Wars:
  • Remember A New Hope, and the scene where Vader brings in an interrogation droid? In the novelization, and in the audio drama, he dismisses it in favor of what starts as a Mind Probe but, as she resists, quickly becomes this. It even gets to the point where he's able to make her believe that she is being burned alive, and that he is her father and needs to know what happened to the Death Star plans. Somehow, even this doesn't get her to talk. While she needs a medic after, she's also able to recover remarkably fast, shunting aside any effects just like all the other trauma she suffers in that film.
  • In Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, the Big Bad, Cronal, wants to take Luke's body, but he has to soften up Luke's mind, first. He does that by forcing Luke to endure The Dark, an eternity of nothing but watching the stars go out. Luke's able to find a way out, but he couldn't take much more and for most of the rest of the book he is disturbed and nihilistic. Later, Cronal decides that Leia would be an even better choice, and when he does it to her, he closes that avenue of escape and cuts away her senses, her awareness of her body, and all of her memories. She takes much more than Luke did without breaking, and it's an open question whether she would have broken even without the interruption, though she too is in poor shape later.
  • Darth Zannah in the Rule of Two novel does this to a woman named Cynda who is holding her at gunpoint. She uses her powers to conjure up terrifying phantoms that only Cynda can see, and it is explicitly said that Zannah can stop it there, with Cynda only remembering the visions as a nightmare. In the next moment, an image of Cynda in bed with Zannah's now-deceased temporary love interest pops into her head, and Zannah pushes Cynda past the point of insanity, shredding her mind and leaving the tiny fragment of her consciousness that still exists irrecoverably trapped in torment. Later, Zannah pulls it on Jedi Sarro Xaj. He gets lucky, however; Zannah just uses it to distract him so she can kill him.
  • In the New Jedi Order series, teenage Jedi apprentice Tahiri Veila is kidnapped by Yuuzhan Vong Shapers who attempt to rewrite her memories to convince her that she was a warrior of their species, as part of an attempt to create Jedi-fighting Force-sensitive Yuuzhan Vong. She's rescued before they finish, but there are still lingering consequences for the rest of the series.
  • In The Thrawn Trilogy, Joruus C'baoth goes far, far beyond the Jedi Mind Trick by mind-raping General Covell to death — reducing him to a state of such mindlessness that, when their link was broken by an Anti-Magic field, he didn't have enough mind left to survive.
  • Jedi Academy Trilogy:
    • Kyp Durron makes sure Qwi Xux can never build another planet-killing superweapon again, by removing her knowledge of the Sun Crusher, so that no one can exploit potential weaknesses of his new toy. Wedge finds her weeping inconsolably in Kyp's wake, barely able to remember her own name, let alone what had just happened, but deeply traumatized by the experience.
    • However, Qwi eventually regards it as being for the best, as Kyp wiped the knowledge of not only the Sun Crusher, but also the Death Star and all the other superweapons she had participated in building from her mind, thereby ensuring that she could never build another one. It still didn't make the experience any less unpleasant for her though.
  • The Courtship of Princess Leia: Gethzerion has driven her sister Barukka mad by tormenting her mentally with the Force as the punishment for abandoning the Nightsisters and trying to atone from using the Dark Side. She hopes this will make Barukka come back, but Barukka's successfully resisted this.
• The Sword of Shannara Trilogy: The eponymous sword shows people the absolute truth, stripped of any sort of perspective — every little lie one has ever told oneself or another is stripped away. It is the only weapon that can harm the Big Bad, as he is keeping himself alive through sheer effort of will and self-delusion.
• Sword of Truth:
  • Darken Rahl has the ability to project horrific visions into others' minds, which he does to Kahlan in Stone of Tears.
  • The undisputed king of Mind Rape in the series is the Dreamwalker Emperor Jagang, who enters peoples dreams with his mind and thus takes control over them, being able to make them do anything which he wants, which is shown to be a horrifying experience.
