A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence

The Holocaust, Group Hallucinosis and False Beliefs

Bennett Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429862403
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence makes an analytic examination of the enactment of genocide by Nazi Germany during World War II to explore how mass and state-sponsored violence can arise within societies and how the false beliefs that are used to justify such actions are propagated within society. Bennett Roth makes use of Bion's concept of 'Hallucinosis' to describe the formation of false group beliefs that lead to murderous violence.

Drawing on both group analysis and psychoanalysis, Roth explores in relation to genocide:

• how people form and identify with groups
• the role of family groups
• how conflict can arise and be managed
• how violence can arise and be justified by false beliefs
• how we can best understand these dysfunctional group dynamics to avoid such violence.

A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and group analysts seeking to understand the role of false beliefs in their patients and society more generally. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of Holocaust studies programs or anyone seeking to understand the perpetration of genocide in the past and present.

1

The problems with Freud’s group theory

I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people; it is one of those things that is easily said. “The Jewish people is being exterminated” every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter.”

H. Himmler, Posen Speech 1943

In Freud’s attempt to understand human social, political and cultural life, he proposed to examine life in the horde, often mistranslated as “group” (“Massen”).¹ Freud employed early-tribal imagery to describe the dynamic of the leader (father imago) of the horde killed by his sons, allegedly because he would not let his sons have sexual access to the women of the horde. His libidinized imagery is reminiscent of Totem and Taboo’s despotic and brutal leader who monopolizes all assets, destroys all rivals, and in turn must be destroyed to meet his fate (Freud, 1915). Freud’s speculative and primitive description of the horde has generally been ignored by evolutionary theories despite their co-existence in time with analytic theory. Continuing psychoanalytic attempts to understand more complex group behaviors consisting of desire, ideology and moral prohibitions have been caught in the intellectual quicksand of Freud’s primitive imagery that mistakenly confined groups to the same developmental progression as children. The contributions of humans’ unique “groupishness” was not necessarily liberated by Bion’s (1961) theories of regression to unconscious group processes that focused on unconscious impediments to work and cooperation in reality or Kaes’ (2007) notion of security (links) in groups (Roth, 2013).

It is now evident that Freud was preoccupied with applying his theory and validating the meaning and imagery of the father-king he cherished in the ancient literary Oedipal trilogy. In this Greek dynastic epic Freud found not only evidence of (his) patricidal guilt and incestuous yearnings, two of the stanchions of his emerging theory, but he also attempted to tie our human social uniqueness directly and simply to repression of sexual desire and the death instinct. Upon deeper reflection while he acknowledges the influence of unconscious forces, it is possible to see in his images the meat-eating head of a pack of carnivores described by Darwin, lurking in the shadows of the Freudian and Kleinian unconscious. Later in his writings (Why War? 1932), Freud seems too preoccupied by personal moral considerations and unable to directly face the abhorrent results of the violence between nations in World War I and the carnage they left behind. Where Freudian theory required that sexuality was developmentally stage related, he avoided considering that destructive wishes and acts be considered in the same manner. War and genocide are forms of group violence instigated by differences in beliefs. Often the differences between friend and enemy, kin and non-kin can become violent if the leaders of human groups take these differences seriously enough that they will kill or die for them.

To appreciate the dynamic interactive complexity of human bio-social organisms living in large and small-scale societies, rather than reducing and distancing them as primitive hordes, requires a wider understanding of multilevel cultural evolution and the dynamics of a variety of within-group human civilizing processes. Although Freud suggested there are interactive cultural influences on the individual psychic moral development of the super-ego, psychoanalysis remained fundamentally based on both pre-Oedipal and Oedipal theories of repressed group dynamic behavior and ignored the embedded social/cultural aspect of his speculations. Families are embedded in cultures that are variable and supply the external anchors in reality for both conscious and unconscious desires, individual roles, mutuality and identity (Kegan, 1982). In addition, the less the individual members of the family are in touch with themselves the more they unconsciously view the world in terms of their inner reality.

