SOURCE: Marcus, Paul. “Bettelheim's Analysis of the Mass Society.” In Autonomy in the Extreme Situation: Bruno Bettelheim, the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Mass Society, pp. 39-60. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.

[In the following essay, Marcus delineates Bettelheim's theory of mass society and compares it to those of contemporary social theorists.]

In this [essay] I will elaborate on Bettelheim's analysis of how the mass society undermines the individual's autonomy and integration, including what I think is his novel conceptualization of there being a dangerous continuity between the mass society, the total mass state of Nazi Germany and the concentration camps. I will further suggest that the insights that Bettelheim offered in his analysis of the mass society have relevance to understanding some of the compelling problems that our society faces today. As we shall see, many of the themes that Bettelheim was concerned with are those that a number of contemporary social theorists, frequently from very different theoretical perspectives, have suggested are crucial to understanding the individual's struggle to maintain his autonomy and integration in late modernity.

Mass society, according to Bettelheim, has a seductive lure: Its positive elements such as modern technology and mass production promise material wealth and security to many. However, says Bettelheim, with this comes its negative aspects; “the impersonal bureaucracy, impersonal taste makers, and impersonal sources of information.”¹ In organized industrial society the immutable impersonal principles of organization alot to each member a circumscribed, routinized task; his uniqueness has no place in the system. The speed with which mass society appeared on the cultural scene has given the individual little time to adapt. Furthermore, says Bettelheim, the mass society's ability to exert powerful control over the individual through mass media and intrusive surveillance capabilities also lead the individual to feel ineffective, weak and powerless to look for satisfactions suited to his own particular personality and circumstances. He thus relies on others for guidance. Likewise, the vastness of the political system and its bureaucracy, and the bigness of most modern technological enterprises foster a loss of autonomy because just at the point where man begins to feel he is losing control of his destiny and may be motivated to do something about it, he is offered a convenient excuse for evading responsibility. Bettelheim mentions, for instance, that many Germans, when confronted with the horrors they supposedly consented to, instead of admitting that they were not able to maintain their independence in the face of outside pressure, claimed “I was only a little man, what could I do.”² Mass society, according to Bettelheim, is so complex that man can justify his saying helplessly that he does not understand his role in the political or productive processes. Says Bettelheim, “The trouble is that the justification does not help; it just lowers his own confidence in himself. His distance from the managers adds the often valid excuse that he is powerless to reach them, let alone influence anyone directly.”³ The individual thus relinquishes much of his autonomy amidst an endless maze of obstacles to self-assertion.

Bettelheim focused on the dangers of impersonal bureaucracy, the trend-setting mass media and intrusive surveillance in undermining the individual's autonomy and integration, which are issues that have been and continue to be of great concern to a number of contemporary social theorists. To some extent, Bettelheim's formulations are compatible with some of the current theorizing and they also provide useful insights into social processes. For example, Bettelheim's observations about the depersonalizing impact of bureaucracy calls to mind Foucault's discussion of the disciplinary power and Max Weber's analysis of modern bureaucracy. As Giddens points out, in both Foucault and Weber (and I think to some extent in Bettelheim), “there is a stress upon the emergence of a novel type of administrative power, generated by the concentrated organization of human activities through their precise specification and coordination.”⁴ In other words, says Giddens, in modern times disciplinary power is characterized by “new modes of regularizing activities in time-space.”⁵ He mentions, following Foucault, the farming of space such as in a classroom with its lines, columns and measured walled intervals and the division of time such as in the way a day is a temporally regulated in a precise and ordered fashion.⁶ The timing and spacing of human activity is thus a prime means of regulating social life. Bettelheim, like Foucault and Giddens, recognized that “the vastness of the political system and its bureaucracy, and the bigness of most modern technological enterprises, now add still another factor—distance”⁷ to its list of elements, which fosters, in Bettelheim's language, personality disintegration. By distance Bettelheim means, in part, the pervasive feeling of helplessness, of being “only a little man,” an object of manipulation in an incredibly complex and impersonal society where one is “distant” from those who make the decisions determining one's fate.⁸ For instance, says Bettelheim, “physical distance from the managers [in a workplace] keeps a man from testing against reality his belief in their good will, a process that might prove disastrous to his sense of economic and social security.”⁹ Elsewhere says Bettelheim, “distance in time is used by the boss in our society who lets an inferior wait before seeing him,” which is meant to impress “the person with the boss' power and his own inferiority.”¹⁰ The result, says Bettelheim, is that the individual becomes demoralized as his sense of agency is diminished. He tends to relinquish his autonomy to those in power, to the “system,” and to the “expert,” thus fostering compliance and conformity, becoming a docile body.

Bettelheim, like Foucault and Giddens, had concern about the invasive surveillance in contemporary society. In his essay “Some Comments on Privacy,” for example, Bettelheim is troubled by the “ever more frequent, pervasive, and intrusive invasion of privacy by governmental agencies, private organizations, and the mass media—aggravated by requests from researchers for all kinds of detailed information on one's activities, opinions, and preferences.”¹¹ What Bettelheim is insinuating, Giddens has argued succinctly: that the processes of surveillance within modern society constitute one of its major institutional dimensions.¹² It should be made clear that by surveillance I am not simply referring to its manifestation solely in terms of the police or security apparatus, but rather, I am describing the fact that “organizations of many kinds know us only as coded sequences of numbers and letters … [by computers]. Precise details of our personal lives are collected, stored, retrieved and processed every day within huge computer databases belonging to big corporations and government departments. This is the ‘surveillance society.’”¹³ As David Lyon has suggested, it is this widespread adoption of information technologies that has amplified and accelerated certain tendencies and processes in contemporary society.¹⁴

