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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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449 |
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| The Auschwitz Self: Psychological Themes
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domination and control over another human being. From the
standpoint of a life-death paradigm, sadism is an aspect of omnipotence, an
effort to eradicate one’s own vulnerability and susceptibility to pain and
death.
There is a similar combination in SS doctors' toying with
inmates' feelings; and, in manipulative shows of kindness followed by extreme
cruelty and apparent joy, in sending people to their death. Indeed, the
Auschwitz self took shape within an omnipotent-sadistic structure and
expectation, so much so that avoiding that stance required some form of inner
resistance.
It is likely that impulses toward omnipotence in doctors
attracted them to the SS and to the concentration-camp system. Here, too, SS
doctors varied and formed a kind of continuum according to the degree of those
impulses. But the environmental structuring was crucial. That is why it could
be said that Mengele, surely at the extreme end of the omnipotence-sadism
continuum, would have become under other conditions a relatively ordinary
German physician-professor. It can even be argued that a doctor whose
omnipotent-sadistic impulses were too great would have had difficulty
functioning in Auschwitz because those impulses could have been at odds with
the numbing required, and their expression could have interrupted the smooth
technology of killing. (Mengele, we recall, was able to harmonize these and
other personal tendencies with the requirements of the environment.)
Yet the Auschwitz self became involved in a process of perpetual
reinforcement: it responded to encouragement for strong feelings of omnipotence
and expressed them as required in relatively structured Auschwitz form; that
expression in turn created actual or, potential anxiety having to do with death
and killing, which then required additional feelings of omnipotence-sadism in
order to ward off that anxiety. Hence the apparent increase noted by some
prisoner doctors, over time, in the Auschwitz self's expression of omnipotence
and sadism.
Auschwitz was the hub of the vast Nazi store of omnipotence
and sadism, which included an enormous attraction to death and its borders. For
doctors there were the added components of omnipotent tendencies in medicine in
general but most especially the vision of National Socialism as “nothing
but applied biology” (see pages 129-31). That vision also incorporated the
mystical Nazi version of the collective “will,” which in much of
German philosophy has been viewed as an absolute metaphysical principle and
“the agent of a law of nature and of history.” 47 Thus believing Nazis saw themselves as
“children of the gods,” 48
empowered to destroy and kill on behalf of their higher calling, as men who
claimed “spurious attributes of divinity.” 49 All Nazis staked some claim to this transcendent
state, but doctors could buttress their omnipotence with those bizarre and
compelling claims made in the name of biology, evolution, and healing. The
Auschwitz self could feel itself to be tapping the power source of nature
itself in becoming the engine of the Nazi movement, or nature’s engine.
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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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Back |
Page 449 |
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