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Compassionate Heroes, Bystanders and the Reformation of Society

Stanley Rosenman, Phd
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 2, Fall 1998

Lloyd deMause pioneers in still another way. Recognizing the inevitability of missing a particularly vital book in the torrent of social science literature, as editor he dares to assign a newly discovered decade-old gem to be critiqued: here, the Oliners' (1988) The Altruistic Personality.

Until now, I had avoided the subject of "the righteous Gentile," the Christian who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. I thought such actions rare, deeming them employed to mask the complicity of the overall Christian populations with the massive killing by the Nazis. Besides, an embittered part of me thought, putting rescuers on center stage enables Jews to indulge the illusion that they are not forsaken in a universe of predators.

To my surprise, the Oliners estimate that 50,000 to 500,000 Gentiles risked their lives, at times those of their families as well, to help Jews survive. Many of these stories were brought to light by the rescued. When considering the deterrents to assisting Jews at this time, the number of rescuers, while far too few, is paradoxically quite large.

Key questions that the Oliners would answer is what enabled a select group to overcome the many impediments to helping Jewish victims and what made for the contrasting group of bystanders. A related issue is whether rescuing was a matter of opportunity or did it stem from personal identity, specifically an altruistic personality of relatively enduring predisposition developed early in life to act selflessly on behalf of others.

Over and above reporting an important chapter of the Holocaust, the book is valuable because it describes the forging of dauntless altruists by way of an empathic upbringing by a warm family. It implies the potential of this kind of upbringing to grow a large, psychologically developed class who, as strong-willed exemplars of mutual caring among citizens, would substantially advance the society's humaneness. This simple prescription appears to put in the hands of a group the means whereby it can reconfigure the group modal character structure into that of a mature productive being who in turn nurtures others.

This essay relates the numerous obstacles to altruistic behavior during the Holocaust, many springing from deep within the soul of humankind. The paper then traces the Oliners' work uncovering factors in child-rearing, family atmosphere and values that established rescuers' personalities, and the contrastingly wretched origins and maimed psyches of the lookers-on. The essay concludes with a brief comment on the import of these findings for constructive social change.

OBSTACLES TO RESCUE OF JEWS
AND THE SPORT OF LOOKING ON

Upon encountering agonized victims, an ambivalent humankind hesitates between feeling responsible to fellow mortals and being transfixed by the pandemonium that encloses its prey in misery.

During the Holocaust, when anybody caught assisting Jews faced torturous interrogation, exile to a concentration camp, even summary execution, as well as suspicion falling over his/her1 family, an individual had grounds not to help. Even in occupied Western Europe, the would-be rescuer feared informants among his own nationals. In some Eastern European countries, organized groups hunted hidden Jews and their saviors, killing them and/or turning them over to the Germans for a bounty. Polish and Ukranian rescuers especially, when detectedÑeven after the war endedÑwere beaten mercilessly and subjected to torching of their farmhouses, extortion and murder by their own countrymen.

The Holocaust presented still more challenges to the urge for self-preservation in potential rescuers. For conquered nationals during World War II, existence generally required exhaustive efforts to maintain family and self. Burdensome conditions evoked claims of entitlement to avoid taking on fresh tasks. And how could one obtain ration cards for the stranger or keep the grocer from knowing an extra mouth was being fed? Surely, these conditions warranted that the normal responsibility to others, (e.g. Schwartz, 1975) be put offÑand allowed one nevertheless to feel that one remained an honorable citizen. Fueling these attitudes, a self-pitying depression appeared to have been widespread among the defeated, deprived nationals oppressively ruled by the Germans. To boot, German propaganda benumbed potential rescuers with a sense of their helplessness before the mighty victor.

To effect rescue, assistance would often be needed from others. Yet how could one decide who was trustworthyÑeven amongst one's family? Victims too had to be evaluated for their circumspection, their being strong enough not to buckle under pressure. But often Jews were suffering stress syndromes that brought on dissociated states in which they were easily cracked, infirm, imprudent, perhaps indifferent to their lives and those of the rescuers, as well as being abrasive, arrogant, or unappreciative. As one rescuer escorted a Jewish woman to the gate of the railway station, the woman suddenly became hysterical, drawing unwanted attention to them. She had recognized the guard at the gate as the one who had arrested her a week earlier. The Oliners relate the story of another rescuer in transit with a Jewish boy who, angered by not being given something he wanted, threatened to tell the German guard that he was Jewish. Hiding in the home of a rescuer, a claustrophobic woman kept going to the open window where she was visible. Drucker (1992) tells of a female rescuer who "had to restrain a man she was hiding who had gone mad and had escaped naked into the streets." Another rescuer complained that she had to endure arguments among the victims that she hid. Ironically, their dire circumstances had rendered some victims psychologically unfit to be rescued in these circumstances.