Bettelheim recognized that in the mass society, social control, both in terms of social reproduction and self-identity, were correlated with the development of administrative power brought about by the accelerating processes of surveillance. Says Bettelheim, “the paramount task of those who wish to safeguard individual freedom is to find ways to protect it despite the power of modern mass control and mass persuasion.”¹⁵ As Giddens has pointed out, the expansion of surveillance capabilities is the main medium of the control of social activity by social means.¹⁶ He suggests that surveillance is fundamental to all the kinds of organizations associated with modernity. It is visible, for example, in capitalist workplace supervision, government administration and the monopoly by the nation-state of the means of violence. Foucault, perhaps more than any other social theorist, has shown how surveillance acts as a medium of social control. Through the relentless reporting and documentation of the behavior of individuals throughout the entire social body, and through the normalizing judgment that emanates from the hierarchy of continuous and functional surveillance, the individual's autonomy and integration is weakened. Says Foucault, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”¹⁷ It is precisely this point that Bettelheim was suggesting in his study of the mass society. With the enormous expansion in the administrative, bureaucratic “reach” of the state, with the ever-increasing coding of information of the individual—the transparency of behavior can become an instrument for undermining the individual's autonomy and fostering conformity to deadening social norms. As Foucault notes in his discussion of Bentham's Panopticon, Bentham made “visibility a trap,” the transformation of the field of visibility into the domain of power. In its extreme form, intimates Bettelheim, such processes involving surveillance technology and bureaucracy can contribute to subtly undermining and destroying democratic institutions and processes, a point that Giddens has emphasized when he wrote that “Totalitarianism is, first of all, an extreme focusing of surveillance.”¹⁸ Bettelheim also had concern about the role of the mass media in undermining autonomy and integration.¹⁹ In particular, he felt that most movies and television shows, for example, followed patterns of the mass media with their conformist messages. Says Bettelheim,

Having lost the ability to self regulate his work, man is equally dependent at play. Yet a life may be full of variety and still seem barren if activities and experiences do not bear the flavor of personal preference, do not spring from a meaningful, individual style of life. To pattern one's way of life on that of others is not a truly free choice, even if nothing is openly forced on the individual.²⁰

What Bettelheim was troubled by was that the available media experiences “are so empty or so fixed that they evoke no emotional or intellectual participation and cannot serve the need for enriching one's life.”²¹ Most contemporary media experiences, says Bettelheim, do not encourage spontaneous new decisions about oneself, and one's way of life, decisions that awaken in oneself, or encourage oneself to persist in, the elusive search for meaning and the widening of one's consciousness of freedom. What Bettelheim was suggesting is that the individual tends to constitute himself, in part, through the media experiences he participates in, and in the context of the mass society this means relinquishing an ethos of autonomy for an ethos of conformity. That is, as Foucault's work suggests, the media, especially of the electronic type, influence and to some extent help “normalize” self-identity through, for instance, encouraging the individual to continually test his or her worth against images of the good or the desirable, and thereby subtly fostering greater conformity and social control of the individual. Moreover, as Giddens has indicated, the media have long influenced the basic organization of social relations.²² Bettelheim illustrated this point when he wrote that one of the most negative features of mass society is that it forces one “to look out at others and be looked in on by them; they being concerned with how we manage and we looking out to see how they do it.”²³ In other words, this lack of privacy leads to a tendency to compare oneself to others and fosters a uniformity in living and a diminution of individuality. As Mark Edmundson recently wrote in the New York Times Magazine, “a middle class corporate norm is becoming pervasive” in “the culture of current-day American conformity.”²⁴

Bettelheim emphasizes that a major negative consequence for the individual in the mass society is the development of intense psychological anxiety and fear rooted in the sense of losing individual identity. This makes the individual more prone to look to the external for direction. The acquiescence in looking to society to provide the individual's personal agenda further reinforces the sense of depletion and loss of personal identity. For example, while the mass society robs the individual of his self-confidence in his decision-making ability, he tends to look to the “expert” for direction and leadership. The mass man begins to feel that the expert knows what is best for him; it is the expert, often via the mass media, from which the individual derives his preferences and fashions his values. Gone is his attempt to gratify his particular propensities according to his own personality needs and circumstances, for the man in mass society no longer can determine what he really wants, but rather his needs and tastes are defined by the expert. In this situation the individual has surrendered much of his autonomy to the state and his personality integration suffers because of it: “while the process of uncritical acceptance usually starts with externals, it does not often stop there because external and internal life are too closely interwoven. So once a person begins to rely on others for decision making in externals it can soon extend to inner conflicts as well.”²⁵ Thus, according to Bettelheim, where other regimes only aimed at getting their citizens to comply and conform to their edicts in terms of external behavior, the mass society also tries to dominate the internal experience of the person; it aims at controlling his thoughts and affective life by undermining his autonomy. Bettelheim is here describing the corrosive psychological impact of living in a disciplinary society, and in particular, he is suggesting in the language of Foucault, how power—understood as a strategy, a “multiplicity of force relations,” that invests individuals, is transmitted by and through them—helps foster a subjectivity characterized by dependence on external authority and passivity. John Dewey, like Bettelheim, was well aware that such a reliance on authority is extremely dangerous to democratic society. Says Dewey, “The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence without our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence on The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here—within ourselves and our institutions.”²⁶

It should be noted that, as far as I know, Bettelheim never discussed the very important issue of how the self-regulating capacities of subjects, shaped and normalized through specifically psychological expertise, are crucial resources for governing in a liberal-democratic manner.²⁷ That is, as the Foucauldian-inspired sociologists Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller have pointed out, the government of human subjects has become enmeshed with innovations and developments in various scientific discourses that have rendered knowable the normal and pathological functioning of humans.²⁸ It is this expert-driven social and political power, bio-power, that has entered our interior lives and has contributed to undermining what Bettelheim would describe as autonomy. In this view, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, for example, participate in the government of subjectivity, not understood simply as a repressive and dominating power, but rather as a discipline that actively produces subjects of a certain form. Psychoanalysis as an expert discourse contours, shapes and organizes the psyche, it fashions individuals with particular desires (especially sexual ones), hopes and ambitions that can support the normalizing disciplinary society, the mass society in Bettelheim's language.

