Trauma and Destructiveness?

How can an “ordinary man” turn into a mass murderer? Are trauma or archaic anxieties a possible explanatory approach to this question? It is so complex and multifactorial that it is, of course, impossible to answer in any single, unequivocal way. In this article I will simply sketch a few avenues of reflection in order to open a debate.

Perpetrator or victim?

For Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman,¹ the notion of trauma has, since the 1980s, imposed itself as a commonplace of the contemporary world. It is the introduction of the DSM,² the feminist struggle over violence done to children and women, and that of the Vietnam veterans described by Allan Young³ — culminating in the creation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — that would impose a twofold paradigmatic revolution upon the concept of trauma in the society of the 1980s. The traumatic event becomes the sole agent responsible for the pathology. The Vietnam veterans, some of whom had taken part in mass killings and atrocities, become victims — men traumatized by what the war made of them, ordinary men placed in an extraordinary situation. They thus pass from the status of perpetrator to that of victim.

The question arises here of the slippage from the position of perpetrator to that of victim in social discourse. It is illustrated by the recent trial at the ICC of Dominic Ongwen, a child soldier accused of war crimes in Uganda. For Christian Ingrao, the position of victim partly justified the massacres of Nazi Germany, the Germans feeling themselves victims of the powers that had triumphed in 1914–18 and of the Jews fatally infesting the pure body of the motherland, all while feeling themselves invested with the mission of saving the Volksdeutsche scattered and in the minority across several countries of Eastern Europe — whom they described as persecuted — by constituting a pure Aryan empire.⁴ In Rwanda, the Hutus regarded themselves as victims of the power and the beauty of the Tutsis, as Sidi N’Diaye shows,⁵ and in the former Yugoslavia, the Serbs saw themselves as the victims of the Croats, fascists and allies of the Nazis during the Second World War, and as having been unjustly defeated in the Middle Ages at the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds.

This slippage raises the question of the links between trauma and destructiveness. Literary writings, works of social psychology and of microhistory attempt to understand — without any clear, unequivocal answer — how “ordinary” men become agents of mass killings, or perpetrators, in a movement of adherence to an ideology or to totalitarianism.⁶ The situations and the mechanisms are manifold.

For the psychoanalyst Christian Delourmel, in an unpublished text, the activation of a “virtual or already-marked fault line” — in Yves Bonnefoy’s terms — and of the “nameless fear” it engenders would constitute the primum movens of Macbeth’s murderous actions. They would testify to the defensive action of the de-objectalizing function described by André Green in the face of a nameless anxiety. For his part, Daniel Oppenheim shows, in another unpublished text, that Lear goes further than Macbeth in the analysis of the causes of barbaric murderous fury, and that these psychic elements connect to another origin of destructiveness — itself also traumatic — namely social, political, and moral disorder, within society as within families. The unleashing of barbaric destructiveness without limit is provoked by the two ruptures of the major structuring references of the human: the order of the world (Lear divests himself of his kingship) and the parent-child bonds (Lear repudiates Cordelia, his two other daughters repudiate him as father). It is the return of the recognition of Cordelia by Lear and of Edgar by Gloucester that puts an end to it, followed by the designation of a new king.

According to other works by this same author,⁷ trauma does not stem only from the characteristics of the traumatic experience, but can bring forth, or bring back, archaic terrors that may incite a destructive violence as a means of defending oneself against them, of externalizing them, of not being the only one to suffer from them. This destructive violence must not be confused with a primary destructiveness inscribed at the closest to the vital instinct and to the biological. Thus for Bianca Lechevallier, the severe psychopathic conducts that can lead to criminality in adolescence are an attempt to escape “the anxieties of annihilating emptiness.” She describes a narcissistic destructiveness with mechanisms of splitting and projective identification, and a destructiveness in the adhesiveness to sensory traces that involves “a fixed, immobile gluing to sensual impressions below the level of perception.”⁸

The experience of terror in the prison of Pitești in Romania between 1949 and 1953 — where detainees opposed to the regime were tortured with extreme barbarity until they agreed to torture, in their turn, other detainees — remains enigmatic: did they do it to escape the continuation of the tortures unto death, out of identification with the aggressor, or because, as Virgil Ierunca suggests,⁹ everything that structured them psychically in their humanity had been destroyed, so that — in my view — in those conditions there no longer existed anything but the death drive running free? This question is all the more complex in that several examples of survivors of the Nazi camps, cited by Catherine Coquio and Daniel Oppenheim,¹⁰ have shown that while a rare few children or adults identified with the aggressor, others, in order to keep their moral and ethical bearings, refused to kill their torturers at the liberation of the camps even though they had the possibility of doing so.

