Global Webs

"... all of us have grown used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an immutable fact, and thereby actually helped keep it going. None of us are only its victims; we are all also responsible for it.

"It would be very unwise to think of the sad heritage of the last 40 years only as something foreign, something inherited from a distant relative. On the contrary, we must accept this heritage as something we have inflicted on ourselves. If we accept it in such a way, we shall come to understand it is up to all of us to do something about it."

Excerpt from Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel's New Year's Day address.

Following the implications of Reflection, the entire world situation is a manifestation of each of our inner selves, but the degree of closeness or distance we have from any given situation indicates how much a part of us that situation is.

While we are all connected by Reflection, there are some realities which are close to us and some which are far away. My reality includes my own divorce. For those around me my divorce is also part of their reality and reflects their inner selves, but not to the same degree. For some of my close friends, the failure of my marriage brings to the surface their own fears of difficulty in their marriages. They have remained married, so the reality of my divorce is not as extreme for them as it was for me, but my divorce is still as much a part of their reality as mine.

These ideas extend to the entire world. The issue of freedom in Eastern Europe is a reflection of all our inner selves, but more so for those people in Eastern Europe.

All of our realities include famine in Africa. To understand world hunger requires looking within and asking what part of each of us is reflected in famine. We all have some fear that there will not be enough to eat.

Natural Disasters

Epidemics are one type of natural disaster. Just as diseases reflect individual inner-selves, epidemics reflect the inner-selves of larger groups of individuals. Each instance of the disease makes sense on an individual level and the epidemic makes sense on a collective level.

For example, I picked up a case of herpes, and as with the other ailments described in this book, found that it clearly reflected inner needs. It was related to the stress of trying to balance conventional love, marriage, and monogamy with the ideals of free love and open marriage from the 1960s. These ideas produced an inner conflict that resulted in sexual stress that manifested itself as herpes.

Herpes became an epidemic. I can only believe that each other individual with herpes is wrestling with the same or similar issues. It is not herpes that is the epidemic, but the stress of the changing sexual attitudes over the last few decades. Herpes is only the external reflection of that stress. It is all our realities, some more than others as is indicated by whether we have the disease or not and how close we are to someone who does.

Winter flues also become epidemics. Given the higher stress in the winter and holiday seasons, this is no surprise. The epidemic is the stress, not the flu. Not everyone gets it, but it is there for those who need it.

In 1978, the Boston area was hit with blizzard on top of blizzard. It rated us the status of a national disaster. The reserves were called in to help clear the streets. Hundreds of vehicles were stuck and abandoned on the major highways. People were forbidden to drive. The state simply shut down for a week.

I don't know what the news coverage of the blizzard looked like from the rest of the country, but I imagine it had a lot to do with the tragedy of it all, but talk to anyone that was in it and you get a different story.

It forced us all to relax. We couldn't go anywhere. We had to spend time with our families and neighbors. There were no pressures. We couldn't go to work. We couldn't go to school. We couldn't go to any of the other types of commitments we had. All we could do was hang around the neighborhood.

The weather turned beautiful, with crisp clear winter days, wonderful to be out in, and tons of snow. It was better than any real vacation, which so often has all the pressures of non-vacation time. This was forced relaxation for all of us and was a time fondly remembered by at least everyone I know who lived through it.

There is no question in my mind that it reflected an inner need of all of us.

I have nowhere near the contact with the San Francisco earthquake that I had with the Boston blizzard, but I wondered about the quake, and got answers from one person who was there.

That person in San Francisco was a public relations person working with a company I was analyzing. She was pure professional businesslike veneer, with no apparent underlying substance.

Shortly after the quake, I was talking to her about arranging a meeting with the company she was representing, but she wanted to talk about the quake. She had turned human. The false professionalism she used to put on was gone.

She talked about her roof tiles and the mess and the traffic, and I asked her if there was a good side as well. She said yes, it was wonderful. People were understanding and considerate, they were not all hustling to get where they were going. People were reaching out to help each other. In her words, the quake really "shook them up"—both literally and figuratively.

At least for this one woman, the quake caused her shell to shatter revealing the human underneath. What other stories are there from San Francisco like that one?