As Rose has pointed out,²⁹ discipline not only consists in a way of organizing social life according to rational thought, exactitude and supervision, it also encompasses a personal life that is constituted by such practices. It involves, he says, training in the subtle and intricate arts of self-scrutiny, self-evaluation, self-regulation and self-correction. In other words, the earlier external constraint of police has in our time been translated into an internal constraint upon the conduct of the self, the formation of subjects who are prepared to take responsibility for their actions and for whom the ethic of discipline is part of their everyday existence. Discipline in our time involves a commitment by the population to values and forms of life supported by the authorities, including psychoanalytic and psychological experts. This is an important point, one on which I will further elaborate shortly with a somewhat different focus. The contemporary citizen is less a social citizen with powers and obligations deriving from membership in a collective body or the state than an individual whose citizenship is manifested throughout his freedom of personal choice among a range of possibilities:

The modern self is institutionally required to construct a life through the exercise of choice from among alternatives. Every aspect of life, like every commodity, is imbued with a self-referential meaning; every choice we make is an emblem of our identity, a mark of our individuality, each is a message to ourselves and others as to the sort of person we are, each casts a glow back, illuminating the self of he or she who consumes.³⁰

Thus, the psychotherapies “provide technologies of individuality for the production and regulation of the individual who is ‘free to choose.’”³¹

It was Erich Fromm, perhaps more than any other social theorist, who was concerned with many of the same themes as Bettelheim; in particular, elaborating in what ways individuals relinquish personal freedom in contemporary capitalist society. Like Bettelheim, Fromm says that the difficulty with contemporary society is that the requirements it levels for “normalcy” often conflict with the individual's own needs for growth and happiness. Two courses of action are open to him as he tries to overcome his painful state of helplessness and aloneness, the existential coordinates that Fromm thinks characterize twentieth-century capitalist man. Says Fromm, “By one course he can progress to ‘positive freedom’; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self.”³² This solution to the conflict between freedom and helplessness he regards as basically a healthy one. The second course of action open to the individual, according to Fromm, involves the unhealthy strategy of relinquishing personal freedom completely. Individuals, he says, seek to merge themselves, or surrender their identity to, the conglomerate we call society. The person, in other words, strives to “escape from freedom.” In Bettelheim's language, this means giving up one's autonomy and integration and identifying with the conformist values of the mass society.

Fromm describes a number of methods that individuals use to obliterate their consciousness of freedom and the integrity of the self such as “authoritarianism,” and “destructiveness.” However, it is his notion of “automaton conformity” that best correlates with Bettelheim's description of the “mass man” with his extreme dependence on social norms and reliance on external authority for direction. Automaton conformity, says Fromm, involves a strategy of escape from freedom by default: “To put it briefly, the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be.”³³ Like the protective coloring of some animals, the individual who is a conforming automaton takes on the coloring, shading, and emotional texture of his surroundings. Because he mimics millions of other people, the automaton no longer feels alone. But, for this reduction in his feelings of aloneness, he pays the price of what Fromm describes as a loss of selfhood. According to Fromm, in his surrender of his “true” self to the facade of sameness with others, the individual does not achieve the security for which he hoped. Instead, he finds himself adopting a pseudo-self to compensate for the loss of his spontaneity. Similar to Bettelheim, Fromm believed that whether it is automaton conformity, authoritarian submission or domination, or destructiveness, these attempts to numb the feelings of aloneness that inevitably accompany the responsibilities of freedom are partial, temporary and inadequate. Moreover, both Bettelheim and Fromm believed that without a “genuine self,” one can be alienated. Without genuine selfhood, one becomes an unfeeling, robot-like mass man.

What needs to be especially emphasized in Bettelheim's analysis of the mass society, specifically as it concerns the individual's reliance on the expert and external authority for direction, is that the typical citizen is unknowingly supporting the system that is robbing him of his autonomy. Says Bettelheim about the mass state, “the only way to guarantee … conformity at all times is to make sure the subjects conform of their own free will.”³⁴ As Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out, it is “the ability of modern rational, bureaucratically organized power to induce actions functionally indispensable to its purposes while jarringly at odds with the vital interest of the actors.”³⁵ It is the mass society that has largely defined the parameters of the individual's freedom and choices, and it is society's “experts” who are in control of the general flow of information. It is in this condition that the individual, in his lack of personal efficacy, “decides” to do what he takes to be the only “rational” thing possible, he looks to those who are in authority, society's “experts,” to guide him. In his attempt to relieve himself of uncertainty, there is the unintended consequence of giving credibility and justification to the experts, and thus strengthening the system that is the source of his subversion in the first place. This, says Bettelheim, is one of the critical aspects of the mass society that differentiates it from previous forms of social control—it determines and governs the conditions for individual decision making.

Bettelheim stresses how difficult it is to maintain autonomy in the mass society when the society is capable of making the individual a “rational” co-producer in the demise of his personal freedom, however “well-intentioned” the individual may be. That is, while the mass society is nearly in full command of the means of coercion, it can employ the individual's rationality to facilitate cooperation with the mass society's objective of social control.³⁶ As Bettelheim points out, with the state pressing for compliance and conformity, for instance, the individual has difficulty adequately maintaining his inner moral values and beliefs. Gradually, this pressure for conformity fosters a jarring discrepancy, experienced as psychic dissonance, between the individual's moral values on the one hand, and conformist actions on the other. Bettelheim indicates that such individuals often remedy this dissonance by changing their values and beliefs in the direction of the state. In doing so, they forfeit much of their integration and autonomy in that they have succumbed to the demands of the state at the expense of their previously held inner moral values. That is, in such a situation where the state is in firm control and offers only limited state-serving options that devalue moral considerations, the individual does what is the rational thing to do, he “decides” to reduce the psychic dissonance and diminish the inner tension and anxiety he feels—but without being aware of the personally deleterious long-range moral consequences of his decision. Such an individual loses autonomy because he relinquishes more and more of his decision making to the state in order to attain greater psychological comfort, a condition that is a form of integration but with a negative valence, what I have called “negative integration.”

