The Reproduction of Evil

A Clinical and Cultural Perspective

Sue Grand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135060923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why is it that victims of abuse so often become perpetrators, and what can psychoanalysis offer to these survivor-perpetrators, whose criminal conduct seems to transcend the possibilities of empathic psychoanalytic inquiry. In The Reproduction of Evil, Sue Grand engages these deeply troublesome issues in the belief that psychoanalysts can and should reclaim the study of what lies beyond ordinary human empathy. Her goal is to elucidate the link between traumatic memory and the perpetration of evil. To this end, she presents an interdisciplinary analysis, at once scholarly and passionate, of the ways in which families and cultures transform victims of malignant trauma into perpetrators of these very traumas on others. Through intensive case studies, Grand draws the reader into the world of the survivor-perpetrators who commit acts of child abuse, of incest, of racial persecution, even of homicide and genocide. By infusing psychoanalytic inquiry with cultural analysis and by supplementing clinical vignettes with well-chosen literary illustrations, Grand is able to convey the survivor-perpetrator's immediacy of experience in a manner that readers may find unsettling, even uncanny. By interweaving psychoanalytic, sociohistorical, and literary perspectives, Grand fills a critical lacuna in the literature about trauma and its intergenerational transmission. Her analysis of the psychodynamic processes and cultural tensions that bind perpetrators, victims, and bystanders provides trenchant insights into the violence and fragmentation that beset our society. Essential reading for a wide clinical audience, The Reproduction of Evil will also be powerfully informative for academic and lay readers interested in the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and cultural factors that account for the perpetuation of evil from generation to generation.

Chapter 1
An Introduction to Malignant Dissociative Contagion

LURED BY THE HEROIC AND DEHUMANIZED BY BOOT CAMP, a young man becomes a soldier. If he is a foot soldier, he enters combat, and visions of the heroic recede. Now he is nothing but a student of violence: what he learns are the ways a body can be slaughtered. Severed from everything but command and survival, captive in a universe where murder is sanctioned, and tenderness is not, he evacuates his mind of all human thought. He must move forward into battle, and he does move forward, until that movement itself becomes a hypnotic:

They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat . . . just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility [O'Brian, 1990, p. 15].

In the hypnotic numbness of the "hump," there is only war's simple reduction: move forward, kill or be killed. If the soldier lives, he kills. If he dies, he is dead among thousands. And so he kills, mechanically, without hate or desire. He kills, and he knows he kills, but it is a dull and distant knowledge. And then, there is a day when his buddy has died. Now the ubiquity of corpses gives way to a particular dead. Lonely, impotent, excluded from mourning by military stoicism, now, on this day, blood lust may overtake him (Shatan, 1977, 1982, 1986; Nachmani, 1997). The mechanical "hump" becomes a sadistic atrocity. In that atrocity, humanity splits: there are the innocent, there are those who annihilate the innocent; there are those who protect them, and those who fail to protect them.

Q: What happened then?

A: Lieutenant Cally walked over to Sergeant Mitchell. They walked backward and started shoving the people into the ditch with their rifles.

Q: What did you do?

A. Nothing. I looked away [Hammer, 1971, p. 132].

Men, women, children: in their blood the soldier finds ecstatic self-restitution; in their bodies he evokes every dimension of human suffering. He is exhilarated in brutality, and bankrupt in his judgment. Afterwards, he remembers, and he does not remember. There was no atrocity, but an act of war: the necessary extermination of a network of spies, of armed children, of wombs pregnant, not with fetuses, but with bombs: "I didn't discriminate between individuals in the village, sir. They were all the enemy, they were all to be destroyed, sir" [Lt. William Calley, in Hammer, 1971, p. 263].

As Simenauer (1982) says of Nazi Germany, "No one did any evil; everyone merely performed the highest duty, blindly to obey" (p. 169). And so the soldier commits atrocity, and makes no judgment, or judges it defensible (Stern, 1995). Or he is the bystander, inert, scarred by atrocity's imprint, perhaps judging his paralysis as defensible, or perhaps, as reprehensible. And what of the surviving victim: how does atrocity transmogrify his interior? Will his lived memory become a force of justice, a renewal of violence, or a habitual pattern of revictimization? Or will the survivor become another bystander, sealed in some paralyzing membrane that prohibits all agency in subsequent encounters with violence? Will he find that fear

puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action
[Hamlet, act 3, scene 1].

