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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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464 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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| Doubling: The Broader
Danger |
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Although doubling can be understood as a pervasive process
present in some degree in most if not all lives, we have mainly been talking
about a destructive version of it: victimizer’s doubling. The
Germans of the Nazi era came to epitomize this process not because they were
inherently more evil than other people, but because they succeeded in making
use of this form of doubling for tapping the general human moral and
psychological potential for mobilizing evil on a vast scale and channeling it
into systematic killing.
While victimizer’s doubling can occur in
virtually any group, perhaps professionals of various kinds — physicians,
psychologists, physicists, biologists, clergy, generals, statesmen, writers,
artists — have a special capacity for doubling. In them a prior, humane
self can be joined by a “professional self” willing to ally itself
with a destructive project, with harming or even killing others.
Consider the situation of the American psychiatrist doing his military
service during the Vietnam War. In working with Vietnam veterans I was
surprised by their special animosity toward chaplains and shrinks. It turned
out that many of these veterans had experienced a mixture of revulsion and
psychological conflict (the two were difficult to distinguish in the midst of
Vietnam combat) and were taken to either a chaplain or a psychiatrist (or the
assistant of either), depending upon the orientation of the soldier himself or
of his immediate superior. The chaplain or the psychiatrist would attempt to
help the GI become strong enough to overcome his difficulties and remain in
combat, which in Vietnam meant participating in or witnessing daily atrocities
in an atrocity-producing situation. In that way, the chaplain or psychiatrist,
quite inadvertently, undermined what the soldier would later come to view as
his last remnant of decency in that situation The professional involved could
do that only because he had undergone a form of doubling which gave rise to a
“military self” serving the military unit and its combat project. One
reason the chaplain or psychiatrist was so susceptible to that doubling was his
misplaced confidence in his profession and his professional self his assumption
that, as a member of a healing profession, whatever he did healed. In this
case, the military self could come to subsume the professional self. Thus,
psychiatrists returning from Vietnam to their American clinical and teaching
situations experienced psychological struggles no less severe than those of
other Vietnam veterans. 71 (see page 454).
Consider also the physicist
who is for the most part a humane person devoted to family life and strongly
opposed to violence of any kind. He may undergo a form of doubling from which
emerges what we can call his “nuclear-weapons self.” He may actively
involve himself in making the weapons, argue that they are necessary for
national security and to combat Soviet weapons, and even become an advocate of
their use under |
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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 464 |
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