Drawing from the behavior of former opponents of the Nazi regime (i.e., the Nazi salute), Bettelheim gives a good example of how the total mass state coerces the individual into becoming a rational co-producer in the loss of his autonomy, thus fostering “negative integration.” It is important to be aware that Bettelheim uses this extreme example from the total mass state in order to show us the kinds of pressures that are, to a lesser extent, operative in the mass society. He is concerned that these pressures could be replicated in the mass society should it gradually develop into a total mass state, an important linkage that I will discuss shortly. Finally, in Bettelheim's analysis of the Nazi salute, we see how with the subtly coerced “cooperation” of the individual, the human body, its elements and behavior, became subject to a political anatomy of detail, to discipline.

Every time an opponent of the Nazi regime greeted somebody in public he had to give the Hitler salute. This experience tended to subvert his ego and diminish integration, “the salute demand split the opponent's ego right down the middle.”³⁷ As Bettelheim explains, the task of the ego is the survival of the individual by mediating between the external and internal worlds and bringing them into concordance. The ego of the German anti-Nazi supported his desire to enjoy the benefits of freedom; thus it was against everything Hitler stood for, and the ego allied with the superego in the conviction that totalitarianism was an evil system one ought to oppose. However, many times a day it had to oppose both these stands in order to fulfill its main task, protection of the individual from destruction, such as by giving the Hitler salute. The German opponent of Nazism needed a strong ego to be able to survive in a hostile society, and to hold on to his convictions when relentlessly bombarded by the mass media with messages which tried to invalidate all he believed (i.e., the individual needed the ego strength to be able to tolerate a degree of psychic dissonance). Such a person, says Bettelheim, found himself in situations which disintegrated his ego because it was forced to do battle on two opposite fronts: “to assert the wish for freedom, and to protect him against being destroyed by the state because he resisted its demands.”³⁸ If the situation forced an opponent of the system to give the Hitler salute, that is, to raise his right arm and say out loud “Heil Hitler,” thus asserting his loyalty to and admiration of the Fuhrer, a person he hated, he immediately felt like a traitor to his most cherished convictions. The only way, according to Bettelheim, was to pretend to himself that the salute did not count, that given the reality in which one found oneself it was all right to render the salute, because it was the only way not to be arrested by the Gestapo. Still, says Bettelheim, one's integration depends on acting in harmony with one's beliefs. So one could maintain one's integration while saluting only by modifying one's belief that saluting was bad.

In most instances, however, the fear of being embarrassed by one's deviant behavior, the fear of endangering those one loved and oneself, put impossible pressure on individuals to succumb to the demands of the totalitarian state. Given that these individuals were “guided in their action by the rationally interpreted purpose of survival,”³⁹ they gave the salute but changed their beliefs to be compatible with their actions. They began to feel emotionally connected to the salute and took on the values that it stood for. In this way they reclaimed a sense of integration, albeit a negative form of integration. As Bettelheim says, this is the appeal of totalitarianism:

one can attain conformity with one's peers and the rest of one's world, and stop being an outcast. On an inner, higher level the appeal is that of reestablishing one's inner integrity, which is endangered if one must act differently from the way one feels. … The vast majority of former anti-Nazis gave up the fight and made their peace with the system. Without joining the party, without accepting all of its values, they came to see much good in it, although they remained critical of a few aspects of the system. But they became convinced that they had to live with and in it. In order not to feel cowardly, not to feel that they had betrayed their values, and to be able to live in peace with their families and neighbors, and—very important, although they might not always admit it to themselves—in order not to feel threatened by the secret police but to be able to take advantage of what the system offered to its followers, most people accepted most of the system.⁴⁰

In the end then, the typical former anti-Nazi gave in to the total mass state, he relinquished autonomy and assumed the condition of “negative integration”—all in the service of the rationally formulated goal of self-preservation.

What Bettelheim's analysis of the Nazi salute provides for us is a psychoanalytically informed formulation of the dynamics and pressures that the former opponent of Nazism experienced. In particular, he is giving us a way of understanding how well-intentioned individuals, on the level of micro practices, lose their autonomy and integration and are taken over by a totalitarian system. Put somewhat differently, Bettelheim is describing what discipline feels like, from the “inside,” as a psychoanalyst conceptualizes it. The Nazi salute is an excellent example of discipline; those techniques of power described by Foucault which provide procedures for training or for coercing bodies. This is bio-power; in particular, it is an example of what Foucault calls an “anatomo-politics of the human body.” Individual movements, gestures and capacities of the body (rather than the body as a whole), says Foucault, are subjected to power, the objective being the economy, efficiency and internal organization of movements. As with the Nazi salute, the exercise of power was to be constant and regular so as to effect an uninterrupted supervision of the processes of activity by the Nazi authorities. Perhaps the most important point to emphasize about Bettelheim's discussion of the Nazi salute is that over time it becomes what Foucault called a “technique of domination,” a method through which the former well-intentioned opponents of Nazism transformed themselves, their very being, their thoughts, conduct and bodies—in the service of the Nazi state.

It is perhaps in the realm of the capitalist marketplace that we can best see how the typical member of the mass society loses much of his autonomy by being constituted as a consumer, transforming himself in the service of the marketplace, and freely participating in his own social control. That is, as Bettelheim has insinuated,

the advantages of the machines [read consumer goods] are so obvious and so desirable, that we tend to become, small step by small step, seduced into ignoring the price we pay for their unthinking use. The emphasis here is on unthinking use, because they all have their good uses. But the most careful thinking and planning is needed to enjoy the good use of any technical contrivance without paying a price for it in human freedom.⁴¹

Bettelheim is here concerned with how the individual's autonomy and integration are undermined by the seductive lure of technology and its consumer products. Individuals, he says, will become “addicted” to technology in lieu of “emotional contentment.”⁴² Bauman has further developed this point in a more sophisticated manner when he noted that, for the majority, consumption has become the all-absorbing, morally guiding and socially integrating characteristic of modern life in wealthy societies. Social order—and thus a soft form of social control—is sustained through fostering and directing consumption. Consumer surveillance obviously has a central role in this process; for example, in teaching consumer skills and encouraging consumers to internalize marketplace rules of behavior. However, what needs to be emphasized is that this social control is achieved in the name of individuality, a wide range of choice and consumer freedom.⁴³ That is, discipline is present, but not the carceral, coercive discipline of the Panopticon. The typical consumer participates in his own social control, not because he is directly coerced, but because he is seduced into conformity by the pleasures of consuming what corporate power has to offer. This is what Bettelheim meant by being “addicted” to technology and its consumer goods. The leading principle of the consumer order is thus pleasure, not pain or coercion, and it is this fact that stimulates his conformity and compliance.