  • Shota does this to Richard in Phantom, making him experience his own subconscious thoughts after he just heard a very graphic first-hand account of what happens in a city occupied by the Imperial Order.
• Due to his god-like nature, Hearteater from Tailchaser's Song has the ability to invade other's minds. He uses the ability to see if Tailchaser is a threat.
• Thursday Next: Aornis Hades attempts this on Thursday in The Well of Lost Plots by destroying her memory, first of her unpersoned husband, then of everything else.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • In The Silmarillion, Morgoth's (literal) dragon Glaurung likes to use this on his foes. Example:
    ...he constrained her (Niënor) to gaze into his eyes, and he laid a spell of utter darkness and forgetfulness upon her, so that she could remember nothing that had ever befallen her, nor her own name, nor the name of any other thing; and for many days she could neither hear, nor see, nor stir by her own will."
  • Morgoth's gaze is described as being able to drive even the lesser Ainur (i.e., angels) mad. Húrin, badass that he is, withstands it. Unfortunately, Morgoth then subjects him to a more mundane sort of Mind Rape, by cursing his children and forcing him to watch them destroy themselves.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron himself does this to Pippin through the Palantír. Briefly, because he thinks the hobbit is going to be sent over to Mordor for proper torture, but poor Pippin is putty in his metaphorical hands, unable to look away from a vision that horrifies him so much he can't really describe it. Frodo, for the entire story, suffers from the Ring, finally losing his ability to picture all that is good in the world, and only seeing himself as "naked before the wheel of fire".
• Tortall Universe: It is implied that this is what the Chamber of the Ordeal is like for those who wish to be knights. The fact that it seems to be a semi-aware entity does not help. It shows you images of what can be, what you're afraid of, what you must do, and it acts as a portal for the God(s) words. If you're afraid of spiders and/or drowning, guess what you get visited by. People have described the experience as being a jewel, and the Chamber is a jeweler's hammer, tapping at your weaknesses. Those are the "good guys". If you're a "bad guy", or just not relevant to the plot, well... Squires have been known to kill themselves once they come out, come out dead, or come out feeling the pain of every injury they inflicted upon women that they beat, raped and murdered, and it doesn't end until it wants to. Anyone want to be a knight?
• Many of the mental-based psychic gifts some vampires have in The Twilight Saga fit the trope.
  • Jane and her twin brother Alec of the Volturi guard both have their own especially terrifyingly offensive gifts. Jane's power causes a victim to feel an excruciating, incapacitating pain comparable to being burned while Alec cuts off all of their senses. Both gifts are clarified to be illusions of the mind.
  • Demetri, the Volturi's tracker, can pick up the "essence" of someone's mind like a scent and use it to track them over any distance.
  • Edward and Aro's Telepathy can feel like rape since they invade the privacy of your mind, preventing you from keeping secrets from them.
  • Jasper's ability is to manipulate the emotions of those around him. He doesn't abuse his power this way, but if he did ...
  • Renesmee can insert her thoughts into your mind.
  • The Volturi also have Chelsea, who can strengthen or weaken your emotional bonds to others, taking away your free will.
  • Corin, also of the Volturi guard, can create an addictive feeling of contentment in others no matter their circumstances.
  • Zafrina can project mental illusions into people's minds making them see whatever she wants them to see.
• In The Uplift War, the invading Gubru do this to several chimpanzees of Garth:
  • When one captured chimp sneeringly informs the aliens he won't tell them anything no matter what they do to him, they chillingly reply that cooperation isn't necessary... then strap him down in a machine that rips all the thoughts from his brain, painfully destroying both brain and body in the process. Yet he still gets he last laugh on them by making sure that his dying thoughts consist entirely of how much he despises them, and the irony of defeating their "undefeatable" machine.
  • The Gubru fuck with the minds of various chimps, without their remembering it, in an attempt to force the species to choose the Gubru as their next Uplift Stage Consorts. The victims only discover this under a similar psi-amplifying machine during the Gubru-financed Uplift Ceremony, when their minds are forced to obey the implanted suggestions against their will.