Being appreciated by the victim was an important reward for some potential rescuers. I hazard that some Jews, obviously too disturbed by pressures to know gratitude, turned off possible rescuers.

Even were the subject well-disposed toward the victims, it was only human to have a keen sense of reciprocal justice (Gouldner, 1960): he would help someone in need as long as he could expect similar aid in turn. But Jews were in no position to return favors. For many Gentiles, the pleasure of being saintly was quickly outweighed by feeling foolish and fearful should one rescue. The calculation that perhaps marks all transactions quickly revealed that the cost of helping Jews eclipsed its tangible rewards. (Deeming that an on-going relationship is disadvantageous generates anger. But conversely, guilt accompanies judging that one receives more than the other [cf. Brown, 1986, Wisp, 1991]. Would this not have led many Jews to not request or even decline help when it was offered?)

A finding tangentially related to the rule of reciprocity is that expecting to meet the person needing assistance later increases helping behavior (Gottlieb and Carver, 1980). But the way things were going for Jews, there seemed little likelihood of seeing them again in this lifetime.

Some theorists see altruistic motives as adaptive in so far as they enhance the survival of the species. The spin by sociobiologists (Wilson, 1978) on this is that life is about gene survival: genes push the carriers to maximize their continuance. In general, self-sacrifice lacks survival valueÑexcept for behavior contributing to the well-being of kinfolk who share genes. These helpful actions are dictated by the genes' "wish" to perpetuate themselves in kin. But obviously Jews lacked genetic ties to the potential rescuers. Besides, a widely held notion, pumped up by Nazi tenets, identified the Jew as a virus seeking to taint Gentile racial purity, that is, the sanctity of the subject's genes. This attitude scarcely heartened efforts to succor Jews.

The theory that altruism is driven by genes intent on enduring is compatible with the finding that we often help persons who are similar to us along with those who appear attractive. In some countries Jews were not only genetically different, but a considerable percentage also wore peculiar clothing, spoke the national language with a discernable accent or indeed knew the native tongue not at all, and carried and physically expressed themselves in ways that set them apart. (Incidentally, the parochial life led by many Jews also left them without Gentile acquaintances whose assistance they might have beseeched.) These distances made for an extra constraint on helping: the rescuer feared that the foe could easily spot the assisted person as Jewish.

These peculiarities of Jews were refracted further by prevailing prejudices and Nazi propaganda dehumanizing and demonizing them. Whatever inborn proclivities there might be to restore people who have been harmed (Klein and Rivire, 1937), or to feel guilt about withdrawing from them or because of having it much better than them (cf. Modell, 1971), or instinctively to feel sympathy for others (Wisp, 1991), were much dissolved in these representations of the Jews.

But beyond the absence of empathic reactions by many Gentiles, the singularities of Jews, imprinted further by the deprivation and terror to which they were exposed, inhibited attempts at saving by inflaming in Gentiles a disdainful, phobic, even wrathful reaction. To defend against disquiet at not assisting Jews and against guilt for the sadistic gratification at beholding the massacre, and in order to continue believing that the world is just, antisemitic myths were revamped. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion depicted Jews seeking to dominate Gentiles by sowing discord amongst them; the Blood Libel presented cannibalistic Jews longing for the blood of Gentile boys shades of the Shylock myth because Jewish blood was lacking, in part because Jewish men menstruated! Lustful Jews seeking to pollute the bloodstream of Aryan maidens and thus the Aryan people were the antiheroes of popular tales, while satanist Jews seeking to defile the Communion wafer were the evil protagonists of another myth. Equated with bacteria, viruses and rodents, Jews were abhorred as carriers of disease. The world was meting out appropriate chastisement.

Obviously, people desire to protect their respective gene pools; or to put it in more experiential terms, anticipate ensuring biological immortality after death by way of descendants. Imagining Jewish threat to one's personal and genetic integrity as well as to the solidarity of one's group and its sacred symbols fomented the will to destroy rather than to help.

