Destructiveness: new paths and new tools for understanding

MARILIA AISENSTEIN:

DESTRUCTION OF THOUGHT-PROCESSES:
“It was said simply, it was simple to understand.”

This sentence is taken from the interview of a Hutu farmer called Pancrate by the
journalist Jean Hatzfeld.
As a reporter and writer, Jean Hatzfeld took a passionate interest in the war in
Rwanda. He went back there after the genocide of the Tutsi and has stayed there for long
periods, collecting testimonies from the rare survivors.
These accounts gave rise to a book published in French in 2000, Dans le Nu de la Vie,
Récit des Marais Rwandais”. This book begins as follows: “In 1994, between Monday 11
April at 11 a.m. and Saturday 14 May at 2 p.m., 50,000 Tutsi, out of a population of about
59,000, were massacred with machetes, every day of the week, from 9.30 a.m. to 4p.m., by
Hutu militia and neighbours, on the hills of the district of Nyamata.”
In a second book written in 2003, Une Saison de Machettes [translated into English as,
Machette Season: the Killers in Rwanda Speak, 2006], Hatzfeld interviewed some of the
Hutu killers he met in a prison in Nyamata.
Pancrate, Adalbert, Fulgence, and Jean were neighbours, friends, farmers or
teachers, fathers, grandfathers, young adults. These men, already convicted, and without
any contact with the outside world, gradually revealed their desire to give an account of
these months of extermination.
Pancrate says: “The first day a messenger from the local councillor came and
summoned us to attend a meeting immediately. There, the councillor announced that the
object of the meeting was the killing of all the Tutsi, without any exceptions. “It was said
simply, it was simple to understand.”
After this first meeting, the massacre was organized.
Adalbert recounts: “We divided up into teams on the football field. One team towards
the top, another team towards the bottom… I was made a leader for the inhabitants of
Kimbungo. I was the leader of the church choir… the other inhabitants accepted me

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without any difficulty. I can’t remember the details about the first person I killed with a
machete. I was giving a helping hand to the church; I struck with big blows of the machete,
I could feel the effort I was making, but felt no personal grief in all the commotion. Which is
why the first real lasting memory I have was when I killed two children on April 17… It
was strange for me to see the children fall without any noise … I went on my way without
checking to see if they were really dead.”

Jean: “It’s a Rwandan custom for small boys to imitate their fathers, that’s how they learn
agricultural methods of sowing and cutting from an early age. That’s how a large number
of them started going around with dogs to sniff out the Tutsi. That’s how a certain number
of children began killing out in the bush.”
Jean Hatzfeld’s book is constructed in an elaborate and complex manner. It consists of
short chapters which classify his dialogues with the Hutu killers thematically.
In the second part, the author shares his thoughts as an enlightened man who is not a
psychoanalyst but a war reporter who has experienced the raids of ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia-Herzogovina, Vukovar, the seat of Sarajevo, and Srebenica. He has read Hannah
Arendt and knows her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
(1963). He draws comparisons and makes links, but also offers some clinical remarks on
the manner in which the interviews took place in the prison of Rilima. They took place in
the courtyard, face to face, on two benches under an acacia tree. They lasted two hours
and took place in the presence of two interpreters who noted everything in full.
Hatzfeld points out immediately that while the interviews with the survivors were
unpredictable owing to their affects which led to blockages, “the killers did not let
themselves be submerged by anything … Each one kept control of himself in his own
way… They often speak in a monotone voice.”
Their vocabulary is often abstract and general, diluted, and devoid of images.
It is clear that we have a description here of a destruction of thinking and of the
processes of representation. The subject disappears, as if dissolved in a strange
submission to a figure of authority (in this case external), which is sometimes
ungraspable.
Numerous theorisations of this phenomenon exist, beginning with Freud’s Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in 1924, followed by many others, Winnicott, Bion,
Pierre Marty with the notion of “ mechanical or robotic states” (états opératoires) , P.

