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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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420 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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doctors’ suppression of feeling, or psychic numbing,
in relation to their participation in murder.* But to chart their involvement
in a continuous routine of killing, over a year or two or more, one needs an
explanatory principle that draws upon the entire, functioning self. (The same
principle applies in sustained psychiatric disturbance, and my stress on
doubling is consistent with the increasing contemporary focus upon the holistic
function of the self.)8
Doubling is
part of the universal potential for what William James called the “divided
self”: that is, for opposing tendencies in the self. James quoted the
nineteenth-century French writer Alphonse Daudet’s despairing cry "Homo
duplex, homo duplex!” in noting his “horrible duality”
— as, in the face of his brother Henri’s death, Daudet’s
“first self wept” while his “second self” sat back and
somewhat mockingly staged the scene for an imagined theatrical
performance.9 To James and Daudet, the
potential for doubling is part of being human, and the process is likely to
take place in extremity, in relation to death.
But that
“opposing self” can become dangerously unrestrained, as it did in the
Nazi doctors. And when it becomes so, as Otto Rank discovered in his extensive
studies of the “double” in literature and folklore, that opposing
self can become the usurper from within and replace the original self until it
“speaks” for the entire person.10
Rank’s work also suggests that the potential for an opposing self, in
effect the potential for evil, is necessary to the human psyche: the
loss of one’s shadow or soul or “double” means death.
In
general psychological terms, the adaptive potential for doubling is integral to
the human psyche and can, at times, be life saving: for a soldier in combat,
for instance; or for a victim of brutality such as an Auschwitz inmate, who
must also undergo a form of doubling in order to survive. Clearly, the
“opposing self” can be life enhancing. But under certain conditions
it can embrace evil with an extreme lack of restraint.
The Nazi
doctor’s situation resembles that of one of Rank’s examples (taken
from a 1913 German film, The Student of Prague): a student fencing
champion accepts an evil magician’s offer of great wealth and the chance
for marriage with his beloved in return for anything the old magician wishes to
take from the room; what he takes is the student's mirror image, a frequent
representation of the double. That double eventually becomes a killer by making
use of the student’s fencing skills in a duel with his beloved’s
suitor, despite the fact that the student (his original self) has promised the
woman’s father that he will not engage in such a duel. This variation on
the Faust legend parallels the Nazi doctor's “bargain” with Auschwitz
and the regime: to do the killing, he offered an opposing self (the evolving
Auschwitz self) — a self that, in violating his own prior moral standards,
met with no effective |
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* Henry V. Dicks invokes
this concept in his study of Nazi killers.7 |
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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 420 |
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