• Called out by name in Vampirocracy by Leon when the new vampire Duke uses mind control to ascertain a suspect's guilt or innocence. The actual event is a pretty mellow, question-and-answer session, though.
• Villains by Necessity: Mizzamir did this to Sam's mother to cover up his physically raping her. It left her permanently mentally damaged.
• Warhammer 40,000 Expanded Universe:
  • In Deus Encarmine, Inquisitor Stele's Cold-Blooded Torture of a prisoner Word-Bearer culminates in a mind rape that reveals Stele's not even human.
  • A trainee Soul Drinker psyker in Crimson Tears uses his abilities on a human who died as a sacrificial combat slave under the lash of the Dark Eldar, and described it as "someone...someone tore out their souls."
  • In Horus Heresy, Curze tortures Vulkan by plunging him into a "dream" in which the man is forced to fight — and eventually "dies" at hands of — his brother Corvus.
  • Happens on a frequent basis in Ravenor, with even the title character using it, especially for a little Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique, and the trope name is used by someone who Ravenor involuntarily "wares" (basically wearing their body and mind like a glove). Meanwhile, "flects" are mind rape in narcotic form.
  • In Ahriman: Exile, Ahriman uses a psychic attack on fellow sorcerer Maroth, and Maroth is so outclassed it damages his mind. Maroth, once a haughty sorcerer, is reduced to a gibbering, weak-willed wreck that spends most of his time crawling around in the dark. It's later revealed that Maroth, while mad, isn't as helpless as he pretends to be.
  • In Black Legion, the Villain Protagonist Khayon rewires Telemachon's mind so that he can't feel any emotions without sorcerer's permission, effectively securing the sensation-seeking Emperor's Child's loyalty. After seeing Telemachon's Hidden Depths, he has a My God, What Have I Done? moment and fixes him.
  • In Gods of Mars, the android Galatea tortures Linya Tychon by feeding lifelike simulations of being repeatedly killed in horrible ways directly into her stolen brain.
• In Warrior Cats, Tigerstar tortures Lionpaw with hallucinations of Lionpaw viciously killing his friend, Heatherpaw.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • The three steps of the Aes Sedai test do this to whomever is taking them.
  • The Aes Sedai also consider bonding a Warder without said Warder's permission the equivalent of rape, although the few times that this happens, they don't even get a slap on the wrist for it.
  • Compulsion, which is why it's banned. It's also first thing that most female (and we presume male) channellers try when they discover their powers — so even though the Weave itself has been lost to history, by piecing together the fragments the technique can be reasoned out.
  • Graendal in particular was known for using Compulsion, especially to make harems of beautiful men and women. In the Age of Legends, they were considered unrecoverable, and it was considered mercy instead of murder to kill them — any level of Compulsion damages the mind, and the stronger the Compulsion, the worse off the subject would be when it was lifted. While others exerted more subtle control over their victims, Graendal — a psychiatrist in a past life — was known to turn her subjects into pieces of furniture grinning dolls.
  • Egwene mind-rapes one of the Forsaken in Tel'Aran'Rhiod. The latter wakes up as a vegetable. Yikes.
  • Perrin toys with this as his control of the Dream expands, but he just ends up killing the rogue channelers instead.
  • The Dark One and his lieutenants to Forsaken who fall out of favor. Don't fail the Big Guy.
  • The a'dam and its male equivalent mind-rape the wearer when they do something the leash-holder doesn't like. Other than their treatment of channellers — including the use of the a'dam — the Seanchan could be the good guys.
  • Turning is hinted at early on and largely ignored for most of the series. It requires a corruption of the Power itself to achieve and literally turns the sufferer evil. When it is actually shown toward the end of the series, it's found to be a drawn-out and horrifically painful experience, and the final result leaves the subject behaving like they are being controlled by a mad demon. However, it can be avoided if the victim is willing to pay a terrible price.
