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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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427 |
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| Doubling: The Faustian
Bargain |
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she must dissect, often enough on the first day of medical
school. One feels it necessary to develop a “medical self,” which
enables one not only to be relatively inured to death but to function
reasonably efficiently in relation to the many-sided demands of the work. The
ideal doctor, to be sure, remains warm and humane by keeping that doubling to a
minimum. But few doctors meet that ideal standard. Since studies have suggested
that a psychological motivation for entering the medical profession can be the
overcoming of an unusually great fear of death, it is possible that this fear
in doctors propels them in the direction of doubling when encountering deadly
environments. Doctors drawn to the Nazi movement in general, and to SS or
concentration-camp medicine in particular, were likely to be those with the
greatest previous medical doubling. But even doctors without outstanding Nazi
sympathies could well have had a certain experience with doubling and a
proclivity for its further manifestations.
Certainly the tendency
toward doubling was particularly strong among Nazi doctors. Given the
heroic vision held out to them — as cultivators of the genes and as
physicians to the Volk, and as militarized healers combining the
life-death power of shaman and general — any cruelty they might perpetrate
was all too readily drowned in hubris. And their medical hubris was furthered
by their role in the sterilization and “euthanasia” projects within a
vision of curing the ills of the Nordic race and the German people.
Doctors who ended up undergoing the extreme doubling necessitated by
the “euthanasia” killing centers and the death camps were probably
unusually susceptible to doubling. There was, of course, an element of chance
in where one was sent, but doctors assigned either to the killing centers or to
the death camps tended to be strongly committed to Nazi ideology. They may well
have also had greater schizoid tendencies, or been particularly prone to
numbing and omnipotence-sadism, all of which also enhance doubling. Since, even
under extreme conditions, people have a way of finding and staying in
situations they connect with psychologically, we can suspect a certain degree
of self-selection there too. In these ways, previous psychological
characteristics of a doctor’s self had considerable significance —
but a significance in respect to tendency or susceptibility, and no more.
Considerable doubling occurred in people of the most varied psychological
characteristics.
We thus find ourselves returning to the recognition
that most of what Nazi doctors did would be within the potential capability
— at least under certain conditions — of most doctors and of most
people. But once embarked on doubling in Auschwitz, a Nazi doctor did indeed
separate himself from other physicians and from other human beings. Doubling
was the mechanism by which a doctor, in his actions, moved from the ordinary to
the demonic. (I discuss the factors in this process in chapter 20.) |
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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 427 |
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