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Syfneé os with the notion of secondary alexithymia, Andreé Green with
“desubjectivization” and “the negative”, and the entire Anglo-Saxon literature on
“concrete thinking”. Within this vast constellation, there is a constant theme: “One must
not think about or picture things; words must not evoke images or affects.”
A “diluted” language, writes J. Hatzfeld; for my part, I would say "a language that
avoids anti- formal regression. On the basis of these remarks, we can make the
hypothesis of a common core: fear or panic 1 of one’s internal productions originating on
the inside or returning from the outside, fear of one’s own representations or of the
traumatic dimension that could be activated by getting more touch with them.
If fear, panic, and even terror, may be said to be one and the same thing, there are
nevertheless differences: the statement, “I can’t think, I can’t think…,” the nagging
complaint of one of my patients, who is suffering atrociously at those moments, is quite
different from that of an engineer suffering from hemorrhagic rectocolitis who says, “I
don’t want to speak about my dreams”. It is different, too, from the discourse of Joseph-
Deé sireé Bitero, the leader of the district of Nyamata and instigator of the machete
massacre: “No, I was not responsible, I was a teacher, I was committed, I obeyed, I killed. In
a party, a leader, whoever he is, cannot decide to do just anything he likes. I myself had a
teaching diploma; it was not for me to reflect on the political slogans of our mentors. I just
had to think about ways of executing people.”

This answer is strangely reminiscent of the one Edolf Eichmann gave to judge
Landau and to the prosecutor who asked him what he thought his specific responsibility
was in the Reich’s enterprise of extermination. They may be summarised thus: “I obey,
therefore I don’t think.”
So whatever the forms of psychic treatment or pathologies, two distinct common
denominators can be identified:
The first is: Thinking terrifies me; I’m afraid of suffering too much.
The second is: I don’t think, I obey; if I obey, I don’t think. Thinking hurts and is
dangerous for me; not thinking is comfortable.

1
In ancient Greece the word panic was a military term describing a disorganisation of the arlies attributed
to the music of the god Pan.

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 Two Freudian texts seem to me to be fundamental for broaching these questions:
“Negation” (1925h) and “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence” (1938a).

For Freud negation is not merely a refusal but the root of the subject. The initial “No” is a
rejection which distinguishes the inside and the outside and brings the “I” into being. Saying
“No” is first and foremost an affirmation of identity: “No, that’s outside me”, that’s not me, it
doesn’t come from inside me, so “I didn’t think that”, I don’t want to recognise myself in
that.
Freud’s point of departure is strictly clinical: “The content of a repressed image or idea
can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is away of
taking cognizance of what is repressed. No in the dream, it’s not my mother” (1925h, p. 235).
On the basis of this observation, Freud notes that negation makes it possible to separate
“the intellectual function from the affective process”. Remember that the aim of repression is
the suppression of affect.
Thanks to negation “thinking frees itself from the restrictions of repression and enriches
itself with material that is indispensable for its proper functioning” (p. 236)
The operation of judgement is thus made possible through the creation of the symbol of
negation, a condition of the independence of thought.

“ The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence” is an unfinished manuscript written
in 1938.
I have always found this text, troubling and moving. Freud shows that he is disconcerted.
The idea that this “rift in the ego which never heals but which increases as time goes on” is
the price to be paid for a successful defence by a premature ego seems strange to me.
Subjected to intense demands from the drives, the child is frightened by an experience
which tells him that the consequence would be a terrible real danger.
He must choose between recognising the danger and renouncing or denying the reality.
The child’s ego responds to this conflict in two opposing but valid ways. Either he denies
the reality and continues as before or he recognises the danger and takes on board the anxiety
caused by this reality. “This success,” Freud writes, “is achieved at the price of a rift in the
ego” ( p. 276).
This rift which never heals is not a split between agencies; it signals the non dialectical
coexistence of an affirmation and of a negation. With the exception of fetichism, psychosis,
and schizophrenic dissociation, psychic organisations in which ego-splitting takes on a

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pathological colouring, we may wonder, as Freud does, if it does not exist in a more general
way. I think it does, and I make this assumption in a paper I wrote in 2001 on the clinical
manifestations of obedience and conformism (Aisenstein, 2001).
That is my hypothesis. I see the early splittings of the ego as organising the denials which
underlie submission to authority, the loss of the capacity to think in terms of “I”, in short, a
conformist dementalization.
I am not so naive as to reflect merely in terms of causality, which is why it is also
necessary to think about the dilution of the superego in groups as Freud emphasised in Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c).
In an article published in 2010 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, I
established a link between the regression of the superego in groups, described by Freud, with
a regression to the ideal ego in the case of dementalisation following a traumatic inflow of
excitation.

