@XShrike
Nope. They explicitly need her to be aware of what is happening, and dread it. IIRC they start administering amnesiacs to keep her from getting too used to the procedure.
@bk3k
It's not really a punishment if it throws you into an easy to grind area, and while the system seems to be pushing to keep him alive.. trying to game it seems like a terrible way to go. It would be far more reasonable to assume that the punishment will scale to his power.
@Vasqueztion
Except people are not cold machines of logic and rational that can look past their mental breakdown in progress and press a pause button to step back and analyze things before coming to the conclusion that stopping this little blame spiral is what they should do. It doesn't matter...