Anthropological evidence supports the basic idea that larger groups of non-kin humans living in cooperation created new evolutionary problems to resolve—among them ensuring the coordination of supplies required the suppression of self-serving behaviors to ensure individual and group security, mutuality and survival in vastly different environments. Some groups solved these problems better than others, and the more successful adaptations spread, by warfare, economic superiority and imitation. Importantly, the successful adaptations in group-level functional organizations included warfare, a topic avoided by most psychoanalysts and developmental theories (Fornari, 1974; Pick, 2012). When psychoanalysts dare to speculate about war, it is still viewed as destructive or criminal or is reduced to psychotic, barbarian behavior, while they search for the causes of war within an individual psyche or focus on its intergenerational traumatic effects. Unlike psychoanalysts, anthropologists consider killing as natural to humans (Wrangham, 2006, p. 44): anyone can kill, not just psychopaths and sadists. Individual killing is complex and includes weapons, intentions or sudden rage (Cartwright, 2002), while group killing more often requires politicized language with symbolic and violent group behavior. Organized combative killing or battles includes clashes among several groups or polities in various forms of alliances or conflicts. Importantly, the history of war, revolution and insurrection, crime and mass murder is primarily the history of man living in groups and contesting competitively with other human groups for various resources or in response to attack or humiliation. While lethal state-organized warfare is an evolutionary novelty among mammals, at the same time it is a constant and transglobal occurrence in our human history. One possible conclusion is that the neuro-psychology of adult males is historically and genetically adapted to take advantage of helpless rivals by killing them because of the long-term advantages of being physically or militarily superior (Wrangham, 2006, p. 57). Primitive war was likely different from organized warfare and driven by resource scarcity and coercion from leaders. Predatory killing in human males may activate a neural reward system as well as social and homosocial rewards and is held in restraint by enforced codes of punishment or prosocial mores. Predatory animals kill parsimoniously, only out of immediate need and not for sport or war. In sum, Cunnliffe (2009) concludes that only a thin tissue of social constraint, carefully nurtured and evolved within group mores, keeps us civilized and there is ample evidence that this constraint breaks down regularly. It is necessary, I believe, to consider how social constraint emerged in human groups and to understand how it breaks down among males when the benefits of lethal aggression outweigh the costs of that aggression.

Before being able to answer this important question regarding violence in groups, a better understanding of human group evolution is necessary. One implication of viewing human cultural and familial history as a process of multilevel group evolution and selection is that the focus shifts from the narrow perspective of the individual psyche and its development to changes that are inherently diverse, but follow patterns of increasing complexity in interactive human group dynamics. Any common psychoanalytic assumption that human nature may be reduced to a list of individual psychological or unconscious psychoanalytic universals that result in human universals, such as incest avoidance or violence, appears speculative when diversity among individuals and groups is considered. Wilson (2015), from the perspective of his theory of evolutionary biology, claims “while humans share a single genetic heritage, including psychological universals … they result in cultural diversity, not uniformity” (p. 145). Conceptions of health and development are not unbiased when considering the problems of living in different cultures and when emergencies and conflicts require that our evolutionary truce be renegotiated (Kegan, 1982, p. 110).

The fundamental question and processes of how human groups became functionally socially organized, and the process by which these groups adapted, became complex non-kin aggregates and thrived, are not satisfied by Freud’s speculations on hordes nor by Darwin’s notion of natural selection as simply the survival of the fittest.² In general, emergent group mechanisms must minimally coordinate group safety, social relations and resources, while preventing disruptive forms of self-serving behavior or conflicts of interest through all the emerging levels of social hierarchical organization and cultural roles. Emerging human adaptive social mechanisms of group cooperation may have been determined by the evolution and establishment of what Bion (1961) called specialized work groups, but they in turn were dependent upon the slow emergence of group psychic links establishing non-kin security and safety (Kaes, 2007). In other words the evolution of human kinship-independent cooperation produced tensions in hierarchical organizational strata dealing with power, patronage, resources and trust: leading to or co-evolving with the development of communication, trade and commerce between non-kin groups. Over many generations of adaptive struggle this non-kin group adaptation became relatively successful until it is both common and vulnerable to outbreaks of violent conflict in most human groups. Kinship and ethnic familiarity have provided a psychological structure for predicting social and sexual exchanges while serving as a primary source of social identity. Confounding the sense of the construction of identity was the emergence of poly-ethnic group coalitions and competing ideologies that determined who rightfully belongs.

In the following, I will present theoretical evidence from evolutionary theory dealing with the emergence of the idea of modern states that will describe the dynamics of warfare in general, and the mass murders by the Nazis in particular. Modern states historically emerged from poly-ethnic empires and intensified the dynamics and conflicts of being a citizen. In order to acknowledge and accept a group analytic level of understanding it is necessary to recall Ostow’s (1986) caution that individual psychoanalytic theory fails to account for Nazi group violent behavior. In group dynamics when there is an affinity between a group and an individual, it is largely a result of that individual’s conscious or unconscious recognition and identification with the inscriptions of the values, desires and goals of that coalition. Elias (1969) suggested that the reality of interdependence was severely and defensively underestimated by psychoanalysts.

