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has called “pseudospeciation,” or seeing other
human beings as belonging to a diffèrent species.¹ One sympathetic
commentator suggested that I could best avoid lapsing into pseudospeciation
with Nazi doctors by “insisting on separating the fallible person from the
evil deed, retaining our identification with the one while condemning the
other.” He took this to be a psychological counterpart of Jesus’
saying “Love thine enemies.” But while I found the suggestion moving,
it did not quite capture my sense of the situation. For once a man performs an
evil deed he has become part of that deed, and the deed part of him. That deed
or deeds has probably required some doubling with the formation of an evil
self. And while one must acknowledge that all of us are fallible human beings,
potentially capable of such evil deeds, we must also underscore the distinction
between potential and actual evil.
My discomfort with Nazi doctors
undoubtedly had to do with uneasiness about a proper moral stance and perhaps
also with fear of contagion. Of course, I was also making contact with much
more ordinary, all too human aspects of these doctors. Whatever satisfaction
that contact provided was more than mitigated by their virtually complete
absence of moral confrontation, of acknowledgment of their own moments of evil
or even of the degree to which they had been part of an evil project. While
that moral distancing did not prevent me from learning a great deal about their
psychological, motivation, it did greatly limit any possibility for what could
be called a genuine human encounter It also limited the “affective
resonance” between us, and therefore my empathy for them, since empathy is
after all a two-way process.
From my side came the problem of how much
and for how long to “join” a doctor in his Nazi world. My
psychological behavior consisted of altering my sense of self sufficiently to
imagine his stance in relation to events being described, while at the same
time performing two other maneuvers: bringing the victims into the picture, and
holding to an ethical context depending on my own sense of self. That stance is
consistent with the contemporary view of empathy as “not to be equated
with identification, [and] indeed is in a sense contrasted with it …
[because] we are empathic with what that person is trying to communicate to us,
not with the person or his conduct.” Empathy has an important cognitive
aspect and can, most simply, be understood as “coming to know.” This
same observer, Michael Basch, also writes that “empathy involves
resonating with the other’s unconscious affect and experiencing his
experience with him while the empathizer maintains the integrity of his self
intact.”² I came to see this tension concerning empathy as the key to
my approach, and perhaps to the study in general.
Whatever empathy I
mustered was in the service of something else: bearing witness. While I claim
no prerogatives of an actual survivor, that survivorlike impulse comes quickly
to anyone who seriously investigates Nazi mass murder. My kind of witness was
psychological and moral, and strongly concerned with questions of the human
future. |
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