The earthquake had a direct benefit for me. Remember the lucrative seminars I was going to teach and the visions of plane crashes they gave me? I had committed to do the seminars but did not want to. The company sponsoring the seminars was holding its biggest money-making show in San Francisco the week following the quake. They had already laid out the expenses for the show and took a large financial loss because nobody could come. This loss, coupled with other factors, made it difficult for them to adequately promote the seminar series I was to give—so they canceled it.

Wars

Most analysis of why there are wars misses the most important point. They fill a deep need.

The war stories of the veterans of WWII are a striking illustration of this. They revel in accounts of the war. Comics and movies glorified the exploits of our soldiers. As a child growing up in the 1950's there was certainly lip service paid to the horrors of war, but the overall impression was WWII was a glorious adventure in which good triumphed over evil.

An interesting look at the British perspective of World War II is shown in the movie Hope & Glory. It shows the positive effects of the war on the English. The war brought a time of change, and a liberation from the stifling English pre-war society. It was seen through the eyes of children, growing and maturing as England itself was. If this is an accurate portrayal of much of England during the war, then it gives a glimpse of one need the war filled for some of the English.

The ancient Celtic tribes used to war every spring. They did it in part for fun. They were careful not to wipe each other out, otherwise there would be no war the following spring.

Look at the invasion of Grenada. Shortly thereafter there was a rush of young men trying to get into the armed forces.

And now, in 1990, with a major portion of our economy dependent on our war machine, the enemy has decided not to play anymore. We need a justification for our military might and Sadaam Hussein suddenly enters the picture.

We haven't always needed the glory of defeating bad guys. The America of the 1960s was filled with self doubt and the emerging image of the ugly American. That America needed to learn the other side; that America had Viet Nam.

Holocaust

The Holocaust is not a topic that is easily discussed, but because of the magnitude of the horror it is a topic that keeps recurring. It is a scary topic for me to approach because of the depths of feelings associated with it, and, as someone who wasn't there and is neither German or Jewish, I cannot speak from my own experience.

But still, I am drawn to it and have found two authors, one German, one Jewish, who were there, and whose combined works show a lot of the phenomenon of Reflection at work. Reflection would imply that both the Nazi's and the Jews had full, not shared, needs that were reflected in each other in the Holocaust. These two author's books come very close to supporting that thesis.

The first is German psychologist Alice Miller's book For Your Own Good. It discusses the very strict German child rearing of the late 1800's and early 1900's that led to a nation of abused children that was then led by an abused child (Hitler) in the outpouring of hatred that was the Holocaust.

The second author is Bruno Bettleheim, a Jewish psychologist who spent time in the concentration camps. His book, Freud's Vienna and other Essays, includes a section of essays about the Holocaust. These essays make the point that the ghetto Jews of Eastern Europe and Germany were psychological very different from most of the Jews we know today. He indicates that the strong death wishes of these people played a significant part in the Holocaust.

Both authors have similar frightening conclusions. Alice Miller feels that if we don't fully understand the psychology of the Nazis that drove them to their acts it could happen all over again. Bruno Bettleheim feels that if we don't fully understand the psychology of the ghetto Jews that allowed themselves to be slaughtered it could happen all over again.

Originally I read Bruno Bettelheim's book because of a desire to see Reflection at work in first hand accounts. This I found, but I was surprised at another effect his book had on me. It was the most personally moving account of the holocaust I had ever read or heard. Other accounts document the horror, but the emphasis on helpless victims just never hit very deep. In Bettelheim's book I see the human failings, weaknesses and sorrows that relate to the horror. It is much more moving because it seems so real and possible.

Bettleheim attributes much of the problem to what he calls ghetto thinking. It is a type of thinking where by you do everything you can to appease your oppressors, hoping they will then be nice to you. He documents how the Jews actually helped the Nazis do their awful job.

Hearing this type of account of the disaster I recognize in myself many of the aspects of ghetto thinking. I can see the horror of the holocaust as an ultimate manifestation of the pains of my own existence. The holocaust is not the tragedy of a people struck down for no good reason other than their religion, it is worse than that—it is the tragedy of a people struck down by an aspect of their own inner selves, an aspect which appears in each of us. This is the real horror; this is the reason we don't want to hear about it. We would rather think of the Jews as "innocent" victims than admit to this connection within us all.