Based on M. Klein's (1935-1961) idea that everyone retains a psychotic level of being from infancy, W.R. Bion (1970) and E. Bick (1968) write of a pervasive unknown horror constantly at the edge of consciousness, a residue of infantile terror. Despite cringing from the unnamed catastrophic anxiety, people are tempted to gingerly palpate its essence to learn something of the uncharted area in order to gain some mastery (cf. Freud, 1920).2 By virtue of his immolation by the Holocaust, the Jew served as the Gentile's delegate to this foreboding. By way of the hunted Jew, the Gentile could approach the flame, yet scurry off before being scorched. Nevertheless, the Jew, sacrificial victim of the era, was regarded with dread; he was an uncanny creature to be shunned because of the alarm he evoked. On primitive levels of thought, the subject avoided touching the dirty, the sick, the starving, the humiliated, the pariah, the foreign, in short the afflicted Jew, for fear that these traits are transmissible. Infection would ordain a similarly appalling destiny. The image of the Jew was designed to arouse repugnance a repugnance that denied that these qualities are fated to be part of everyone. At the same time, paradoxically, the Jew was viewed as the personification of this internal terrifying force. By viewing his slaughter, the subject hoped to put to rest fear of the dread entity. Most Gentiles compromised the conflicting needs to revisit and yet avoid archaic anxieties by gazing at the Jew through splayed fingers. I wonder, if I had been a Gentile of an occupied Western country, would my conduct have differed?

Rationalizations were handy for Gentiles made uneasy just watching during the massive sacrifice of Jews. The need to believe in a just world (Lerner, 1980) persuaded many that Jews must deserve their terrible fate. A fair-minded providence ensured that such things could not happen to the observer he was far too virtuous. Indeed, his not being carted away demonstrated his worth. He need not trouble himself about sinful Jews. Thus these observers could retain the comforting assumption that a world that plays fair warranted their standing by.

Stripped of normative morality by the times, Jews preyed upon each other in the scramble to remain alive, e.g. the actions by some Jewish councils and policemen of the ghettoes. In his sardonic novel, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Gentile Polish writer, T. Borowski (1959), a former inmate of the camps, describes how he often joined fellow Gentile captives in gleeful conversations about the moral shortcomings of Jewish prisoners. Particularly since Jews had often played hubristic homilists to Gentiles, the moral degradations now forced by the latter upon Jews appeared fitting retribution to citizens outraged by previous Jewish efforts to redeem Gentile cultures and psyches. Observers might readily conclude that arrogant Jews deserved their fate.

That many Jews did not fight more effectively for their existence also served as an excuse to not assist. "If this death-infatuated people does not care, why should I bother?"

Outbalancing all other factors discouraging efforts at rescue is that a wide swath of the population had been subject to destructive child-rearing. In the wake of such upbringing were shattered egos, with dissociated ego modules eager to grasp executive control of the mental apparatus in order to reenact their calamitous beginnings, proceeding as either victimizers or victims (cf. deMause, 1982, 1977; Freud, 1920; Putnam,1989). Discomposed lives may be consumed by such reenactments. At the spectacle of six million being murdered, a bystander may indulge in a mesmerizing identification with both predator and prey, discharging sadistic and masochistic drives without realizing responsibility or guilt. Memorable scenes, absorbed by rubber-necking at sacrificial spectacles, prevent the onlooker's empty years from collapsing upon each other, creating a vacuity that speeds him to the end of an uninspired life that made no imprints. Now, at any rate, he may exult that he lives more fully than the victims who only leave ashes.

No looker-on observing Kitty Genovese's drawn-out murder came directly to her aid; none even called the police, although a phone was in every apartment from which the many witnesses watched. In attempting to comprehend, social psychologists (Darley and Latan, 1968) have fixed on the idea that when there are many observers of a person in distress, responsibility is diffused, each observer assuming that someone else will help the victim.3 Undoubtedly true. But it seems a quite vapid dynamic compared to the delectation at possessing the marvelous pageant of a brutal slaughter as centerpiece of one's otherwise insipid memory bank. The remarkable incident may be brought out and newly burnished at times when one's zeal for living wanes. Gazing anew with one's mind's eye at a striking murder does better than an orgasm in convincing the viewer that he is alive. The looker-on's deadness is transferred to the corpse. Should the target of an ordeal have survived, then bystanders as well as perpetrators are boosted when contemplating the memory, knowing that the victim still suffers crippling sequelae from the trauma (cf. Eitinger, 1961), and that the victimizers, including the spectators, still function as alien internal intimidators tormenting the prey. Finally the spectators have left prints!