The emergence and accelerating nature of Nazi organizational antagonistic policy and behavior toward Jews from 1933 onward makes simple dynamic understanding of Nazi rhetoric and behavior difficult. Confounding our understanding is that organizational behavior was multifaceted, as was the Nazis’ cultural means at their disposal to justify and implement racist and imperial goals. Anti-Jewish policy became a progressive violent process made of pieces in a vast puzzle that resulted in deportation, war, genocide and the destruction of Jews and Jewish culture in Europe. Anti-Jewish policy and murder was enacted differently within the various countries in Europe. Earlier attempts to grapple with this widespread dynamic destructive process lack a critical understanding of the dynamics and spread of progressive terror evolving into mass murder. While we cannot access the perpetrators and interview them, I can provide a model for understanding its group dynamics, force and contagion of violence.

Freud (1915, p. 122) observed:

In 1912 I took up a conjecture of Darwin’s to the effect that the primitive form of human society was that of a horde ruled over despotically by a powerful male. I have attempted to show that the fortunes of this horde have left indestructible traces upon the history of human descent; and especially that the development of totems, which comprises in itself the beginnings of religion, morality and social organization, is connected with the killing of the chief by violence and the transformation of the primal horde into a community of brothers.

Importantly and reductively, Freud goes on to hypothesize that “human groups exhibit once again the familiar picture of an individual of superior strength among a troop of similar companions dominating the group.”

While the status of totemism has remained somewhat vague and unrefined in anthropology, the concept of the horde has retreated into the background to be replaced by a concept of political community or polity. Narroll (1964) defined polity as being a group of people whose membership is defined in terms of occupancy of a common territory and who have an official with the specific function of announcing group decisions at least once a year (p. 286), and are not included in a larger political unit. Eller (2006) later stated: “a polity is a sovereign political entity usually but not necessarily a state” (p. 213). Within this distinction is a range of loose or structured human organizations that vary from households, agricultural villages, chiefdoms, monarchies, early states and modern states (Otterbein, 2004, p. 81). Each individual social polity structure is both different and with different degrees of complexity and conflict within its boundaries and can range from primitive tribal structures to complex unions of state-like organizations. As the social structures become more complex there was the greater possibility for armed or competitive conflict with another (neighboring) social-political structure, whether kin or non-kin. With emerging complexity and greater numbers of inhabitants, our ancestors learned to negotiate and cooperate and to suppress disruptive forms of within-group non-kin competition: making forms of benign within-group selection the primary human evolutionary force. Group selection theory describes natural selection operating between or within groups of organisms, rather than only between individuals. Group or multi-level selection produces adaptations that benefit the functioning or survival of the group or other kin, rather than the individual. Darwin’s evolution theory rejected the idea of group selection in favor of individual selection. Most humans evolved and live, however, in a variety of complex social group coalitions in proximity to other coalitions. Another major distinction ignored by Freud’s group theory is that it is only in human groups that paternity emerged as important. In multi-male and female animal groups females mate promiscuously and paternity is mostly irrelevant rendering the Oedipal conflict a purely human construction although there may be other benefit from between group matings.

When considering the dynamics of human group selection distinctions between coercive, disruptive and benign forms of within-group non-kin, social cooperation is critical to understanding the evolution of larger successful human social entities (Bingham and Souza, 2009). It became, and remains, evolutionarily necessary for all human social groups to develop systems and symbols to preempt transgressions and instill a sense of fear for the consequences of anti-group and anti-family behavior. This was accomplished by inflicting real or social harm to those defying varying codes of protection. From infancy individuals emerge first within their intimate and subsequent larger social structures seemingly aware of, learning and internalizing the coded signals to avoid social punishment. This learned adaptive function prepares individuals to adapt to expanding social scenarios and interdependent roles.

The more successful or productive group(s) selection functions are within larger social groups and culture, the more they will harvest socially adaptive cooperating individuals. Such successful adaptations foster growth in population, create more material culture and are likely to control more territory and resources, yielding more offspring with extended kinship. The less successful groups are vulnerable to exploitation, dispersal and annihilation.