Bettleheim addresses this head on: "War is horrible, and man's inhumanity to man even more so. Yet the importance of accounts of the extermination camps lies not in their all too familiar story, but in something far more unusual and horrifying. It lies in a new dimension of man: an aspect we all wish to forget about, but can forget only at our own risk. Strange as it may sound, the unique feature of the extermination camps is not that the Germans exterminated millions of people—that this is possible has been accepted in our picture of man, though not for centuries had it happened on that scale, and perhaps never with such callousness. What was new, unique, and terrifying was that millions of people, like lemmings, marched themselves to their own death. This is what is incredible, what we try to understand."

One difficulty with understanding the Jews of the holocaust is in part due to the fact that they were not the Jews that we know today. The Jews we know are the ones who wanted to break with the old ghetto traditions. The ones that remained didn't.

In Bettleheim's words "But though Israel is alive, the Jewish ghetto people—with their unique religion and culture that had survived intact since the Middle Ages—were indeed exterminated by Hitler, along with the Gypsies and a great number of others. Only those who had broken with the ghettos resisted, ..."

"It is hard to assess what it does to a people when for three generations all its most active members—those committed to fighting for freedom—leave the group; when only those who lack the courage or imagination to conceive of a different way of life remain behind. The Jewish elite which shows up so well in American cultural life, for example, had for a century been lost to the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe."

Bettleheim talks of the death drive, identified by Freud, as a major force behind the ghetto Jew's fate. He saw the death camps as the final manifestation of it. "But this was only a last step in giving up living one's own life, in no longer defying the death instinct, which, in more scientific terms, has been called the principle of inertia. The first step was taken long before anyone entered the death camps. It was inertia that led millions of Jews into the ghettos that the SS created for them. It was inertia that made hundreds of thousands of Jews sit home, waiting for their executioners, when they were restricted to their homes."

Bettleheim, then sees the holocaust almost entirely as a manifestation of the death wish of the ghetto Jew. He does not put much blame on the Nazis, saying they made it perfectly clear what they were up to. Hitler had said many times there would be no Jews in Germany, but his original intention was for them all to move out. He only started to send them to concentration camps to show them he meant business. In the early days of the camps a Jew could get out simply by promising to leave the country. This is in contrast to the experience of the political prisoners in the camps who could not leave alive and for whom the camps were originally built.

While Bettleheim might not put much blame on Hitler and the Nazis, Alice Miller sees it entirely differently. In her book For Your Own Good, Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence she puts the blame squarely on the Germans.

She, like Bettleheim, is driven to understand the holocaust. "Since the end of World War II, I have been haunted by the question of what could make a person conceive the plan of gassing millions of human beings to death and of how it could then be possible for millions of others to acclaim him and assist in carrying out this plan."

Alice Miller's book was very popular in Germany. She thought it would be difficult to convince the public of her ideas, but "... all I needed to do was describe Hitler's childhood in such a way that it served as a mirror, and suddenly Germans caught their own reflections in it."

It is this child rearing that created the mass psychology that led to the holocaust. Miller quotes many old German child rearing texts that point to the importance of breaking a child's will at an early age. For example one text claims "Over the years children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will..." and another says "The blows you administer should not be merely playful ones but should convince him that you are his master."

Miller uses the term "poisonous pedagogy" to refer to all techniques used to condition a child in an autocratic fashion. The children do not complain of this child rearing because "The love a child has for his or her parents ensures that their conscious or unconscious acts of mental cruelty will go undetected."

"The child's dependence on his or her parents' love also makes it impossible in later years to recognize these traumatizations, which often remain hidden behind the early idealization of the parents for the rest of the child's life."

The result is children with broken wills who respect all authority, and then grow up to become authority figures themselves.

This type of child-rearing, popular in Germany at the turn of the century, crushes spontaneous feelings and becomes the breeding grounds of hatred. The children raised this way were not allowed to express the anger and helpless rage the child-rearing gave them, but the anger doesn't disappear. Instead it reappears as "a less conscious hatred directed against either the self or substitute persons, a hatred that will seek to discharge itself in various ways permissible and suitable for an adult."