The role of the spectator as molesting indweller, keeping the survivor a foreigner in permanent exile in the survivor's tortured mind, is based on the latter's awareness that European bystanders in the Holocaust often had a veiled, complex exchange with the perpetrator. In furtive transactions some bystanders quietly directed the sacrificial extravaganza which they had covertly commissioned, and now were surreptitiously applauding the performance.

Arranging for more than a pleasurable shudder at Jewish misfortune, one subgroup of beholders promised rescue, only to dupe the victims. Paldiel (1996) relates the tragedy of a distraught mother who had been hiding in the forest with her daughters. She handed the infant over to a willing Polish woman. Along with her few remaining possessions, the mother gave the five-year-old to another woman. The mother then learned that the infant was murdered; then the mother herself was slain. The five-year-old later recounted that when her caretaker discovered that the mother was dead, she was "kind" because instead of killing the girl, the woman chased her out of the house with a broom, keeping the money given her for the child's upkeep. Survivors' memoirs provide many tales of ensnared victims turned over to the Nazis for a financial or psychological reward.

One dynamic of the deceiver is the reenactment of having endured betrayal by parents who failed to keep the promise of what Winnicott (1965) states that every child on some level of proto-thought assesses as expectable. Jacobson (1971) contends that as a child, the future betrayer was disillusioned by constant exposure to fighting between the parents. One patient learned to play one parent off against the other. He would incite siblings to rebellious behavior and then inform on them. As an adult he continued this pattern at high levels of corporation politics.

A barrier to rescue comes from the public attributing neurotic and perverse motives to the rescuer. Thus "if I am going to be assessed as weird for taking risks, why go through the trouble of rescuing?" Perhaps psychoanalysts voice the cynicism of the public in judging exploits of deliverance. One general psychoanalytic interpretation is that the savior fears for the endangered child within, places it in the victim, and there repairs it. Often the subject is depicted as wanting basically to kill self or other; the rescue saves the self or other from the subject's own murderous impulses (Esman, 1987, Atwood, 1978). Frequently the desire is to rescue the fallen woman, that is, to deliver mother from father and have her for oneself. Extricating mother may hopefully lead to her mothering the subject (Meyer, 1984). Mending a victim may be a reproach to the parent as to how he or she should have treated the subject. I admit to questioning whether rescuers who put their family at risk and, in addition, developed an intense relation with the saved person, might be communicating disappointment with what family members had been offering them. Some descriptions of daring rescuers had me wondering whether rescuers had a need to put themselves into dangerous situations in order to test their ability to find a way out.

Anna Freud represents many analysts in arguing that altruistic motivation does not exist. In Mosher's (1987) index of psychoanalytic writings, no title is listed with the word "altruism." A. Freud's opinion overlooks the fact that even if the person is narcissistically gratified by redeeming the life of another or delights in having foiled hated Nazis, this motivation is of a different caliber and leads to outcomes of markedly different worth compared with the torpor of a watcher. Further, such motives are embedded in different kinds of people than the bystanders. And the presence of egocentric motives need not exclude unselfish affects as also driving the charitable behavior.

BEGETTING INDOMITABLE ALTRUISTS

In the Oliners' investigation, almost all the rescuers studied had been designated by Israel's victim memorial, Yad Vashem, which based its data on evidence from rescuers along with ancillary documentation and interviews. To qualify, the rescuer had to be prompted by humanitarian considerations, risked his or her life, and received no payment. The key control group were "bystanders," subjects who said they had done nothing to resist Nazis. Subjects filled out questionnaires and met for several hours with trained interviewers. Since interviews took place forty years after the rescue, an assumption made is that the adult personality maintains much consistency.

The personality of the future rescuer was shaped by a warm family, parents in physical proximity responding empathically to the needs of the infant and thus directly modeling caring behavior. Trust, security, curiosity and self-directedness were traits fostered by the early firm attachments. Becoming the kind of person who reached out to others, the subject was the person chosen by others needing help.