When reconsidering Freud’s hundred-year-old theory it is necessary to make important distinctions between group cultures in which the important dominant individuals appropriate the best mates and resources due to strength or power, and those where individuals achieve high status in social groups through kinship, earned behavior or adaptive sophistication (competence). According to Freud’s untested scenario, within the primary family parent-offspring antagonisms (conscious and unconscious) were, from infancy, reducible to rivalry with the same sex parent over access to the opposite sex parent. When human intergenerational conflict is viewed as competitive, the Oedipal myth and other folk tales acquire an expanded significance. Most often written by men for males, they do not persist simply to convey themes of the unconscious significance of desire, such themes must also appeal to a larger social purpose (group): rulers and parents struggle to subdue competitive others (Daly and Wilson, 1988). Current evidence suggests that open competition for sexual mates as Freud described occurs primarily at the time of sexual maturity and parent-offspring conflict begins to be openly and conflictingly concerned with same sex rivalry over reproductive status (Daly and Wilson, 1988).

It is important to recognize that violent competition, as Freud speculated, was not restricted to seeking sexual access but importantly to attain resources in emerging or ancient social groups. Such competitions became violent with or against other coalitions for access to self-sustaining resources, symbolic icons and conflicts over authority. Self-interested kin and non-kin hierarchical coalitions within a larger polity added complexity to competition by forming independent sub-groups that competed in open and hidden ways. Eventually attempts were made to organize competition by laws, rules or agreements to modify the costs of conflict and losses.

Where psychoanalytic theory constructed an internal source of “inhibition and prohibition” in the morally governing super ego, its theories ignored the important idea that it was necessary for people living in large social groups to struggle to develop prohibitory mechanisms that included symbols, weapons/punishments, that aimed to suppress conflicts of interests of a wider range: violence and greed. These cultural suppressors appeared on larger group stages at low cost to the human social groups. The development of social suppressors allowed groups to bond and expand while requiring the development of new forms of coercive mechanisms for suppression of “selfish” self-interest (Bingham and Souza, 2009). Increases in the population of human groups living among non-kin placed an evolutionary premium on individuals who were better able to predict their social environment scenarios, adaptively sustain themselves among other individuals and avoid conflicts of interests with non-kin. The emergence of protective and restrictive coercive laws and law enforcement became a self- and group-interested moral development as well as social reinforcement necessary for cooperation and insured the maintenance of the group’s beliefs and culture. At the same time similarity and shared beliefs increasingly brought people cooperatively together with less fear of conflict, while coercive enforcement sought to eliminate or marginalize those unable to maintain group and cultural values and beliefs. Enforced kinship-independent cooperation was the result and yielded an entire suite of traits and systems we think of as essentially human that include complex language, our unique sexual and child-rearing practices, and our elaborate ethical and political cultural sense. However these evolutionary developments did not liberate humans from competition between large groups or polities for necessary resources coincident with the emergence of coercive or violent military coalitions. Nor did it protect those within a group or class of persons from seeking solidarity and enjoying superior intellectual, social, military or economic status: of an elite with status and power. Often status was awarded to performance in war that was offensive or defensive. Political complexity was motivated by men’s pursuit of status that usually refers to dominance and culture bound forms of prestige and status.

Often the competition and conflict between coalitions, elites or belief systems resulted in recognition of significant difference and armed conflict or forces for splitting apart a polity appeared, improvement in the tools of warfare emerged dependent on advances in weaponry and wars became a larger life-and-death group struggle. War between coalitions is likely a product of human natural selection and expresses the respective communities’ willingness to risk lives to back a specialized social structure, a belief system or to secure resources. This creates the recognition of public allies and enemies through two opposing armed forces or armies. Contesting communities created symbolic identifactory and social value beliefs to justify and encourage the violent risks taken in pursuit of these elite interests. If the nation is on the verge of collapse or finds enemies without and within that are intolerable, a unitary executive power often seeks a violent solution. Often this decision rejects the notion of a just or unjust war.

On a fantasy (psychic) level, however, members of each community, in or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The problems with Freud’s Group Theory
• 2. The Role of Non-kin Cooperation, Weapons that Kill at a Distance and Shared Beliefs in Group Formation
• 3. A New Evolutionary Basis of Group Development
• 4. War Group Development and the Nazi Path to Violence
• 5. The Nazi Platform of Group Hallucinosis
• 6. Hallucinosis and Perversions
• 7. The Historical Range of Mass Murder and the uniqueness of the holocaust imaginary threats and violent solutions
• 8. Summary and the Imaginary Nation
• 9. Addenda
• Appendix A. Himmler’s Speech at Poznan
• Appendix B. Friedrich Jecklen
• Appendix C. The Kovno Massacre
• Appendix D. The EinsatzGruppen
• Bibliography
• Index