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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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422 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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mortal part.” It does the “dirty work” for
the entire self by rendering that work “proper” and in that way
protects the entire self from awareness of its own guilt and its own death.
In doubling, one part of the self “disavows” another part.
What is repudiated is not reality itself — the individual Nazi doctor was
aware of what he was doing via the Auschwitz self — but the meaning of
that reality. The Nazi doctor knew that he selected, but did not interpret
selections as murder. One level of disavowal, then, was the Auschwitz
self’s altering of the meaning of murder; and on another, the repudiation
by the original self of anything done by the Auschwitz self. From the moment of
its formation, the Auschwitz self so violated the Nazi doctor’s previous
self-concept as to require more or less permanent disavowal. Indeed, disavowal
was the life blood of the Auschwitz self.* |
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| Doubling, Splitting, and Evil |
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Doubling is an active psychological process, a means of
adaptation to extremity. That is why I use the verb form, as opposed to
the more usual noun form, “the double.” The adaptation requires a
dissolving of “psychic glue”20 as
an alternative to a radical breakdown of the self. In Auschwitz, the pattern
was established under the duress of the individual doctor’s transition
period. At that time the Nazi doctor experienced his own death anxiety as well
as such death equivalents as fear of disintegration, separation, and stasis. He
needed a functional Auschwitz self to still his anxiety. And that Auschwitz
self had to assume hegemony on an everyday basis, reducing expressions of the
prior self to odd moments and to contacts with family and friends outside the
camp. Nor did most Nazi doctors resist that usurpation as long as they remained
in the camp. Rather they welcomed it as the only means of psychological
function. If an environment is sufficiently extreme, and one chooses to remain
in it, one may be able to do so only by means of doubling.
Yet
doubling does not include the radical dissociation and sustained separateness
characteristic of multiple or dual personality. In the latter condition the two
selves are more profoundly distinct and autonomous, and tend either not to know
about each other or else to see each other as alien. The pattern for dual or
multiple personality, moreover, is thought to begin early in childhood and to
solidify and maintain itself more or less indefinitely. Yet in the development
of multiple personality, there are likely to be such influences as intense
psychic or physical trauma, an atmosphere of extreme ambivalence, and severe
conflict and confusion over identifications21
— all of which can also be instrumental in doubling. Also relevant to both
conditions is Janet’s principle that “once |
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* Michael Franz Basch speaks
of an interference with the “union of affect with percept without,
however, blocking the percept from consciousness.”19 In that sense, disavowal resembles psychic
numbing, as it alters the valencing or emotional charge of the symbolizing
process. |
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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