In another example, Bettelheim shows how individuals in the mass society lose their autonomy in the work arena with debilitating consequences. Work, one of the most important activities in realizing our human potential, the endeavor that most of us spend more of our time doing than anything else, instead of being the free and creative expression of individuality becomes an instrument of dehumanization. Bettelheim says that individuals tend to work without concern for the purpose of their labor or its final product. In this sense he is a dependent person in that he in effect is accepting other people's decisions as the basis for his own actions. Moreover, without much freedom in selecting his work, or power over its result, the typical worker in the mass society feels frustrated, alienated and insignificant. To be in a situation where technology assigns tasks to the individual, to be constantly told what to do with a minimum of reasons being given, fosters a feeling of being an outsider looking in rather than an active and creative participant. In such conditions the average worker tends to lose his autonomy and his sense that he is involved in purposeful work in which he is genuinely able to express himself.

This situation is further complicated when we consider for a moment the role of modern surveillance in the capitalist workplace, another instance of the rise of the kind of disciplinary society that, says Foucault, characterizes the modern world. For it is impersonal, high-tech, intrusive surveillance that robs workers of a sense of autonomy and self-determination. As I have already indicated, following Foucault and Giddens, the timing and spacing of human activity is a central way of controlling social life. Power and knowledge are chronically intertwined. The Panopticon, says Foucault, reappeared in the capitalist factory. That is, the very architecture of the workshop made workers highly visible and thus amenable to attempts at complete control by their supervisors. In such an environment, in the language of Bettelheim, the typical worker feels a diminution of his decision-making capacity and individuality. Moreover, such panoptic transparency for workers leads to internalization of the standards of management and tends to induce conformity. This is another example of Foucault's normalizing, panoptic disciplinary power.

Bettelheim thus far is emphasizing that there is a danger in the mass society of the individual's autonomy and integration gradually being eroded such that he is more inclined to look to the state and other modes of government for direction and general orientation. As already intimated, Bettelheim then enlarges his analysis of the mass society. He suggests that there is a basic continuity between the depersonalizing effect of technological mass society and what he calls the total mass state or the “concentration camp society”—a totalitarian regime, like Nazi Germany, whose values and practices have nearly totally dominated the individual and crushed his autonomy.⁴⁴ Bettelheim was worried that unless the tendencies in a mass society that permeate such democratic nations like the United States were not contained and modified, if the individual's freedom and sense of control over his life were not respected and exercised, the mass society could turn into a total mass state with far-reaching negative consequences for the individual, that is, totalitarianism. Says Bettelheim,

In the “mass” state as we now know it, both inner controls and deep inner satisfactions seem to weaken from generation to generation. If this should continue and is not just a temporary effect of the tremendous changes wrought by technology … it will have to be compensated by stronger and stronger outside controls. Otherwise, weakened and irresolute, man's inability to provide for his emotional needs, including the need to respect himself, may lead to dangerous inertia, or to explosions of instinctual violence. The tendency of the mass state to provide release will never make up for lack of satisfaction.⁴⁵

What Bettelheim is saying is that it is only amidst the radical loss of individual autonomy in which the citizenry has been refashioned as docile bodies that the mass society will possibly evolve into a total mass state like Nazi Germany, a society in which there exists the state apparatus for total domination. As I have already pointed out, Bettelheim's concern about the destructive effects of a technological mass society on the individual's autonomy and integration can be viewed as part of the tradition of renowned thinkers that debated this issue in Germany before and after the Holocaust. However, in my view, Bettelheim took this tradition in a novel and new direction.

Bettelheim suggests that there is a fundamental progression between the depersonalizing effect of technological mass society, the total mass state and, most importantly, the concentration camps. He sees that if the dehumanizing tendency in mass society is not contained it could evolve into a total mass state which is capable of using concentration camps to crush the individual's autonomy and integration.⁴⁶ This development Bettelheim calls the “concentration camp society.”⁴⁷ Bettelheim points out that the main purpose of the concentration camps reached far beyond their being a place where the SS took revenge on its enemies or made them slaves: “The concentration camp was the Gestapo's laboratory for subjecting free men, but especially the most ardent foes of the Nazi system, to the process of disintegration from their position as autonomous individuals. It [as a form of bio-power] ought to be studied by all persons interested in understanding what happens to a population subject to the methods of the Nazi system.”⁴⁸

It is for this reason that Bettelheim says that if we understand what happens to the individual in the concentration camp, how his autonomy and personal integration is destroyed, then we may acquire a better grasp of “both an oppressive mass society, and what it takes to remain autonomous in any mass society.”⁴⁹ Time and again, in The Informed Heart and his subsequent writings, Bettelheim conceptualizes the concentration camps as an extreme example of “an oppressive mass society.”⁵⁰ Says Bettelheim: “By now the German concentration camps belong to the past. We cannot be equally certain that the idea of changing personality to meet the needs of the state is equally a thing of the past. That is why my discussion centers on the concentration camps as a means of changing personality to produce subjects more useful to the total state.”⁵¹ Moreover, “The modern state now has available the means for changing personality, and for destroying millions it deems undesirable. … In our day people's personalities might be changed against their will by the state, and … other populations might be wholly or partially exterminated.”⁵² For Bettelheim studying the concentration camps was important because of “their social meaning … as an example of the very nature of the coercive mass state.”⁵³ Bettelheim's contribution to understanding the concentration camps must therefore be viewed from this wider cultural perspective, which has always been his major focus. In both his first and one of his last papers his major concern was always the same: “What does it [the concentration camps] tell us about mankind and about our modern, technologically oriented mass society?”⁵⁴

