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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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499 |
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| Genocide |
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or collective spiritual trauma (or both, in the case of the
Germans with the First World War); one embarks on a desperate quest for meaning
and revitalization; above all, one seeks an individual-psychological cure from
the death imagery with which one remains afflicted. A decisive psychological,
issue is the extent to which one can envision self-cure in total elimination of
the group one sees as perpetuating the affliction or illness. In any case, the
genocidal self is impelled by its own struggle with disintegration: indeed,
rage directed at victims can derive partially from a displacement of this death
equivalent, from rage at one’s own fear of disintegration. Rage can also
distance the killer from the act of killing.
Fascist ideology can have
particular appeal for the survivor self fighting off disintegration because it
holds out, at all levels, a promise of unity, oneness, fusion. It deals with
death anxiety, moreover, by glorifying death, even worshiping it. While
one’s own death as a warrior is idealized, the self mostly escapes death
— achieves the death of death — by killing others. There can readily
follow a vicious circle in which one kills, needs to go on killing in order to
maintain one’s cure, and seeks a continuous process of murderous,
deathless, therapeutic survival. One can then reach the state of requiring a
sense of perpetual survival through the killing of others in order to
re-experience endlessly what Elias Canetti has called “the moment of
power”138 — that is, the moment of
cure.
Beyond Nazi or Turkish experience, certain characteristics of the
contemporary self and its experience of historical dislocation may render it
particularly vulnerable to this genocidal direction. I have in mind such
characteristics as exacerbated meaning-hunger due to one’s loss of
symbolic moorings, to confusion about the endless images of possibility to
which one is exposed, along with one’s intensified struggles with death
anxiety having to do with nuclear-weapons imagery of annihilation or even
extinction. There can result swings between the Protean style (repeated shifts
in the self's involvements and beliefs) and the constricted style (compensatory
narrowing of the self's involvements and search for a single path to
truth).139 This compensatory struggle against
Protean experiment can take the shape of various forms of social purification
and can lead to a collective sequence from dislocation to totalism to
victimization genocide. |
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| Alternatives; The Embodied Self |
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| There are other possibilities. Given life-enhancing
environmental conditions, the self can avoid the doubling of the genocidal
direction and move instead toward principles of integrity. Our model here can
be what I call the “embodied self”: a self that includes a measure of
unity and awareness of body and person in regard to oneself and others. The
infant’s perception of its own body is crucial to the early development of
a sense of self, and we can speak of a sequence in awareness from body to
organism to person in the evolving concept of the “I.” With subse-
[…quent] |
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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 499 |
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