|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
442 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
|
| |
dogs) than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore,
assign a totally diffèrent value to their lives” (italics
added).37 The Auschwitz self could feel a
certain national-scientific tradition behind its harsh, apocalyptic, deadly
rationality.
In all these ways, Nazi-German ideology and ethos could
create, in the Auschwitz self an individual form of belief resembling that of
primitive people in witchcraft: “The web [of this belief] is not an
external structure in which he is enclosed … [but] the texture of his
thought and he cannot think that his thought is wrong. Nevertheless, his
beliefs are not absolutely set but are variable and fluctuating to allow for
different situations and to permit empirical observations and even
doubts.”38 |
| |
| |
| Numbing and
Derealization |
| |
The Auschwitz self depended upon radically diminished
feeling, upon one’s not experiencing psychologically what one was doing. I
have called that state “psychic numbing,” a general category of
diminished capacity or inclination to feel. Psychic numbing involves an
interruption in psychic action-in the continuous creation and re-creation of
images and forms that constitutes the symbolizing or “formative
process” characteristic of human mental life. Psychic numbing varies
greatly in degree, from everyday blocking of excessive stimuli to extreme
manifestations in response to death-saturated environments. But it is probably
impossible to kill another human being without numbing oneself toward that
victim.
The Auschwitz self also called upon the related mechanism of
“derealization,” of divesting oneself from the actuality of what one
is part of not experiencing it as real (That absence of actuality in regard to
the killing was not inconsistent with an awareness of the killing policy —
that is, of the Final Solution.) Still another pattern is that of disavowal or
the rejection of what one actually perceives and of its meaning. Disavowal and
derealization overlap and are both aspects of the overall numbing process. The
key function of numbing in the Auschwitz self is the avoidance of feelings of
guilt when one is involved in killing. The Auschwitz self can then engage in
medicalized killing an ultimate form of numbed violence.
To be sure, a
Nazi doctor arrived at Auschwitz with his psychic numbing well under way. Much
feeling had been blunted by his early involvement with Nazi medicine, including
its elimination of Jews and use of terror, as well as by his participation in
forced sterilization, his knowledge of or relationship to direct medical
killing (“euthanasia”), and the information he knew at some level of
consciousness about concentration camps and medical experiments held there if
not about death camps such |
__________
*Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich stress the widespread pattern of derealization among Nazis in
general, both during their time in power and afterward. 40 |
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 442 |
Forward |
|
|