CLOSING REMARKS

Despite repeatedly linking mass society, the total mass state and the concentration camps, Bettelheim has often been misinterpreted by those Holocaust scholars who tend to be more concerned with his provocative and disturbing ideas about the Jewish experience in the death camps and less with Bettelheim's major concern as spelled out above. Jacob Robinson, for example, in his scathing critique of Bettelheim's work, recognizes that Bettelheim is analyzing the Nazi experience as “the first true mass state” and “the outstanding example of an oppressive mass state,” and yet he devotes his critique almost completely to factual, historical and conceptual errors concerning the Jewish experience under the Nazis. In other words, while his critique of Bettelheim is valid in many aspects as it pertains to Jewish life in extremity, Robinson never adequately reckons with Bettelheim's central thesis, that of how the individual maintains autonomy and integration in a mass age.⁵⁵

Lawrence L. Langer also tries to delegitimate Bettelheim's framework by unfairly criticizing him for approaching the concentration camps as an extreme example of the coercive mass state and the individual's fight to sustain his autonomy. Langer says that such an approach does not help us understand the Holocaust; which Langer claims was Bettelheim's aim. Says Langer, “Although Bettelheim distinguishes verbally between concentration camps and extermination camps, although he admits that his personal observations were limited, he nevertheless undertakes an elaborate classification of behavior in what he calls ‘extreme situations’ which he intends as an authoritative analysis of the Holocaust ordeal.”⁵⁶ But again, as I have shown, Bettelheim's stated aim in The Informed Heart is not to understand the Holocaust per se, but rather to analyze how individuals can maintain their autonomy and integration in the mass society.⁵⁷

To be fair to Robinson and Langer, however, from time to time Bettelheim does tend to extrapolate his mass society/concentration camp analogy to life in the death camps, and this is where his theory is weakest. He does not adequately take into consideration the already mentioned difference between an extreme situation, where the main Nazi goal was punishment and “reeducation” of prisoners (the concentration camps), and a terminal one, where the main goal was the extermination of inmates (death camps). I will shortly return to this important distinction and clarify its ramifications for the present study.

It should be noted that there may have been other reasons why Bettelheim's main thesis was never adequately absorbed by most scholars reading him. First, Bettelheim's message that the concentration camps (later he sometimes referred to the Holocaust) highlight the dangers to human beings inherent in modern mass society and in modern science was probably a message that people did not want to hear when he wrote it, because it was simply too threatening to contemplate. His attack on mass society was viewed as an attack on the society that most of us embraced, and to fully acknowledge the dangers inherent in our society was perhaps too undermining and anxiety provoking for most of us to take in. Second, the Holocaust has been explored and studied by those in the Jewish community and they quite understandably tended to focus on the Jewish dimension of the tragedy. As far as I can determine, when Bettelheim's Informed Heart came out in 1960, many critics focused on what I have identified as Bettelheim's central thesis—the mass society/autonomy theme, and only secondarily commented on the specifically Jewish meaning of the event. What seemed to happen, according to Bettelheim, is that the Holocaust came to be viewed for its Jewish significance at the expense of its more universal message about the age we were living in. Bettelheim has commented on this point when he lamented the “tragic ghetto thinking that so many Jews still see this greatest tragedy in Jewish history only from the perspective of their own history and not from that of world history to which it belongs.”⁵⁸ While some may regard Bettelheim's point as a plausible and thoughtful observation, it is this kind of abrasively written and judgmental passage that probably contributed to his work being criticized and, at times, rejected out of hand by many Holocaust scholars.

Finally, a word of clarification on two important methodological questions. First, to what extent, if any, can we responsibly describe the inmates' experience in the concentration camps and death camps as if they were in some sense “similar enough” as to suggest a certain continuity of experience, thus allowing us to cautiously merge these categories of experience for illustrative and heuristic purposes? As I have indicated, Bettelheim has been criticized for not respecting the differences between an extreme situation and a terminal one, including the possible different implications for understanding inmate behavior.

Before stating my position on this methodological question, I want to emphasize that in my view, following Barry Barnes, all “similarities” and “differences,” including the alleged differences between concentration and death camps, are social constructions.⁵⁹ That is, as Barnes has pointed out, all similarity relations are learned; they reflect the preferred arrangement of some community, rather than something insisted upon by nature itself; the similarity relations which concepts stand for are conventions. According to Barnes, “Proper usage is simply that usage communally judged to be proper, and is no more predetermined than idiosyncratic individual usage. … Meaning,” Barnes continues, “changes, or stays the same, as the community wishes to have it.”⁶⁰ It is the community of Holocaust scholars, in other words, who decide on whether a similarity relation exists between concentration and death camps or whether they are judged as too different, such that they are regarded as being unable to be merged for heuristic purposes in any analysis of inmate behavior. As far as I can tell, this is in fact the received view. However, as Barnes has argued, “concept application is a matter of judgment at the individual level, of agreement at the level of community; it is open-ended and revisable. Nothing in the nature of things, or the nature of language, or the nature of past usage, determines how we employ, or correctly employ, our terms.”⁶¹ Thus, what matters is whether a specific, constructed similarity relation is helpful, or not helpful, in illuminating a particular problem that is being studied by a scholarly community. Such a judgment is an individual determination that can always be contested, negotiated and revised.

My position in this book is as follows. While I think there were clearly significant differences between the “typical” inmate's experience in the concentration camp and the death camp (perhaps most importantly the ever-present and relentless threat of extinction that permeated the death camps), I believe that it is reasonable to assume that in general there were a number of similarities in the inmates' experience in the concentration and death camps. For instance, extreme physical maltreatment, deprivation, the Nazi use of terror, the fear of dying, Nazi degradation and dehumanization and traumatic disruption of family and community life were, in varying degrees, part and parcel of the generic camp experience. In my view, for heuristic purposes, there are enough similarities to allow us to carefully use examples from both concentration and death camps to analyze and illustrate certain aspects of inmate behavior in the camps.