This book meditates on these questions; it inquires into the memory of annihilation, and asks how that memory is lived, shared, and silenced in the relational nexus of evil. In particular, I am preoccupied with the way annihilation's memory is transmuted into the perpetration of evil. I do not presume that all evil is rooted in a history of trauma survival. Most trauma survivors do not become perpetrators. But most perpetrators have a history of malignant trauma, that is, an experience of psychic or physical torture, or both, inflicted by another. I propose that this traumatic history finds a singular articulation in the interpersonal and intrapsychic operations of evil. This chapter provides a conceptual introduction to the link between trauma and evil, whereas succeeding chapters utilize clinical, literary, and cultural material to elucidate these concepts.

Catastrophic Loneliness and the Reproduction of Evil

And so I begin with a look at trauma's core. As Krystal (1988), Langer (1991, 1995), Felman (1992), Laub (1992), Caruth (1995), and others suggest, the survival of massive trauma seems to be characterized by a region of unknowable and unshareable experience. Simply put, there can never be another who can know the survivor in the moment of the "execution itself." In her core, the trauma survivor remains solitary in the moment of her own extinction. No one knew her in the moment when she died without dying; no one knows her now, in her lived memory of annihilation. This place where she cannot be known is one of catastrophic loneliness; it is a solitude imbued with hate and fear and shame and despair. And it is an area of deadness strangely infused with a yearning for life. For unlike the dead, she is at once dead and yet left alive in the wake of her own destruction. Death has possessed her in its impenetrable solitude. But life makes her desire to be known in that solitude. When cruelty has collapsed the survivor's pretraumatic self, rebirth is sought in the empathic witnessing of the traumatized self (Langer, 1991, 1995; Caruth, 1995; Laub and Podell, 1995). Because that traumatized self is defined by solitude, the survivor's resurrection requires that she be known by another in this solitude, for, as Benjamin (1995) notes, "The sea of death can be crossed only by reaching the other" (p. 186).

But any attempt to know the survivor in the execution itself is to "listen to an impossibility" (Caruth, 1995). How can the survivor be known by another in a moment defined by its loneliness? Who will be the knower and who (and what) will be the known? Loneliness is a space that precludes the presence of another. And this loneliness of the survivor is no ordinary loneliness: it is not merely the "unthought known" (Bollas, 1995) or the "unformulated" in Stern's (1997) sense. This loneliness is not something wordless that can be ultimately rendered in speech. It is unformulatable: it cannot be represented mutually in linguistic narrative. Whatever can be known mutually and linguistically about traumatic experience is not death's solitude but something else, some other pain that exists at the perimeter of death. This is annihilation's paradox: that the need to be known continually meets the impossibility of being known. And the need to be known meets, as well, an inner refusal to be known. Much as another's empathic understanding is critical for the survivor's resurrection, so that very understanding threatens to renew the survivor's annihilation. Any presumption of knowledge will eviscerate the truth of her loneliness, collapsing the core of her traumatic identity. Loneliness is the sacred container of the survivor's residual sanity; it is the survivor's ultimate testimony. It must not and cannot be foreclosed.

Annihilation awakens contradictory desires that can be neither achieved nor surrendered. The survivor's predicament resonates with the schizoid dilemma described by Laing (1960) and Guntrip (1969). What Ulman and Brothers (1988) call the "shattered self" of trauma is suffused with death anxiety, with the sense that there is no self. Such a personality becomes preoccupied with the protection and concealment of the no-self and its deadness, because, paradoxically, deadness and vacuity are the defining qualities of the person's tenuous identity. Other people become figures of hope and dread. While they potentially offer much needed confirmatory evidence of the existence of the self, they nonetheless threaten to eclipse the no-self with the larger presence of their own identities. Without confirmatory contact with another, the no-self will wither and die; with it, it will be annihilated. In the presence of such acute existential anxieties, there is a "pre-experiential motivational push, a drive, for a meeting of minds," which "meets a drive to remain hidden, an isolate, unfound and untouched by others" (Aron, 1996, p. 80). In Pizer's (1999) sense, this is an area of the self that seeks and resists therapeutic "negotiation." The difficulty that the schizoid process poses for analyst and patient (see Guntrip, 1969, on the schizoid compromise) increases when this process originates in malignant trauma: the remoteness of the no-self is excacerbated, as is the impossibility of being known. And yet, the desire to be known is imbued with that urgency which attends the final moments before slaughter.

