| “This World Is Not This
World” |
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illusion. Here I recall the cautionary words of a
French-speaking, Eastern European survivor physician: “The professor would
like to understand what is not understandable. We ourselves who were there, and
who have always asked ourselves the question and will ask it until the end of
our lives, we will never understand it, because it cannot be
understood.”
More than being merely humbling, this passage suggests
an important principle: that certain events elude our full understanding, and
we do best to acknowledge that a partial grasp, a direction of understanding,
is the best to be expected of any approach. It is an eloquent rejection of
psychological reductionism: the collapsing of complex events into single,
all-embracing explanations, in ways that sweep away rather than illuminate the
interlocking structures and motivations behind those events. In that kind of
reductionism, one can sacrifice psychological accuracy no less than moral
sensitivity.
Another pitfall, even in the absence of reductionism, has
to do with “understanding” as a replacement for moral judgment: with
the principle contained in the frequently invoked French aphorism Tout
comprendre c’est tout pardonner. But here I would say that if such
full understanding were to include a grasp of moral as well as psychological
issues, the second part of the aphorism “forgiving all” — would
not follow. The danger has to be recognized, and it can be overcome only by
one’s remaining aware of the moral context of psychological work.
Partly to address some of these moral questions in connection with
social and historical experience, the early psychoanalyst Otto Rank called his
last major work Beyond Psychology (1941).² Rank had long been
preoccupied with ethical principles he believed Freud and others had excluded
from psychological work, largely because psychology itself was entrapped in its
own scientific ideology. By implication, that kind of scientific-psychological
ideology could reduce Auschwitz, or its SS medical practitioners, to a
particular mechanism or set of mechanisms. The question of evil would then not
be raised. In that sense we may say that, to address moral issues one need not
remain entirely beyond psychology, but must constantly look at matters
that most psychology has ignored. Even then we do well to acknowledge, as Rank
did, that psychology can explain just so much. Concerning Auschwitz and Nazi
genocide, there is a great deal about which we will remain in ignorance, but we
must learn what we can.
Of considerable importance here is one's
psychological model or paradigm. My own departs from the classic Freudian model
of instinct and defense and stresses life continuity, or the symbolization of
life and death. ³ The paradigm includes both an immediate and an ultimate
dimension The immediate dimension — our direct psychological involvement
— includes struggles with connection and separation, integrity and
disintegration, movement and stasis. Separation, disintegration, and stasis are
death equivalents, images that relate to concerns about death; while the
experiences of connection, integrity, and movement are associated with a sense
of vitality and with symbolizations of life; The |
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