It is well-known that inmates' lives in the Nazi camp system differed markedly, depending on which camp one was in and the time one was incarcerated. As Benedict Kautsky, an Auschwitz survivor, pointed out, “When you talk about a concentration camp, it's not enough to give merely its name. … Even when you're talking about the same period of time, prisoners in the same camp lived as if on different planets.”⁶² Clearly, while there were important differences between concentration camps and death camps, there were also crucial differences between death camps themselves. Says Hermann Langbein, another Auschwitz survivor, “Auschwitz of the year 1942 was essentially unlike the Auschwitz of the year 1944. Every single sub-camp in the larger complex was a world of its own. For this reason many survivors of Auschwitz object to particular descriptions: ‘that's not the way I saw it—that's totally new to me.’”⁶³ Langbein's observations are not surprising in light of the fact that Auschwitz and its satellites encompassed more than 40 camps⁶⁴ and it was not only the largest extermination camp but the largest concentration camp as well.⁶⁵ Similarly, the Nazis also set up a death factory on the grounds of the concentration camp Majdanek, suggesting an organizational link to the concentration camp system.⁶⁶ In other words, making any type of generalities, comparisons and distinctions about life in the camps—concentration or death camps—has its obvious limitations and caveats in part because of the extremely complex organizational history and multifunctional nature of the Nazi camp system as a whole. As Ernst Federn has pointed out, Buchenwald, where he and Bettelheim were imprisoned together in 1939, “from its founding in 1937 until 1939, was one of the worst camps, while from 1942 until its total disintegration in 1944-1945 was one of the best.”⁶⁷ Thus, in any kind of attempt to draw a portrait of a “typical” camp inmate's experience, one inevitably makes generalizations that need to be highly qualified, since these generalizations do not adequately convey the kind of experience that a particular inmate in a particular camp had at a particular time. Moreover, many inmates were in more than one camp during their ordeal, sometimes in both a concentration and death camp, thus further complicating any attempt to make general statements about inmate behavior. This is a fundamental methodological problem in Holocaust scholarship. Given these methodological limitations, and my belief that there is enough continuity of experience between concentration and death camp inmates to justify a cautious merging of categories for heuristic purposes, I have opted to analyze inmate behavior by drawing from material from both concentration and death camps. I will, however, indicate the camp I am referring to in each example, when known, and I will attempt to make my analysis and conclusions appropriately contextualized and qualified. The reader will have to judge for himself whether this approach is sensible and helps illuminate our subject.

It should be mentioned that other responsible scholars have used material emanating from concentration and death camps without making any sustained attempt to distinguish the camps as a crucial contextual factor governing their analysis and conclusions. Terrence Des Pres, Yaffa Eliach, Eliezer Berkovits, Michael R. Marrus, Tzvetan Todorov and Wolfgang Sofsky, for example, all describe, quote and analyze inmate behavior from both types of camps without making any substantive analytic distinction between concentration and death camps (except perhaps mentioning the distinction), suggesting that they believe that there is enough similarity of environments to justify their analyses and conclusions about inmate behavior “in general.”⁶⁸ In fact, Des Pres, one of Bettelheim's most severe critics, has argued for the conceptual amalgamation of Nazi death and concentration camps and Soviet camps: “I have not hesitated to call all these places ‘death camps.’” Any differences in atmosphere, says Des Pres, are “secondary distinctions so far as survivors are concerned. For them any camp was a closed world in which one's chance of coming through was nearly zero.”⁶⁹ And the historian Lenny Yahil has written, “Of course, it is possible to conclude that basic conditions there [Auschwitz] held for other kinds of camps as well, including concentration camps during the initial period.”⁷⁰

The second methodological issue, one that is not atypical in social science scholarship, but is perhaps particularly problematic for any study of inmate behavior in the camps, is that it is possible to support almost any viewpoint by quoting from survivors' memoirs and interviews—the main historical materials available to learn about the inmates' camp experience. That is, depending on the acknowledged or unacknowledged assumptions guiding one's investigation, depending on what one is “looking for”—one's preferred theory lets call it—one can find a quote from a survivor that supports one's scholarly “agenda” and sought after conclusions. That is, as Thomas Kuhn has shown, theories function as gestalts, which pre-configure just how the world appears to us. Knowledge, including empirical, factual knowledge, is relative to the theory or paradigm in which one is lodged. In addition, sometimes, the so-called “evidence” is contradictory and it is of course always open to a variety of interpretations. These methodological considerations are possibly more troublesome in camp inmate studies given the fact that the researcher is very dependent on survivor testimonials to know “what happened” in the camps. These testimonials are subject to problems of recall, distortion, contradiction and narrative smoothing, as well as the same hidden and not-so-hidden above-mentioned agendas and constraints pertaining to the scholars who study them.

So, for example, if one wishes to see in the typical inmate's experience a struggle of all against all, one can certainly find supportive survivor quotations. In the same way, if one wants to find collective solidarity and mutual support, there are hundreds of supporting citations from which to build one's theory. A simple example concerns the Jehovah's Witnesses. Jack Werber, a Jewish survivor of five and a half years in Buchenwald, wrote in his memoir, “The Jehovah's Witnesses were the most compassionate people—they gave their own bread away to those more hungry than them.”⁷¹ This observation is typical of what I consider the received view. However, Margarete Buber-Neumann, a widely cited Ravensbruuck survivor, wrote, “If they [the Jehovah's Witnesses] took any risks at all, it was only in the service of Jehovah … and never of their fellow prisoners.”⁷² Obviously, these viewpoints are probably “true” relative to the author's context; however, it is precisely this lack of critical consensus about most issues pertaining to inmates' behavior (and the Holocaust) that makes it difficult to make any general statements or definitive and categorical conclusions. Thus, I have tried to be sensitive to these methodological issues throughout this book, in part by acknowledging and always being mindful of this lack of consensus, and respecting and emphasizing the ambiguousness, complexity, individualized and dialectical character of the inmates' experience.

Notes

1. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), p. 99.

2. Ibid., pp. 84-85.

3. Ibid., p. 84.

4. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 151.

5. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press 1985), p. 183.

6. Ibid., p. 147.

7. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 84.