Hitler was an abused child, as was his father before him. Hitler's persecution of the Jews made possible: revenge on his father (who was suspected of being half Jewish), liberation of his mother (Germany), attainment of the love of his people as a shrieking Jew hater, and a role reversal from his childhood so that he was now the dictator with the ability to persecute the weak child in his own self.

Non-Germans don't understand Hitler's appeal, thinking he looks silly in old newsreels, but for the Germans, Hitler was using the exact gestures that were familiar to all. They saw a father figure from their childhoods.

"And so, when a man comes along and talks like one's own father and acts like him, even adults will forget their democratic rights or will not make use of them. They will submit to this man, will acclaim him, allow themselves to be manipulated by him, and put their trust in him, finally surrendering totally to him without even being aware of their enslavement."

"Freed from their 'bad' (i.e. weak and uncontrolled) feelings, so-called Aryans could feel pure, strong, hard, clean, good, unambivalent, and morally right if everything they had feared in themselves since childhood could be attributed to the Jews and if, together with their fellow Germans, these 'Aryans' were not only permitted but required to combat it relentlessly and ever anew among members of this 'inferior race.'"

The perpetuators of the Holocaust were not perverted, they showed none of the shame of perversion. They were proud of the strength of what they were doing.

"The men and women who carried out the 'final solution' did not let their feelings stand in their way for the simple reason that they had been raised from infancy not to have any feelings of their own but to experience their parents' wishes as their own. These were people who, as children, had been proud of being tough and not crying, of carrying out all their duties 'gladly,' of not being afraid—that is, at bottom, of not having an inner life at all."

"Against the backdrop of the rejection of childishness instilled by our training, it becomes easier to understand why men and women had little difficulty leading a million children, whom they regarded as the bearers of the feared portions of their own psyche, into the gas chambers. ... From the start, it had been the aim of their upbringing to stifle their childish, playful, and life-affirming side. The cruelty inflicted on them, the psychic murder of the child they once were, had to be passed on in the same way: each time they sent another Jewish child to the gas ovens, they were in essence murdering the child within themselves."

Miller goes on to point out that there is only a matter of degree between "spanking" and "beating" a child. Both cause humiliation and the need for repression. There is also only a matter of degree between "spanking" and "poisonous pedagogy," simply manipulating the child emotionally without physical force. We are all survivors to some degree of this parenting behavior.

This is why Hitler's Germany is a part of all of our realities. We all have hidden angers left over from our childhoods that need expression. It is the recognition of this in the Nazi behavior that makes us want to cast them as totally inhuman—denying the existence of the same roots of violence in each of us.

We can tie Bettleheim's and Miller's views together to see the web of Reflection. The ghetto Jews as described by Bettelheim reflected exactly the self-image the Germans wanted to destroy in themselves. The persecuting Germans fulfilled exactly the death wish of the ghetto Jews.

The real horror of all this comes, not from the facts, but from that deeper part of each of us that understands both the Nazis and the ghetto Jews. We wish to deny our connections with Nazi psychology just as much as we wish to deny our connection with ghetto thinking, but both are real for all of us—we can tell because the holocaust is part of all of our realities.

It is scary for each of us to examine the holocaust like this, but the benefit from looking within is described by both Bettleheim and Miller. Bettleheim is talking about ghetto thinking, Miller about poisonous pedagogy—the opposites joined together in the holocaust.

Bettleheim: "As a psychoanalyst, I am beholden to the idea that the hidden, denied, and repressed continues to disturb our conscious life unless we drag it out into broad daylight and take a good look at it, so that we may permanently rid ourselves of it. Otherwise, we continue to carry it within us as our secret shame."

Miller: "And if we are courageous enough to face the truth, the world will change, for the power of that 'poisonous pedagogy' which has dominated us for so long has been dependent upon our fear, our confusion, and our childish credulity; once it is exposed to the light of truth, it will inevitably disappear."

Copyright ©1992 Dennis Merritt. All Rights Reserved.