The Holocaust as a Trope for “Managed” Social Change (article)

Introduction

This paper explores some shared psychological meanings of Holocaust imagery (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 1998) invoked by people experiencing downsizing, re-engineering, restructuring, managed care, and other forms of “managed” social change in the United States. I present a brief case example to illustrate how the evidence for the Holocaust metaphor lies in the action that carries the seed of its emotional plausibility. It is my countertransference that leads me (and others) from experience of action to its symbolization. By listening via my own unconscious, I can comprehend and hold onto others’ projection of Holocaust imagery and language onto contemporary American workplace cataclysm.

Since the end of World War II and the revelation of the Nazi war of extermination (Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, 1975), the word Holocaust (from the Hebrew, olah, burnt offering, sacrifice) has been adopted by many different groups, under varied circumstances, to designate the nature of their suffering. Whatever else atrocities, genocides, and

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other horrors are called by those who undergo them, they are often characterized as a Holocaust. At least one common structural denominator is the concentration of power that makes institutional terror possible.

While participating in my own workplace organization, in my frequent role as speaker or presenter at national conferences, and in my capacity as organizational consultant (interviewer, participant observer), I have often heard downsizing, re-engineering, restructuring, and managed care described in the idiom of the Holocaust. What is one to make of the cultural borrowing of this highly charged image? What is its psychodynamic significance? What, exactly, does it embody and condense? How does this use correspond to, or differ with, the use of the Holocaust by other groups? As a Jew who lost virtually my entire paternal family in Rumania to the Nazi era, how do I listen to these narratives and not discount them as flights of hyperbole? In this paper I shall present an extended example of this use and suggest some interpretations.

The Holocaust as Metaphor for Evil

In The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior (1994), George Kren and Leon Rappoport ask, “Why does the Holocaust not fade away?” (p. 3). They reply:

…insofar as the Holocaust is seen in general moral terms, it stands out as the ultimate expression of the human capacity for organized evil and has come to serve as the standard to which all lesser or proximate evils are compared. Accordingly, over the past decades any substantial threat to the existence or basic rights of an oppressed population or minority group has triggered appeals to the Holocaust (p. 4).

The Holocaust can be used “as a reminder of past evil, and … as an explanation (or analogy) of present events” (Professor Gary Holmes, personal communication, October 1, 1999). Among those who commit atrocities, it is commonly invoked to diminish personal responsibility for action, if not to exonerate oneself, and to rationalize for oneself a victim ideology (“I was just following orders”).

A widespread group psychological use of the Holocaust is to turn suffering from an absolute, lonely experience, into a comparative, relative experience. One encounters statements such as: “We suffered (a) as much as you did, (b) more than you did.” Such positions serve partly as what Franco Fornari called “the paranoid elaboration of mourning” (The Psychoanalysis of War, 1966), substituting vigilance and anger for vulnerability and grief. It is a salve for loss through continued fighting.

By contrast with this widespread narcissistic-defensive usage, I find that many Americans evoke Holocaust images (e.g., Nazis, SS, Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, trains, Dr. Josef Mengele, selection for life or death, gas chambers, SS police, labor camps, large scale executions, euphemisms, secrecy, rumors, disappearance) as an idiom by which to comprehend the extent, depth, and kind of suffering they experience in the workplace since the early 1980s. The “symbol choice” directs us – if we can bear to hear it – to the speaker’s catastrophic experience and to the psychohistoric dynamics of group representation or group fantasy. When individuals, families, workplace organizations, and ethnic-national groups suffer catastrophe, they search for metaphors that—affectively and cognitively together—attempt to answer the question: What is this experience like? (see Thomas Ogden, “Reverie and Metaphor: Some Thoughts on How I Work as a Psychoanalyst,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1997, 78: 719-732). The effort at “likening” becomes an intermediate area between consciousness and unconsciousness.

(Although I wish here primarily to immerse the reader in the phenomenology of business-as-Holocaust, there is a growing literature by psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, and scholars of contemporary managed social change. See my (with others) The HUMAN Cost of a Management Failure: Organizational Downsizing at General Hospital, 1996, and my Euphemism, Spin, and the Crisis in Organizational Life, 1998.)

A Letter from a Colleague

In late September 1999, I received a letter from a senior Jewish academic and teacher in an American biomedical setting, a person whom I have known some 15 years. Her poignancy and remarkable candor take us to the heart of my subject matter: the Holocaust as trope [figurative use of a word as metaphor or hyperbole] for what passes officially for American corporate “business as usual.” My colleague had read my 1998 book, Euphemism. In the summer of 1999 I had sent her a manuscript I would present at the Society for Psychological Anthropology in September. It was titled, “From Countertransference to Social Theory: A Study of Holocaust Thinking in American Business Dress.” With only a few minor adapta-

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tions to assure confidentiality, I quote her letter in its entirety, and with her permission.

I read your paper “…A Study of Holocaust Thinking.…” It was tremendously powerful—shocking, really. Simply the juxtaposition of the two language categories of the title—Holocaust and American business—is profoundly troubling. The article raised deeply personal issues for me. This is what I must share with you at the moment.

