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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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14 |
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| INTRODUCTION |
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ultimate dimension addresses larger human involvements, the
sense of being connected to those who have gone before and to those who will
follow our own limited life span. We thus seek a sense of immortality, of
living on in our children, works, human influences; religious principles, or in
what we look upon as eternal nature. This sense can also be achieved by the
experience of transcendence: of a special psychic state so intense that within
it time and death disappear — the classic experience of mystics.
One must address this ultimate dimension — what Otto Rank called
“immortality systems”;4 — if
one is to begin to grasp the force of the Nazi projection of the “Thousand
Year Reich.” The same is true of the Nazi concept of the Volk — a
term not only denoting “people” but conveying for many German
thinkers “the union of a group of people with a transcendental
‘essence’. . . [which] might be called ‘nature’ or
‘cosmos’ or ‘mythos,’ but in each instance ... was fused to
man's innermost nature, and represented the source of his creativity, his depth
of feeling, his individuality, and his unity with other members of the
Volk.” 5 Here we may say that Volk came
to embody an immortalizing connection with eternal racial and cultural
substance. And that connection begins to put us in touch with the Nazi version
of "revolutionary immortality."6
The
paradigm also delimits the researcher's combined attitude of advocacy and
detachment: articulating one's inevitable moral advocacies, rather than
bootlegging them in via a claim to absolute moral neutrality; and, at the same
time, maintaining sufficient detachment to apply the technical and scientific
principles of one's discipline. My own advocacies include those related to my
being an American, a physician, a psychiatrist, a Jew, and a human being
concerned with forces of destruction in our world — and to my generally
critical stance on ethical, social, and political questions.
The
balance sought in dealing with these staggering experiences, however difficult
to maintain, is what Martin Buber described as one of “distance and
relation.” |
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| Medicalized Killing |
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In Nazi mass murder, we can say that a barrier was
removed, a boundary crossed: that boundary between violent imagery and periodic
killing of victims (as of Jews in pogroms) on the one hand, and systematic
genocide in Auschwitz and elsewhere on the other. My argument in this study is
that the medicalization of killing — the imagery of killing in the name of
healing — was crucial to that terrible step. At the heart of the Nazi
enterprise, then, is the destruction of the boundary between healing and
killing.
Early descriptions of Auschwitz and other death camps focused
on the sadism and viciousness of Nazi guards, officers, and physicians. But
sub- […seqent] |
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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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