The preconditions of the genocidal process or of mass killings

I will sketch here only a few hypotheses, drawing on the work of those who have tried to approach the mechanisms of mass killings, such as C. Browning, H. Welzer, C. Ingrao, A. De Swaan,¹¹ and on the work on groups carried out by psychoanalysts such as Didier Anzieu and René Kaës.¹²

H. Welzer, in Les exécuteurs (The Perpetrators),¹³ writes: “The first stage of all known genocides involves a redefinition of the universe of obligation — that is, the working out of criteria of belonging and non-belonging of individuals to the common universe (…) it is enough for a single coordinate within the social field to shift, that of social or ethnic belonging, for there to be a radical redefinition of the universe of general obligation.”¹⁴ It thus becomes “normal” to perpetrate acts otherwise forbidden by the criteria of universal morality.

The stranger to be expelled, even exterminated, is the one who lives inside the peoples and mingles with them. In Germany, he is regarded as a parasite to be extirpated from the body of the motherland. C. Ingrao, in Croire et détruire (Believe and Destroy), explains that he attacks the vital space that must be reconstructed and purified within the framework of a struggle for existence and survival. The anxiety of his disappearance and the struggle for his biological survival, and that of his people, justify the massacres. Likewise for H. Welzer, the Jews are the foremost parasites: stateless, they live inside the bodies of peoples¹⁵ and dilute themselves there through assimilation. Too close to the Germans, they must be expelled from the group and become radically foreign. The Jews are not the only group targeted. The project of creating a settlement colony in Eastern Europe, gathering together all the Volksdeutsch who were potentially victims of their surroundings and at risk of being diluted in them, presupposed the expulsion, the massacre, or the enslavement of 27 million Slavs, as C. Ingrao explains in La promesse de l’Est (The Promise of the East).

In Croire et détruire and in La promesse de l’Est, C. Ingrao describes how the anxieties and beliefs that justified the extermination took root in the defeat of 1914–18, which introduced a “shaking of the order of the world” at the societal and group level. This war had as its consequence immense upheavals, bereavements, traumas that touched the entire generation of the Nazis’ parents — then children — and it fed the belief in the disappearance of Germany as a political and biological entity.

In these conditions, which would have favored the emergence of archaic anxieties in a great number of Germans, is there, when society wavers, an emergence of what Fakhry Davids¹⁶ calls our normal internal racism, which he links to the paranoid-schizoid position — the fundamental anxiety-inducing situation, for Melanie Klein, being the fear of being destroyed from within and the recourse to primitive defense mechanisms to master it: splitting, the expulsion outside the self of the bad, and so on?

The work of Didier Anzieu on groups also allows for a few hypotheses. After the defeat of 1914–18, German society would no longer have provided “the basic narcissistic security” that individuals ask of the groups to which they belong. This absence would be found again in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam described by H. Welzer, where the jungle was experienced as a space of extreme menace harboring an invisible enemy. The group no longer playing its role as container, the archaic anxieties inevitably aroused by its functioning are mobilized even more than in a “normal” situation: phantasies that the group is its own body or the body of the mother, anxieties correlative to the fragmentation of the body, to the threat of loss of identity, to the danger of being engulfed, persecutory anxieties, and so on. The drives of destruction are mobilized, for the “skin-ego of the group”¹⁷ could not exercise its capacity for binding. In the My Lai massacre in Vietnam (where the aggressor country was a democracy), the enemy is everywhere for the GIs (whereas it was a defenseless population in that village) and all are aggressors, including the babies. This is what the transcript of the commission of inquiry, which I quote, shows.

