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In the awkward
position of being both editor of TAJnet and also author of this article, I will
dispense with editor’s comments and update the piece as author, writing a
bit about what advances in these ideas have occurred in the succeeding nine
years.
This article,
along with three other articles on related subjects, received the 1996 Eric
Berne Memorial Award for theory[1]. It has been translated
and published in German and is considered by the author to be the more
significant of the four. Since the time of its publication in Jan. 1991, much
more material has been developed about genocide relating it on a continuum from
mass murder to individual murder and to everyday, social murders.
One of the
criteria developed by Robert Jay Lifton, in his seminal work[2] on
thought reform and totalism, is the dispensing of existence. By this Lifton
meant that the environment exercising total control over its subjects has the
power to do away with whomever it wishes. Totalitarian governments kill many
people. But there are other, shall we say incomplete, systems, and even
individual human acts, of a similar nature that do not actually kill people but
expel by summary dismissal, exile or ex-communication.
An organization
devoted to thought reform asserts control over members’ existence either
directly or by implication. Even if extinction entails mere expulsion from a
job, or workshop, or a community, the act strikes deeper existential ground: a
need to belong. The need to belong is related to the fear of abandonment, and
it is related to death. Ultimately groups of this kind, therapeutic,
organizational, or national, rely on terror, that is, the threat of expulsion,
isolation and death. Leaders who impose terror, whether in dictatorships,
organizations, or families, rule rather than govern.
It is natural for
each of us to want to be rid of that which we see as a threat or a danger. For
example we dispense with the existence of pathogens or insects that might carry
them. It is also normal for us to want to be rid of that which annoys, a loud
noise, a bad smell, an obnoxious person… Or we dislike someone and do not
invite him or her to a social function. These are all normal and human
tendencies we all possess. It is normal behavior.
But this tendency
can, like any personality characteristic, become exaggerated and misused. This
escalation can go all the way from ignoring someone, to killing them. Sometimes
the dispensing of existence means getting someone you work with fired, or
firing them yourself. Perhaps it means manipulating them onto another team. It
can mean kicking someone out of therapy, a practice that enjoyed a certain
fashion and acceptance in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.
It occurs in
large weekend life-training groups. The training is set up in such a way as to
make the trainer's grandiose promises so seductive that participants want
desperately to be allowed to stay in the training, receive approval from the
trainer, and learn the psychological secrets that will "transform" them. Anyone
exercising critical thinking or challenging the ideas of the leader is asked,
or told, to leave. For example, a former mass marathon participant recounts
that at some point the trainer had enough of one person. He just wheeled around
and said coldly: ‘Then get out. Just get out!’ It was eerie, weird.
The room was silent. This guy got up and walked out; you could tell he was
upset.”[3]
Being ridiculed
or abused by the trainer or the other participants takes on a devastating
meaning within the milieu of control. In the family, perhaps it means sending a
child from the table, or making them go to their room. Sometimes it means
making a child or a patient, or a trainee, stand in the corner until they agree
to do, what you demand.
In short, there
are many ways in which the extreme of the century, The Holocaust, other
Genocides, can be studied and even understood to some extent in order to reveal
that which we overlook in everyday life. Starting with the extreme has helped
me to understand life more fully and completely. It is the dark side, to be
sure, but left unacknowledged, it prevents us from enjoying life and beauty to
their fullest.
Glossary:
Thought
Reform:
This is the formal term for brainwashing. According to
Lifton[4]: despite the vicissitudes of brainwashing,
the process which gives rise to the name is very much a reality: the official
Chinese Communist program of szu-hsiang
kai-tsao (variously translated as
ideological molding, ideological reform or as we shall refer to it here,
thought reform) has in fact emerged as one of the most powerful efforts at
human manipulation. The Chinese Communists have brought to [their attempts to
change peoples minds], a more organized, comprehensive, and deliberate - a more
total - character
Totalism:
the coming together of immoderate
ideology with equally immoderate individual character traits - an extremist
meeting ground between people and ideas[5].
[1] Jacobs, A. (1997). Eric Berne
memorial award speech. Transactional Analysis Journal. 27/1. pp. 11-13.
[2] Lifton, R. J. (1989). Thought
reform and the psychology of totalism: A study of brainwashing in communist
China (rev. ed.). Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
(Original work published 1961).
[3] Cushman, P. (1989, Spring).
Iron fists/velvet gloves: A study of a mass marathon psychology training.
Psychotherapy, 26, 23-39.
[4]Lifton, pp. 4-5.
[5] Lifton, p. 419.
TAJnet reprint of the 1991
article Aspects of Survival: Triumph over Death and Onliness by Alan
Jacobs... |
