Volkan and Miller: Why the Holocaust? Why Genocide?

Why did the Holocaust happen? It is a question that psychoanalysts have tried to answer over the decades. However, there have been other instances of genocide in the 70 years since the Nazis killed millions of people at the direction of Adolf Hitler. Mass government or group-ordered killings have taken place in Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda. So there is another, broader question: Why does genocide happen?

Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller (1923-2010) focused on the Holocaust and Germany. Her research provides lessons about the consequences for the world when children are systematically humiliated, oppressed, and denigrated. In the past three decades, Vamık D. Volkan, an analyst of Turkish Cypriot birth, psychiatrist, and diplomat, has found more universal answers to the roots of genocide. Their viewpoints are complementary, but they also differ in significant ways.

Miller’s is a more intrapsychic view, focusing on how German child-rearing practices, which she called “poisonous pedagogy,” annihilated children’s sense of self, demanded complete obedience, and ultimately created the cadre of government officials who willingly carried out Hitler’s commands to oppress and murder millions of people.

Volkan finds answers in the shared identity of a culture or country: its regression in the aftermath of trauma and in the presence of a charismatic and malignant leader who exploits that trauma for a murderous agenda. He has looked at multiple examples of genocide and terrorism, including the Holocaust, Bosnia, and even the September 11, 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda.

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In For Your Own Good (1983), Miller wrote that the Holocaust happened because of Germany’s collective denigration and oppression of its children. She read child-rearing manuals, some written in the 1700s, which detailed the importance and necessity of breaking a child’s will and compelling obedience (pp. 8-58).

She wrote of the impact of poisonous pedagogy on the German people, saying it was inconceivable and impossible for them to have expressed their anger and helpless rage as children, especially when they were beaten, humiliated, and deceived. “What becomes of this forbidden and therefore unexpressed anger? Unfortunately, it does not disappear, but is transformed with time into a more or less conscious hatred directed against either the self or substitute persons,” she wrote (p. 61).

While she discussed Hitler’s upbringing and psyche, and the hatred and projection that drove him to order the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others, she also focused on how he was able to exert such extreme control over so many people. Control that had them acquiesce in genocide.

She looked at the lives of several of Hitler’s top deputies and writes, “Among all the leading figures of the Third Reich, I have not been able to find a single one who did not have a strict and rigid upbringing” (p. 65). Such an upbringing demands obedience.

To back up her theory, Miller quotes from the post-war writings of Nazi officials, including Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz. He said of his childhood: “It was constantly impressed upon me in forceful terms that I must obey promptly the wishes and commands of my parents, teacher, and priests, and indeed of all adults, including servants, and that nothing must distract me from this duty” (p. 68).

A culture that raises children to believe they must be obedient can be destined to foster and slavishly follow a leader like Hitler, Miller says. She continued, “When someone like Adolf Hitler came along and claimed, just like Father, to know exactly what was good, right and necessary for everyone, it is not surprising that so many people who were longing for someone to tell them what to do welcomed him with open arms and helped him in his rise to power” (p. 70).

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Volkan also looks to trauma to explain genocide, including the Holocaust. However, he also examines other instances of oppression or mass political murder, including Serbia under Slobodan Milošević and Afghanistan under the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. He focuses on the process of cultural groups or countries rather than individuals.

Borrowing from Erik Erikson’s definition of identity, Volkan (“Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Trauma,” 1988, www.Vamıkvolkan.com) says people in any cultural group or country have a shared identity. He describes it “as the subjective experience of thousands or millions of people who are linked by a persistent sense of sameness while also sharing numerous characteristics with others in foreign groups.” Children become part of the group and take on its identity.

The children Miller wrote of were very much alone, although they had a communal sense of denigration and obedience. Volkan places more significance on the group experience—its response to a collective injury during a specific event. When a large group’s identity is humiliated or threatened, people belonging to that identity psychologically find it easy to humiliate, victimize, and kill individuals belonging to the enemy group in the name of identity without blinking an eye. They use aggression in order to repair, protect, and maintain their large-group identity (“Large-Group Identity, International Relations and Psychoanalysis,” 2008, www.Vamıkvolkan.com).

The humiliation suffered by the group leads to what Volkan calls large-group regression. He notes that regression “is an inevitable and necessary response to certain levels of trauma, threat or stress” (“September 11 and Societal Regression,” 2012, www.Vamıkvolkan.com). The group’s regression makes it vulnerable to a charismatic leader like Hitler or Milošević, who used what Volkan calls a chosen trauma—for Germany, its humbling defeat in World War I and for Serbia, the Battle of Kosovo in 1389—as a rallying point. A chosen trauma validates the group’s sense of injury and persecution and sets an agenda for revenge.

Volkan (Blind Trust, Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror, 2004) finds a number of characteristics

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among the members of a regressed group. These include:

• Shared processes after a traumatizing event such as war, terrorism or oppression by a dictator;
• Group members lose their individuality;
• The group rallies blindly around the leader in authoritarian submission;
• The group creates a sharp “us” and “them” division between itself and “enemy” groups;
• The group feels “entitled” to do anything to maintain its shared identity;
• The leadership creates elements within the group including: “new” nationalism, ethnic sentiments, religious fundamentalism or ideology, accompanying “new” morality, and sometimes a “new” history of the group purged of unwanted elements (the grandiosity of having been given the right to impose);
• Group members become overly concerned with the notion of “blood” and a homogeneous or purified society (pp. 60-61).

These characteristics were all part of the psyche of Hitler’s Third Reich.

One area where Volkan and Miller agree is in their assertions that genocide has taken place because of projection. Volkan describes projection as a child’s attempt to rid himself of shame, humiliation, and self-hatred—the “bad” parts of his psyche—by externalizing them onto someone else. In large, regressed groups, bad parts are projected onto other groups who are blamed for past traumas: Jews, Bosnians, other tribes.

“Belonging to the same large-group identity allows thousands or millions of people to share the same large-group enemy and ally representations, and this in turn plays a key role in large-group identity issues contaminating and influencing international relations” (“Large-Group-Identity, International Relations and Psychoanalysis”).

Miller, drawing from biographical material about Hitler, including Mein Kampf (1925), describes a childhood of beatings, ridicule, and humiliation. She also makes the projected connection between Hitler and his chosen enemies: “A child whose father does not call to him by name but by whistling to him as though the child

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were a dog has the same disenfranchised and nameless status in the family as did ‘the Jew’ in the Third Reich” (For Your Own Good, p. 161).

She also goes on to say, “The fact that Hitler had so many enthusiastic followers proves that they had a personality structure similar to his, i.e., that they had had a similar upbringing” (p. 170). That they, too, projected their bad selves onto Germany’s enemies.

It is worthwhile to note what motivated Miller and Volkan to explore the Holocaust and genocides. In her original preface to For Your Own Good, Miller does not mention Hitler or the Holocaust. She wanted people to be aware of “the devastating role of child-rearing, its destruction of vitality, its danger for society” (xvii). In the preface to the American edition, she said, “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 be then possible for millions of others to acclaim him and then assist in carrying out this plan” (x). Volkan describes his transition from clinician to researcher into ethnic, racial, religious, and other large-group tensions and violence. He began this work in the 1980s, taking part in conversations among Egyptians, Israelis, and Palestinians over their differences and it soon became his main occupation.

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