Speaking of the murders of babies, a GI declares:

“I aimed my M16 at them.

— Why? — Because they could have attacked. — They were children and babies? — Yes. — And they could have attacked? Children and babies? — They could have had grenades. The mothers could have thrown them at us. — The babies? — Yes. — Were the mothers holding the babies in their arms? — I think so. — And the babies wanted to attack? — I expected, at any moment, that they would counterattack.”¹⁸

For the Nazis, the non-Aryans are enemies and persecutors of whom the Germans would be the victims, a mortal danger for Germany, which justifies the massacres, including that of children — potential enemies and persecutors.¹⁹ This “mad” discourse is also inscribed in a movement of projection of one’s own individual and group destructiveness onto the other. The group illusion — a mode of defense against the archaic anxieties that arise within the group, leading to a denial of the differences between the members of the group and to a fusion in its “good breast” — would also be an element that could explain the necessity of expelling the “parasite” stranger, of creating a pure “motherland” in which to come and lodge, and the necessity of “becoming one body” within the group. After the My Lai massacre, the men unpacked their rations, ate, smoked, and told jokes, which is not without recalling the hypomanic, festive moments with a collective meal described by Anzieu in the process of group illusion, which he distinguishes from the totemic meal.²⁰

The Nazi “promise of the reign” was to bring forth a new man, happiness, and what Ingrao calls “a fusional racial utopia.”²¹ The belief in order and in the new man motivated the commitment of the high dignitaries, of the SS, of the Einsatzgruppen, and of a fraction of the youth that set out for the “conquest of the East.” How was it shared by an entire country? It is difficult to answer this question, although several books describe the psychic, social, and political processes of the population’s adherence to Nazism.²²

What is the nature of the ideal that justified the crimes of Nazi Germany? A brief detour through the communist regimes may shed light. In Le Tchékiste (The Chekist, written in 1923), Sroubov liquidates the opponents, accepts the liquidation of his father by his best childhood friend, and dreams of methods of liquidation that prefigure Auschwitz, all for “Her” (the revolution).²³ Here the ideal takes root in the body of the mother and the woman conflated — eternal, savage, transcending time. The death drive and the destructive drive aim at the destruction of the parasites internal to the body of the woman and mother, in order to arrive at a messianic time without contradiction, the classless society.

In the case of Germany, the messianic time is made concrete by the thousand-year Reich, with a perfect happiness in a purified group.²⁴ The desire to live in a group and a vital space that would abolish death, the difference between the living and the dead, and temporality, and that would permit a reproduction of the identical, was one of the foundations of the Nazi ideal, which rehabilitated the notion of Stamm (tribe) and Sippe (lineage, kinship).²⁵ The aim is to create an inseparable solidarity among the individual, the family, and the nation by means of the genetic heritage — each human being being the complete repository of the genetic heritage of his father and his mother, and thus of all the ancestors of the two branches. As early as 1935, Stamm and Sippe were part of the rituals of the marriage ceremony, each member of the couple becoming the reified instrument of the demand for total permanence and identity, for the repetition of the same, for the abolition of castration, of the difference between generations, of lack and loss. Can one speak here of an effect of the group illusion, which creates a non-place and a non-time and gives way to repetition, to phantasies of an absence of differentiation among the individuals of the group and of a return to the origin? Hitler, occupying the place of the all-powerful father in a couple with the motherland, would he be the good and all-powerful object that would allow a state of flawless happiness to be recovered?

Those who took part in the conquest of Eastern Europe in the name of these ideals, and with the aim of creating a great, purified Aryan Germany including the Volksdeutsche, would have been the most ardent perpetrators of genocide, according to Ingrao.²⁶

Conclusion

Genocidal processes and mass killings required the commitment not only of the killers, but of the populations, at varying levels of complicity. H. Welzer cites a very troubling figure: out of nineteen million soldiers of the Wehrmacht, only about a hundred helped the Jews instead of killing them or handing them over to the executioners.²⁷ How is this to be explained?

Notes