Other than underscoring that the family of the infant and toddler was nurturing and available, neither the training of the researchers nor the methodology permitted a more differentiated study of the first two years. For example, weaning and bowel training are not mentioned. Nor is there attention to the Kleinian view of the origins of reparative urges: that they are established by the child's ability to sustain and work through the guilt for those inevitable murderous fantasies toward the mother that are confused with reality. In this manner the child reaches the level of being able to be concerned for the other (Klein and Rivire, 1937). Clearly the Oliners' study does not permit an evaluation of the influence of early infancy compared with other age periods in molding the child. Of course, it would be of little help for such comparison were a sub-group found that had an ideal early childhood that radically changed, since the change itself would be calamitous; a trail of disorientation and dislocation would then skew the psyche.

Compensating the lack of evaluation of the relative influence of early childhood, the Oliners carried out an exacting study of the instillment of values after the child's second year. In accordance with researchers who brought to light that young children are entreated by parents to change their behavior every few minutes, the Oliners posited that discipline (teaching and punishment) is a central focus of the parent-child relationship. From the future rescuer's early childhood to late adolescence, the family employs a gentle approach in efforts at changing the child's attitudes and behavior, relying heavily upon reasoning. Absent in the training is any assumption by the parents of the child's malicious intent; errors are due to failure to grasp, for instance, that his/her behavior did not consider the feelings of the other. Explanations, patiently extended, draw the child's attention to the impact of his/her behavior upon the other's sensibilities. (Here I thought that the Oliners did not acknowledge that these parents probably allowed the child to also shape them and the relationship: that they probably had encouraged the child to express him or herself, and that the parents were good listeners.) Taught the worth of all people, the rescuers became empathic toward a diverse range of persons. Although most rescuers would have aided any afflicted group, some rescuers were closely involved with Jews before the Holocaust. From the parents' ministrations, rescuers learned the skills of caring and its self-rewarding nature. Even the children of rescuers, declared Fogelman (1994), had loving relationships with the children being saved.4 Conduct particularly prized was being responsible, fulfilling promises and completing tasks. Helping victims came easily when empathy was joined with a strong sense of personal responsibility. The rescuers are portrayed as admirable: their empathy did not stem from a sense of weakness; more than others they felt in control of their destiny and possessed a conviction of their effectiveness. Self-confidence plus a certain adventurousness were also conducive to the risk-taking involved in rescue. While some writers, e.g. Tec (1986), said rescuers were socially marginal, the Oliners offer rather that the rescuers stood out in the community, but were not alienated from it.

The Oliners maintain that the personality of the rescuer was formed by integration of the early love and consequent sweet-tempered teaching of positive values. The resulting personality characteristics, including an egalitarianism that regarded all people with respect, were reflected in reciprocal, cooperative ways of relating to others. Fundamental violation of these principles threatened a sense of chaos, disrupted the order that made life meaningful. The rescuer was drawn to setting things right. Because of this pervasive morality, rescuers did not fall into saving Jews, they actively made opportunities to do so. Interlocking traits and values, incorporated before the war, were meaningful long after the war ended.

Nonetheless, rescuers were clearly responsive to circumstance. Geography was a significant factor: forests, the open sea, a neighboring neutral country, even nearby provinces occupied by Italian rather than German troops, were conducive to attempting rescue. Economic resources, the presence of an effective network, the nature of the victim, all affected the decision to rescue.

Benign cycles of growth further developed rescuers. For illustration, their inner security opened them to fresh experiences that taught them new skills, allowing them to meet novel challenges that gave them a sense of potency in impacting events. This expansive life style was exhibited in successfully embarking upon the role of rescuer. Concern for survival was pushed to the background as the person shouldered responsibility for his charge. The new role demanded that one agree to a more intricate life, anticipate contingencies and avoid being overwhelmed by the strains, handle the unexpected inventively, do the practical things that had to be done, often being secretive and lying with facility, changing roles and identities like an actor, exposing self to dangerÑall the while keeping at bay the fear of being caught. For many rescuers, their competency was gratifying and they basked in the appreciation of their wards.