• In Who Fears Death, Onyesonwu finally gets fed up with the passivity of the citizens of Jwahir and literally does this to a crowd of them in the market square by forcing them to relive her mother's rape.

"Mundane" Torture

• What Hanging Judge Wargrave puts his victims through in And Then There Were None, especially in the case of the one he thought of as the worst of all of them: child-killing Yandere Vera Claythorne.
• The Cardinal of the Kremlin has a torture scene in which a female double agent is completely deprived of sensory input until her own imagination overwhelms her and she loses her mind... after twelve hours. Being Tom Clancy, it is totally plausible — ten whole pages of horror.
• While he is dubiously successful, practicing at this seems to be Beineberg's hobby in The Confusions of Young Törless. We only get to see a fraction of what he does with Basini, but there's plenty of brutal psychological humiliation, dicking around with hypnosis and Cold-Blooded Torture, as well as physical rape.
• In Domina, Malcanthet, the "Queen of the Succubi", used mundane rape to break people and make them her slaves before the series started.
• In False Memory, Dr. Ahriman is big on doing this. His Mind Rape of half the cast fuels most of the story's conflict, since it's difficult to know if what they're doing and thinking is really them and not his planted suggestions.
• Harry Potter: The Cruciatus Curse causes excruciating physical pain. However, extended use of the curse causes complete insanity in the victim; poor Neville's parents got to experience it first-hand.
• The tracker-jackers in The Hunger Games cause hallucinations of your worst fears. As we find out later, the Capital has been playing with the venom in a method called hijacking — in addition to other mental torture, good memories are triggered in the victim while low doses of venom, carefully applied, cause them to associate the memories with fear and horror. In Mockingjay, it turns out that this is what happened to Peeta. In addition to becoming an angry, paranoid and violent person, for some time afterward, he has difficulties differentiating what is real and what isn't, and it's a while before he recovers.
• The Manchurian Candidate is about a man brainwashed by the Chinese during the Korean War as part of a decades-long plot to elect a Communist puppet to the Presidency of the United States.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four:
  • The premise of Doublethink is a slow-acting form of Mind Rape in and of itself. Even worse because it's self-inflicted.
  • Pretty much the last third of the book is one of the most distressing and disturbing mundane mental assaults in fiction, if not the most. Winston and Julia are put through every form of psychological torture imaginable, all carefully crafted to tear their minds apart in the most clinical, efficient way possible. Just as terrible as the treatments themselves are the idea of how much the Party knows about you in order to prepare such effective assaults.
• In The Republic Of Trees, Isobel tried to leave the group, which by the laws of the Republic is punishable by death. The only alternative to death is "correction therapy" — unfortunately, with each of the other characters at different stages of their own Sanity Slippage, the role of the therapist is left to Joy, the second in command in the group, a Knight Templar about the rules and, as others haven't realised yet, a newly self-discovered Yandere.
• In The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Hannibal Lecter causes a fellow inmate to kill himself through sheer force of personality.
• In The Silmarillion, Túrin Turambar and his sister Niënor get cursed by the Big Bad and go through a Trauma Conga Line. The thing is, when it all started, Túrin was all of eight and Niënor hadn't even been born yet — the person the Big Bad really wanted to break was their father, who had to sit there for twenty-seven years and helplessly watch it happen. It worked. See also the previous category for a less mundane example in the same story.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Ramsay Bolton tortures Theon Greyjoy to the point that he forgets his own name and is convinced he is Ramsay's loyal servant Reek. In Game of Thrones, the television adaptation, we actually see this play out, with Ramsay sadistically creating cruel Hope Spots, giving the illusion of hope before ripping it away, in addition to slow and nightmarish physical torture to utterly break his mind.
• The Southern Reach Trilogy: The extensive and invasive psychological conditioning and surgery on the linguist breaks her mentally. The psychologist, as a mercy, allows her to opt out and return home even though the linguist was Lowry's tool.

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