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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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421 |
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| Doubling: The Faustian
Bargain |
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resistance and in fact made use of his original skills (in
this case, medical-scientific).11*
Rank stressed the death symbolism of the double as “symptomatic of
the disintegration of the modern personality type.” That disintegration
leads to a need for “self-perpetuation in one’s own image”13 — what I would call a literalized form of
immortality — as compared with “the perpetuation of the self in work
reflecting one’s personality” or a creative-symbolic form of
immortality. Rank saw the Narcissus legend as depicting both the danger of the
literalized mode and the necessity of the shift to the creative mode (as
embodied by the “artist-hero”).† But the Nazi movement
encouraged its would-be artist-hero, the physician, to remain, like Narcissus,
in thralldom to his own image. Here Mengele comes immediately to mind, his
extreme narcissism in the service of his quest for omnipotence, and his
exemplification to the point of caricature of the general situation of Nazi
doctors in Auschwitz.15
The way in
which doubling allowed Nazi doctors to avoid guilt was not by the elimination
of conscience but by what can be called the transfer of conscience. The
requirements of conscience were transferred to the Auschwitz self, which placed
it within its own criteria for good (duty, loyalty to group,
“improving” Auschwitz conditions, etc.), thereby freeing the original
self from responsibility for actions there. Rank spoke similarly of guilt
“which forces the hero no longer to accept the responsibility for certain
actions of his ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, who is either
personified by the devil himself or is created by making a diabolical
pact”16; that is, the Faustian bargain
of Nazi doctors mentioned earlier. Rank spoke of a “powerful consciousness
of guilt” as initiating the transfer;17
but for most Nazi doctors, the doubling maneuver seemed to fend off that sense
of guilt prior to its developing, or to its reaching conscious dimensions.
There is an inevitable connection between death and guilt. Rank equates
the opposing self with a “form of evil which represents the perishable and
mortal part of the personality.”18 The
double is evil in that it represents one’s own death. The Auschwitz self
of the Nazi doctor similarly assumed the death issue for him but at the same
time used its evil project as a way of staving off awareness of his own
“perishable and |
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* Rank’s viewing of
The Student of Prague, during a revival in the mid-1920s, was the
original stimulus for a lifelong preoccupation with the theme of the double.
Rank noted that the screenplay’s author, Hanns Heinz Ewers, had drawn
heavily on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Story of the Lost
Reflection.”12
† In his earlier
work, Rank followed Freud in connecting the legend with the concept of
“narcissism,” of libido directed toward one’s own self. But Rank
gave the impression that he did so uneasily, always stressing the issue of
death and immortality as lurking beneath the narcissism. In his later
adaptation, he boldly embraced the death theme as the earlier and more
fundamental one in the Narcissus legend and spoke somewhat disdainfully of
“some modern psychologists [who] claimed to have found a symbolization of
their self-love principle” in it.14 By then he had broken with Freud
and established his own intellectual position. |
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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 421 |
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