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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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498 |
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| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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[symboliza…] tion of an individual organism — as
experienced by a particular person and (in related but by no means identical
ways) by other people.134* To emphasize
activity, shift, and change, we may speak of “self-process.”
Extreme numbing can, as we have seen, lead to amoral self-process; and
numbing and doubling to evil self-process, sometimes with the self losing its
capacity to distinguish between good and evil. Yet evil self-process can
include struggles of conscience that propel one in the direction of
principled mass killing. Precisely when the principle called upon takes
on a strongly therapeutic tone can self-process move readily toward genocide.
The self’s capacity for such action is always influenced by
ideological currents in the environment. Again, in terms of self-process, the
sequence from ordinary doctor to Nazi doctor to ordinary doctor suggests the
extraordinary power of an environment to issue a “call” to genocide.
Everything said here about the self’s response to that call depends
importantly upon idea structures of a collective nature, upon shared mentality
rather than any isolated self.
Yet people have differing
vulnerabilities to amoral or evil action. Studies of the “authoritarian
personality” were inspired by German behavior under the Nazis.136 And I have suggested the relevance for genocide
of certain features of self-process in German culture: tendencies toward guilt
and self-condemnation; toward inner divisions of the “torn condition”
as inclinations toward doubling and Faustlike behavior; toward all or none
commitments or ideological totalism; and toward death-haunted immortality
hunger. But Germans have no monopoly on any of these traits or upon evil
self-process of the potentially genocidal self. One need only consider the
situation in which idealistic young Americans, working in a mental hospital as
conscientious objectors to war and violence, reached the point where they
“helped to kill”137 deteriorated
mental patients. While their actions were hardly genocidal, these people of
notably developed ethical sensitivity were led by their environment to collude
in killing.
An Auschwitz survivor went further: On seeing Eichmann and
his lsraeli prosecutor together on television during the trial, this woman
developed the uncomfortable feeling that the two men “had something
similar … [in] their looks.” And although she “reproached”
herself and was “very shocked,” she could not rid herself of that
impression. She was clear about Eichmann’s guilt, and made no particular
criticism of the prosecutor. Rather, her troubling perception of apparent
similarity reflected her inner struggle with the idea that others, her own
people, she herself, could, under certain conditions, also be capable of evil
behavior.
The self’s movement toward genocide is likely to be
impelled by a powerful sense of survivor mission, which can include a
therapeutic need of its own. One lives through actual or symbolic death
immersion of war |
__________
* Michael Basch speaks of
the self as “the symbolic transformation of experience into an overall
goal-directed construct.”135
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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 498 |
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