How does humanity metabolize this dilemma? What I propose throughout these essays is this: that evil is an attempt to answer the riddle of catastrophic loneliness. Unlike all other forms of human interaction, evil alone bears witness to the contradictory claims of solitude and mutuality that haunt traumatic memory. The reproduction of evil is the survivor's continual reentry into the moment of execution, where "death is the irreducible common denominator of men" (King, 1963, p. 117). The survivor has been waiting to be known, not merely in the memory of the execution, but in the execution itself. It is here that her solitude was defined; it is here that she attempts to be known in her solitude. For torture is a transaction between what Sullivan (1953) calls the "not me" and the "not" other. And it is also an "I—it" relation (Buber, 1923,1947) in which the ego uses another as a thing. Only in the context of evil is it possible to achieve radical contact with another at the pinnacle of loneliness and at the precipice of death. Only perpetrator and bystander recreate and encounter the no-self of torture's vacuity, and only they can be in the presence of that no-self without any pretense of knowing it. In perpetrator and bystander, there is neither the desire for, nor the illusion of "understanding" the no-self. In the perpetrator-bystander-victim relation, the no-self is in the presence of others who confirm the truth of catastrophic loneliness, even as these others do not know this loneliness.

Through revictimization, through a renewed link to a perpetrator, some survivors attempt to be seen in the area of the no-self. Through perpetration, the survivor who becomes a perpetrator attempts to share his no-self by evacuating it into his victim. In both revictimization and perpetration, there is a meeting which is no meeting in the execution itself. This is mankind's nearest approximation of the mutual recognition of solitude: the mutual encounter of torture inevitably collapses into torture's mutual isolation. In a sense, a shared encounter with the no-self can only be found in the treacherous and ellipitical loop of destruction. From this perspective we can understand the psychoanalytic dynamism that Benjamin (1999) describes:

[T]he point at which the patient presents the real difficulty that needs mending, really is often experienced as the moment of maximum attack on our subjectivity (as analysts and as persons). This destruction is inevitable when we work in "basic fault" areas, where traumatic repetition is so emotionally powerful that understanding appears to the patient as useless [p. 203].

Thus, in a myriad of ways, victims return to their tormentors "because being misrecognized feels so much more secure than being unrecognized and unknown" (Nachmani, 1995, p. 430). In this return to the tormentor, the survivor—perpetrator imagines the I—it relation of cruelty fantastically transformed into a paradoxical form of confirmatory relatedness.

In comparison to torture's intrigues, benign relationships can only approximate a memory of the execution, not the execution itself. As Benjamin (1999) notes, "When we work on this fault line, simple recognition is no longer possible, and the effort to remain good, caring, and empathic will only exacerbate the dilemma" (p. 203). In empathic contexts, the survivor will attempt to convey her own traumatic experience, and the other will attempt to understand and heal this experience. Human comfort and human communion will have considerable healing effects. But benign relations cannot transact the region of catastrophic loneliness. Measuring "life in coffee spoons" (Eliot, 1922), measuring death with mere compassion, presuming to know that solitude which cannot be known, they eviscerate the truth of that loneliness.

But evil seduces with its perverse promise of recognition. Evil will always be constituted so that victim after victim is accompanied by her perpetrator to the obscure solitude of extinction. In each new victim, the perpetrator shares his own catastrophic loneliness, in what Bollas (1995) calls the "companionship of the dead." Evil always reaches its terminus in shared loneliness and in the shared disappearance of selves.¹

Thus, there is a thin edge that forms between the intensely shared experience of torture and the utter bankruptcy of its isolation. If torture precipitates what Fromm-Reichman (1959) called "uncanny loneliness," then the repetition of torture signifies both a shared flight from, and a shared renewal of, that loneliness. In a masterful compromise formation, the survivor-cum-perpetrator devises interpersonal dynamisms that are a shared enactment of her impossible desires.² These enactments of solitude must involve horrific and compelling encounters and elisions in human dialogue. Through the victim's mind and body, the survivor—perpetrator registers his longing for the absent other, "who could have and should have been there" (Benjamin 1995, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1: An Introduction to Malignant Dissociative Contagion
• Chapter 2: Loneliness and the Allure of Bodily Cruelty
• Chapter 3: Child Abuse and the Problem of Knowing History
• Chapter 4: The Paradox of Innocence: Dissociative States in Perpetrators of Bodily Violation
• Chapter 5: Malignance and the Bestiality of Survival
• Chapter 6: The Depravities of the Nonhuman Self: Greed, Murder, Persecution
• Chapter 7: Frankenstein and His Monster: Grief and the Escape from Grief
• Chapter 8: The Problem of Redemption: From Homicide to Psychic Annihilation
• References
• Index