relative ease with which physicians—members of my own medical profession with its claim to healing—could be socialized to killing.”A large portion of his book focuses on the physicians at Auschwitz.
Perceived powerlessness
Many of the Auschwitz doctors described a feeling of powerlessness—of being “a tiny cog in someone else’s machine.” As a physician, you had to carry out sterilizations “as it was simply ordered by the university which received its order from the state health offices,” one of Auschwitz’s doctors said in an interview with Lifton. In Auschwitz “you’re just there on the spot and helpless.” Another former Nazi doctor told Lifton that “it was a horrible thing [,] but we couldn’t do anything [else].”
Whether conscious or subconscious, this mode of thinking shifts the blame to the person giving orders, to the supervisor, or to the system. In the perception of these Nazi physicians, they were simply serving as agents. They believed they had no choice. By succeeding at being obedient, the doctors also, in their own minds, shed individual responsibility for their actions.
Doubling
Lifton also describes a phenomenon he termed “doubling,” which he described as “the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part self acts as an entire self.”
The other self “is created on behalf of what one perceives as one’s own healing or survival,” he continued. And in “avoidance of guilt: the second self tends to be the one performing the ‘dirty work.’”
Professionals, in particular, may have a special capacity for doubling, Lifton argues. In them, a professional self can be joined to a prior self. In physicians, for instance, a “medical self” is almost a necessity. The “medical self” enables the physician to be compassionate (original self) but also to keep a professional distance (medical self). The medical self can be relatively unmoved by pain and grief, be inured to death, and carry out challenging medical procedures that demand a certain distance.
But doubling has a downside: it creates a self through which physicians can easily and quickly distance themselves from something they feel is unethical or unacceptable. The student from the above example, who was ordered to perform a vaginal examination on an unconscious patient without previous consent, would never do so as their prior self. Even if there is inner reluctance from the prior self, the medical self steps in and performs the examination because it believes it must, thereby freeing the prior self from moral conscience and responsibility.
Lifton argues that the danger of this “opposing self” is that it can become “unrestrained, as it did in the Nazi doctors.”
“The way in which the doubling allowed Nazi doctors to avoid guilt was not by the elimination of conscience but by what can be called the transfer of conscience,” he writes.
Rudolph Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, listed the options: “either to become cruel, to become heartless and no longer to respect human life [that is, to develop a highly functional Auschwitz self] or to be weak and to get to the point of a nervous breakdown [that is, to hold onto one’s prior self, which in Auschwitz was nonfunctional].”
Groupthink
At Auschwitz, doubling became not just an individual method but a shared psychological process and group norm. Irving Janis, psychologist and scholar, calls this phenomenon “groupthink.”
When a young doctor at Auschwitz was first taken to one of the selections, he was shocked. He reportedly said that he “didn’t want to be in a slaughterhouse […and that] as a doctor his task is to help people and not to kill them.” Another physician later told Lifton that this argument was never used at Auschwitz, because “it would have been completely pointless.” If one of the doctors were to question the morality of his own actions, then he would implicitly be judging those of his colleagues. The young doctor was subsequently reassured by the camp
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