As you may recall, I spent two years (1992-1994) as acting chair of my department of internal medicine, a challenging, demanding, and ultimately extremely painful and soul-crushing time for me. When I relinquished that position, I spent the next year on sabbatical, attempting to become a prototypical National Institute of Medicine hard science researcher—and shortly thereafter underwent a series of health crises, including the near loss of the sight in one eye (wonder why!). In any event, I never really allowed myself to process the administrative experience or to reflect on why it had caused me such anguish. Reading your article, I was overcome by feelings of guilt and shame, as I realized how—on a small scale—I came to approximate the aggressors you portrayed.

Although I always tried to act with integrity, I think looking back that I was frequently co-opted by the dominant bottom-line corporate thinking that you describe so well. For example, I personally fired two colleagues whom I had known and worked closely with for over 10 years, simply because they could no longer prove their “utility” to the system. I am convinced now, with hindsight, that their terminations were only symbolic in nature, did nothing substantial to assuage our budget problems, and were primarily sacrificial acts to appease forces both within and without the department. The more I read of your analysis, the more I realized just how guilty I was of the sins you cite—the euphemized language, the personification and subsequent glorification of the institutional organism, the denial of the still small voice within, the sense of having “disappeared” good human beings who in a day became obliterated from our world. There are other examples as well.

I guess I am sharing all this because I believe I am basically a good human being who has always identified more with the oppressed than with the oppressor (and, indeed, as a social scientist and non-M.D., as you well know, have always been more oppressee than oppressor). Yet how easily power corrupted me and created a damning shift in perspective. I began to dream the collective dream, and it wasn’t that hard. Clearly I paid a price—I attribute my subsequent health problems at least in part to the internalizing and somaticizing of tremendous levels of anxiety and distress—but on a conscious level I thought I was just exhibiting necessary toughness, showing I could be “one of the boys.”

The striking thing in what you write is that to NOT dream the dream, play the game, you almost have to be crazy—and very brave, to trust your inner experience only in the face of overwhelming disconfirming messages from the outside world. But on balance, it is better to be crazy than cruel. I had the opportunity to become a Nazi—a little, baby Nazi to be sure, but there it was—and I seized it eagerly. Eventually, as your article points out, I was eaten in turn, when I was no longer useful to the survival of the machine. I don’t wonder at all how the Holocaust could have happened.

Well, my friend, I hope these thoughts are not too depressing. Although I admit to being temporarily devastated as these unlooked-for insights worked their way up from my unconscious, on balance I learned a great deal. For example, I think my subsequent physical recovery and professional fulfillment are both direct results of my having had the wisdom to voluntarily renounce the chair position (which, out of pragmatism more than anything else, the dean had asked me to accept on a permanent basis) and relearn the skill of listening to my own heart. That inward turning is also what eventually moved me away from hard research toward the medical humanities, and I can honestly say I have recovered my soul in the process.

So, while I have had to face that good people, including myself, can do bad things, I have also discovered that teshuvah

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(Hebrew, for repentance) and redemption both are possible. Good lessons for the New Year. And I have to thank your article for helping me to bring all of this into such clear focus. I thank you for your plain speaking, your courage, and your unwillingness to deny and distance from some very brutal truths. If this be insanity, then we need more of it.

Discussion

This single example, a personal letter, can be read as a cultural and historical exemplar that articulates what many people say; and what for countless others serves as the “unthought known” (Christopher Bollas, In the Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, 1989). My colleague makes the implicit explicit, the unconscious conscious. She describes part of the journey to unconsciousness and back to consciousness. Her letter reveals hard-won insight into herself, into processes widely shared in contemporary American culture—and the personal cost of unconscious identification with the aggressor. It shows the work of aggression in the service of mastering the anxiety of overwhelming vulnerability—and of the ultimate futility of such self-protection. It brings to mind Robert J. Lifton’s well-known concepts of “psychic numbing” and “doubling” (similar to Melanie Klein’s “splitting” and “projective identification”), and of Donald Winnicott’s distinction between the “false self” and the “true self.”

In part, at least, my friend’s experience includes, among other things, the lure of power and acceptance (to be “one of the boys,” with its gendered connotations), until another part of her talked back, via her body (her health). I wonder whether she had become a “victim” to her wish to belong and to overcome marginality.

The letter shows how, in the juncture between personal life history and organizational (cultural) history, the true self is (here, temporarily) cast aside and recovered. It shows how Holocaust thinking, imagery, and acting, can be engaged in within “normal” American health care, university, corporate, and government settings—how a way that at first seems disturbing and repugnant (dissociated, not-me, “This doesn’t happen here”) becomes recognizable (integrated, me, “I did that,” “I was that”). Finally, the letter is an intersubjective document that exists in interpersonal space in which she trusts to see herself and to be seen.

Conclusions

This paper has described and interpreted the symbolic linkage between modern large-scale American business organizational style and the Holocaust. A personal narrative was used to illustrate how American workplace experience comes to be represented in the idiom of Nazi atrocity. I have argued that the Holocaust can be used psychologically as a trope for the experience of massive forms of “managed” change that go by such euphemisms as downsizing, RIFing [reductions in force], surplusing, separating, re-engineering, restructuring, and managed health care. Via a single document, I have offered data that help us to understand how the Holocaust comes to be a compelling internal representation and external expression for what is officially “the bottom line” of “just business” in American life.

(Author’s Note: The author expresses gratitude to Professor Michael Diamond and Professor Gary Holmes for their encouragement in this project and comments on this manuscript.)

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