Statistical analysis of the data uncovered four types of rescuer. The first was characterized by strong cohesive family bonds, often in a religious setting; the child grew up feeling potent, responsible, decisive, risk-taking. The second category had extensive warm contacts with Jews. An abstract sense of connectedness characterized the third type. They took on responsibility for society as a whole; a strong conscience motivated their involvement. In short, they exhibited a loyalty to overriding autonomous principles rooted in justice (innocent people should not be persecuted) and/or care (the obligation to help the needy). The fourth sub-group was marked by the egalitarian conviction of similarity to the rest of humanity and strong empathy for those in pain. They saw themselves as possessing integrity and being responsible. Often direct contact with a Jew in distress initiated their supportive efforts. Except for the second grouping, Jews were not regarded as especially worthy compared to other people.

Many social scientists like the Adorno group (1950) and N. Tec, (1986), as well as philosophers such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, rather shrugged at altruists other than those in the third category (the valorous person set apart from the community) whom they idealized. Portrayed as courageously pitting himself against mass sentiments and the coercive power of social values, this sort reaches for transcendent revelatory meanings. However the Oliners contest this appraisal, asserting that all too often members of this category, inured by intellectual defenses to the suffering of real people, may then become principled upholders of inhuman doctrines like fascism. The Oliners grant that the other categories may have vulnerabilities: empathic people may choose not to act; subscribers to normative values, i.e., those moved by enjoinders of a respected group, may readily stand aside. Nevertheless, the autonomous, principled rescuers are empirically found by the Oliners to be few in number, while those whose empathy and mutuality were cultivated by early compassionate ties and who maintained affiliation to the community are represented far more. This finding reiterates that the weightiest psychological organizer of most rescuers is rootedness in a caring family. It further ensures that moral' does not descend to moralistic'.

Despite their vigorous argument against mythicizing the rescuer-out-of-principle, the Oliners earlier presented two awesome women governed by firm convictions that all people are born free and are equal. On her own initiative, each formed and led extensive networks that saved hundreds of Jewish children. Accompanying the typology of rescuers is the Oliners' acknowledgement that each rescuer is prompted by somewhat idiosyncratic motives.

A contrasting childhood of diluted attachments besets the bystander through an ungracious lifetime. Having suffered as a child for his purported evil, with gratuitous, irrational scapegoating punishment by a moody, often drunken parent, the subject grew up constricted and emotionally distant from others, self-centered, somewhat paranoid and passive. Having parents who physically punished him, the bystander believed that the powerful had rights over the less powerful, trusted others little, and accepted his own inability to influence them. Fearfulness diminished risk-taking, thus the world remained unexplored. Therefore, skills and knowledge were less cultivated. Any acceptance of obligation was restricted to a small circle. Given their involvement largely with self-survival, bystanders generally considered relationships as commodity exchanges. Toward the Nazi occupation they expressed equivocation, accommodation, and even exaltation, as well as a concurring disparagement of Jews. Those bystanders who did feel hostile to Nazis were often overcome by fear, hopelessness and uncertainty.

It would appear that a related factor adds to the potency of a supportive childrearing in giving rise to rescuers. Especially if the rescue requires a degree of intimacy, like living under the same roof over time, the relationship adopts parent-child aspects. The rescuer feeds, clothes, and shelters the assisted person, may handle the waste bucket, sensitively modulates the terrors of the victim, and has to sacrifice preferred activities. To ensure a viable relationship, communication must adroitly and acceptably signal needs, satisfaction, approval, displeasure and reproach. An ideal rescuer is able to graciously consent to partial role reversals of helper and helped, particularly if the victim has relevant capacities. Little wonder that rescuers tended to have a tender early childhood with ample opportunity to internalize nurturing parents.

The Oliners' self-fulfilling procedure slightly flaws the study's finding that, barring coercive circumstances, rescuing or non-rescuing is completely a reflection of the actual early family. However, the correlations are less than perfect. Little heed was given to those persons whose conduct was not predictable from family background. Such focus might have led to recognition of the capacity of some individuals to transcend or fail to live up to the family ethos because of an unfolding psychical reality rooted in fantasy and powered by unconscious wishes and defenses.

It is ironic that the Oliners ignore the part played by subjective meanings, imagination, and the construction of an inner world in enabling some individuals to be autonomous of and to resist authoritarian dictates.

