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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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467 |
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| Genocide |
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[Armeni…] ans in 1915 — not with any claim to
comprehensiveness but only to suggest wider applicability. These principles
could also apply to recent examples of genocide in Cambodia, Bangladesh,
Nigeria, Paraguay, and the Soviet Union. Rather than a definitive theory of
genocide, I want to suggest a sequence of collective patterns that occur in at
least certain forms of genocide.
At the heart of the task is the
question: Why all? What is the source of the impulse to destroy a human group
in its entirety? No conceptual approach can be made to this question without
satisfying two fundamental requirements: it must consider a combination of
psychological and historical forces, and be sensitive to questions of death and
killing and their relationship to individual and collective life. Such an
approach must also be sufficiently flexible to connect with a variety of
historical events, some of them unforeseen and even unprecedented.
Freudian theory cannot in itself meet these requirements, but those of
us who would apply alternative theory are nonetheless children of Freud.4* Otto Rank, the early follower of Freud and
subsequent dissident, is a key figure here as a major source of the paradigm of
death and the continuity of life — or the symbolization of life and death
— that I have been employing in this book and in other work over several
decades. A central tenet of that model would be that human beings kill in order
to assert their own life power. To that tenet may now be added the image of
curing a deadly disease, so that genocide may become an absolute form of
killing in the name of healing.
The model I propose includes a
perception of collective illness, a vision of cure, and a series of
motivations, experiences, and requirements of perpetrators in their quest for
that cure. |
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| The Historical
“Sickness unto Death” |
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| The perceived illness is a collectively experienced
inundation in death imagery, a shared sense of Kierkegaard's “sickness
unto death.” It is the despairing edge of historical (or psychohistorical)
dislocation, of the breakdown of the symbolic forms and sources of meaning
previously shared by a particular human group. That collective sense of
immersion in death, bodily and spiritually, could not have been greater than
that experienced in Germany after the First World War. But the larger
dislocation had begun much earlier. The German struggle with what has been
called anti-modern despair6 goes back at
least to the last half of the nineteenth century. So much so, that Fritz Stern
called his 1961 study of |
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* George Kren and others
also note the inadequacy of classical Freudian thought for approaching the
Holocaust, and look tentatively toward Jung and Wilhelm Reich for more relevant
theory. Israel W. Charny suggests the usefulness of Rank’s early work, in
connection with which he cites Ernest Becker and myself.5 |
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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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Page 467 |
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