8. Ibid., p. 85.

9. Ibid., p. 86.

10. Ibid., p. 87.

11. Bettelheim, “Some Comments on Privacy,” in Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 399.

12. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1990).

13. David Lyon, The Electronic Eye (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 3.

14. Ibid., pp. 226-227.

15. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 103.

16. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 149.

17. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power.” An afterword by Foucault in H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 221-222.

18. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, p. 303.

19. See, for example, “Children and Television” and “The Art of Motion Pictures,” in Bettelheim, Freud's Vienna and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1990), pp. 149-155, 112-126, respectively.

20. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 89.

21. Ibid.

22. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp. 23-27.

23. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 91.

24. Mark Edmundson, “Save Sigmund Freud,” in The New York Times Magazine, July 13, 1997, p. 36.

25. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 80.

26. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1939). Quoted in Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon Books, 1969), pp. 19-20 (no page number from Dewey given).

27. Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “Governing Economic Life,” Economy and Society, Volume 9, Number 1, February 1990, p. 1.

28. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul (London: Routledge, 1989).

29. Ibid., pp. 222-228. See also, Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

30. Ibid., p. 227.

31. Ibid., p. 228.

32. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon, 1969), p. 161.

33. Ibid., pp. 208-209.

34. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 103.

35. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 122.

36. Ibid., p. 135.

37. Bettelheim, “Remarks on the Psychological Appeal of Totalitarianism,” in Surviving and Other Essays, pp. 318-322.

38. Ibid., p. 319.

39. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 122.

40. Bettelheim, “Remarks on the Psychological Appeal of Totalitarianism,” p. 327.

41. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 49.

42. Ibid., p. 63.

43. Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 71-78.

44. Bettelheim, “Returning to Dachau,” in Freud's Vienna and Other Essays, p. 232. It should be emphasized that Bettelheim's linkage between mass society and the concentration camps best applies to those camps where the aim was the subjugation, punishment and dehumanization of the inmates so that they could be exploited by the Nazi state. In contrast, the death camps were designed for one purpose: to murder their victims.

45. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 101.

46. Aspects of this formulation have been presented in Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg, “Reevaluating Bruno Bettelheim's Work on the Nazi Concentration Camps: The Limits of His Psychoanalytic Approach,” in Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg (eds.), “Bruno Bettelheim's Contribution to Psychoanalysis.” A special issue of The Psychoanalytic Review, Volume 81, Number 3, Fall 1994, pp. 537-564.

47. Bettelheim, “Returning to Dachau,” in Freud's Vienna and Other Essays, p. 232.

48. Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” in Surviving and Other Essays, pp. 82-83.

49. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 107.

50. Ibid., pp. 269, 276. Bettelheim's idea that the concentration camp could be described as a “mass society,” in part because of the inmates' experience of social anonymity and depersonalization within it, has been supported, for example, by Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Company, 1967), pp. 437-459; Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 126, 154, 211; and Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), p. 50. As Fleck and Müller point out, Moore uses the term “civilized society” rather than mass society in his formulation of the camp as a general model of modern society and specifically the working class of industrial Europe. Christian Fleck and Albert Müller, “Bruno Bettelheim and the Concentration Camps,” in The Journal of the Behavioral Sciences, Volume 33, Number 1, Winter 1997, p. 26.

51. Ibid., p. 110.

52. Bettelheim, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,” in Surviving and Other Essays, p. 247. Bettelheim is here insinuating that what he sees as a continuity between the mass society and the total mass state with its concentration camps could, in a further progression, develop into a genocidal society as it did in Nazi Germany.

53. Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, p. 108.

54. Bruno Bettelheim, “The Holocaust in the Undermind of the West,” Dimensions, Volume 4, Number 1, 1988, p. 6.

55. Jacob Robinson, Psychoanalysis in a Vacuum: Bruno Bettelheim and the Holocaust (New York: Yad Vashem—Yivo Documentary Projects, 1970), pp. 3-36.

56. Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 35.

57. Ibid., pp. 33-36. It should be mentioned that the first third of The Informed Heart is about the mass society and only two out of the five chapters of that book are devoted to understanding inmate behavior in the concentration camps. This is a further indication that the major focus of Bettelheim's book was the mass society and not comprehending the concentration camps or the Holocaust.

58. Bettelheim, “Freedom from Ghetto Thinking,” in Freud's Vienna and Other Essays, pp. 259-260. I will critically evaluate Bettelheim's “ghetto thinking” notion in Chapter 7.

59. Barry Barnes, T. S. Kuhn and Social Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 22-35.

60. Ibid., pp. 29, 30.

61. Ibid.

62. Quoted in Langer, Versions of Survival, p. 6. Langer is quoting from Hermann Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz (Wein: Europaverlag, 1972), p. 37.

63. Ibid., in Langbein, p. 18.

64. Yisrael Gutman, “Auschwitz—An Overview,” in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 6.

65. Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 251.

66. Ibid., p. 260.

67. Ernst Federn, “The Terror as a System: The Concentration Camp,” The Psychiatric Quarterly Supplement, Volume 22, Part 1, 1948, p. 57.

68. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Pocket Books, 1976); Yaffa Eliach, “Jewish Tradition in the Life of the Concentration Camp Inmate,” in The Nazi Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, January 1980 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), pp. 195-206; Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell (New York: Sanhedrin, 1979); Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987); Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996); Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). In passing it should be mentioned that ironically, Lawrence L. Langer, one of the scholars who has most aggressively argued that Bettelheim fails to meaningfully distinguish between concentration and death camps, criticizes the credibility of Bettelheim's observations and conclusions about prisoner behavior in the concentration camp by comparing it to similar inmate behavior in the death camp. In other words, Langer is not honoring the very contextual distinctions that he says are crucial to meaningfully understand inmate behavior in the different types of camps. See, for example, Versions of Survival, pp. 41-42.

69. Des Pres, The Survivor, pp. 132-133.

70. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 561.

71. Jack Werber, with William B. Helmreich, Saving Children: Diary of a Buchenwald Survivor and Rescuer (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1996), p. 75.

72. Quoted in Todorov, Facing the Extreme, p. 58.

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