REFORMATION OF THE SOCIETY

Embedded in this portrayal of the intrepid rescuer and the poignant stories of deliverance, is the route toward the relatively bloodless achievement of a benevolent society: promoting a kind-hearted parental relationship to the infant along with serenely teaching and modeling consideration of others to the child. Then surely the results of this upbringing, self-confident forceful individuals appreciating diverse others, would provide solid grounding for democratic humanitarian regimes. Here, for instance, every age horde would not seek to create disorder in the society and foment every other age horde, but would rather offer the creative products derived from its unique experiences.

However, the uncluttered appearance of this path may be illusory. The ancient and medieval folk art of many peoples indicates an unconscious awareness of their respective barbarous modes of childrearing as well as the resulting fracturing of the child's psyche, and in turn, the youth doing their malevolent best to rip the fabric of the society. Nevertheless, the multitude of gratifications in abusing children and the respite enjoyed in neglecting them, along with the general lack of criminal penalties for doing so, has proven most difficult to give up.

Further, the individual brought up by uncaring parents often develops envy of "psychodevelopmentally" advanced groups and fear of the social changes sought by them. The primal affects of envy and fear lead less psychologically evolved classes to seek to sacrifice those brought up by more bountiful parents (cf. deMause, 1977). One theme put into play by the disparate psychological evolvement of two adjoining groups is projection by members of the more primitive group upon the advanced psychoclass a group with a distinctively better upbringing and consequently more benign values (deMause, 1982). Thus, rage at the respective subject's own disappointing parents, along with the contorted self-images spawned by faulty rearing, are projected onto the advanced group. The self-reproach of the less evolved parents for having failed to be nurturing is also deposited upon the envied group. In this way the abused child furious at his parents, as well the abusive parents, all defend against guilt and fear of retaliation for the damage they have done or wish to have done to family members. They look to an outside group for solution to an intrafamily problem, that is, to be their scapegoat. These dynamics appear to be a crucial generator of the myth of the Blood Libel, i.e. "it is the Jews who kill and cannibalize our children, not we" (cf. Schultz, 1986). An allied urge is to inflict losses on the advanced group so as to force them to mourn. In this fashion, the advanced group is delegated to do the painful grieving for injuries done by and within the family by the more primitive group members, since the latter cannot sustain or process guilt (Fornari, 1966; Klein, 1935-1961).

Another prompting for violence against the advanced group stems from the spiteful wish that the latter's traumatized members, on becoming parents, will be compelled to inflict upon their children the calamities to which they will have been subjected. In this way the invidious advantage of the advanced group would be erased; the universality of child abuse would exonerate parents of the less evolved group. It may be seen that the envy of the general population attempts to strip the advanced group of any distinctiveness except for markers for sacrifice.

No single path guarantees humane arrangements amongst individuals and amongst groups. But images of resolute rescuers saving hunted creatures will help shake off emotional shutdowns that check the struggle. As well, given the Oliners' thesis, they highlight the pivotal area of kindly childrearing that engenders wide-spread public-spirited sentiments.

The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe, by Samuel P. and Perl M. Oliner (New York: Free Press, 1988) is available in paperback for $16.95 and is well worth reading.

A member of the Practitioner's Section of the Psychoanalytic Division of the American Psychological Association, Stanley Rosenman, Ph.D. is in the private practice of psychotherapy in New York City.

1. My difficulty handling the gender of pronouns in a composition should not obfuscate the meritorious part women played in saving Jews. See for example the biographies of four righteous Gentiles, Johte Vos, Marion Pritchard, Irene Opdyke, and Magda TrocmŽ in Rittner and Myers, 1986. It may be noted that Jewish women passing as Gentiles also displayed much bravery assisting fellow Jews, as the victims saving themselves and being saved.
2. Freud too refers to pockets of psychosis in normal people.
3. Darley (Myers, 1983) related that he and his partner, Latan, planned the study over dinner, presumably at a Princeton restaurant. In the setting of this orderly upper middle class town, it must be difficult to envisage experimental variables trailing intrigue with predation. Incidentally, the same conclusion of "diffused responsibility" has since been often stated by many social psychologists based on experimental variations. It is as if by repetition they could banish baneful thoughts about the human condition.
4. However, Drucker (1992) notes that she spoke to the currently adult children of rescuers who voiced resentment that their parents placed them at risk.

REFERENCES

Digital Archive of PSYCHOHISTORY Articles & Texts [Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal] [Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other]

REFERENCES

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