I would like to recall here the experiments of Stanley Milgram who wanted to bring to
light the modalities of submission to a figure of authority – a vague and disembodied
authority because it was a question of “scientific authority”. He gives an account of these
experiments in a book published in 1974 called Obedience to Authority: An Experimental
View. These experiments are remarkable and overwhelming.
Under the cover of testing the procedures of memorization, the Milgram experiment
measured the degree of submission, or resistance, of the “study participants” to a protocol that
enacted sessions of torture pure and simple.
The large majority of the “study participants” carried out the experiments until the end
without hesitating to use the strongest levels of intensity. During the experiments a few of
them hesitated, but resumed again after the intervention of unknown authority figures in white
coats who “reassured them”.
Milgram concludes by writing that that in certain circumstances and in the face of
authority, however vague it may be, “ordinary people, devoid of all hostility, can, simply by
carrying out their task, become the agents of an atrocious process of destruction.”
In short, this coincides exactly with the conclusions of Hanna Arendt (1963) in Eichmann
in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
During his trial, Eichmann presents himself as an ordinary man, the involuntary agent of a
destruction that he did not want. He does not feel guilty because his first value, above all else,
is obedience. It transpires that it never crossed his mind to say no to authority.

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 Whether we are talking about a Hutu farmer or an engineer like Eichmann, or a
philosopher like Heidegger, the picture remains dramatically the same.
What does this incapacity to “affirm oneself negatively” consist in? I am borowing this
expression from J.B. Pontalis who sees Melville’s Bartleby as the hero of “negative
affirmation”. “ ‘I would prefer not to.’ A No that is expressed in a listless voice but with
incredible insistence, an implacable but always calm firmness, a no that has the softness of a
yes ... Bartleby is uncompromising, his resistance is radical.”
It is not so much a matter of saying no as of affirming oneself negatively in relation to a
group and to authority. An affirmation of identity, “No, this is outside me,” (Freud) which
seems not to take place in traumatic circumstances.
We can imagine the traumatic circumstances at the origin of a “dementalization” due to
the subject’s incapacity to bind the excitation. In metapsychological terms, what we are
dealing with, in my view, is moments of drive defusion.
The internal destructiveness of the human psyche, turned against the psyche itself, is
expressed by the unbinding between the libido (which Freud calls Eros in An Outline of
Psychoanalysis (1940a [1938])), “which aims to establish ever greater unities”, and the death
drive which, he adds, aims to “undo connections and so to destroy things” (p. 148).
Binding-unbinding: this brings us back to the heart of the problem of meaning.
Linking several elements means creating a meaning that can be appropriated, which
confers a sense of subjectivization, of thinking about oneself as a subject. Unbinding,
destroying links, means destroying meaning, which triggers the mechanisms and processes of
disobjectalisation and desubjectivization, as André Green has described so well.
I have mentioned the importance of the role of negation and splitting in this specific form
of the destruction of thinking. To conclude, I would like to recall briefly certain premises. The
“mechanical” or “robotic” states (états opératoires) described by the Paris Psychosomatic
School are pathognomic signs of the clinical manifestations of the negative. The heuristic
concept of “mentalization” introduced by the psychosomatists of the Paris School concerns
essentially the processes of representation. It accounts for the capacity of the psychical
apparatus to bind drive excitation with networks of representations. “Dementalization”, the
most characteristic example of which is “mechanical” thinking (pensée opératoire) is
observed in certain cases of somatic illness. It also appears in transitory traumatic states
which can be experienced by any individual. To this type of particular psychopathological
configuration, I would add a third category which I have called the clinical manifestations of
“conformism” (Aisenstein, 2001).

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 This dementalization may be understood as an anti-traumatic strategy under the sign of
survival. This anti-traumatic strategy does not constitute a classical psychic defence, like
delusion, for example, but it denotes possibilities of discharge through soma, behaviour, or
acting out. The obstacles encountered by mentalization are related to certain failures of
hallucinatory wish fulfilment at the beginnings of psychic life. These failures are at the origin
of deficiencies in the establishment of auto-erotic activities and fantasy life. The notion of
anti-traumatic defence or of anti-traumatic strategy implies the existence of a struggle against
anxiety and painful affects at any price. When repression and negation are no longer effective,
the subject has recourse to splitting and the disavowal of reality.

References

Aisenstein, M. (2001). De l’obeissance. Libres cahiers pour la psychanalyse, 4, 93-97,

Editions In Press.
Aisenstein, M. (2010). Conceptual Framework from the Paris Psychosomatic School: a
Clinical Psychoanalmytic Approach to Oncology. Int. J. Psycho-anal., 91 (3) 621-640.
Arendt, H. (1963) in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London:
Penguin.
Freud, S. (1921c). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. S.E. 18, 65-143.
Freud, S. (1925h.) Negation. S.E., 19: 233-239.
Freud, S. (1938a). The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence. S.E., 23: 271-278.
Freud, S. (1940a [1938]). An Outline of Psychoanalysis S.E., 23, 139-207.
Hatzfeld, J. (2000). Dans le Nu de la Vie, Récit des Marais Rwandais. Paris : Seuil.
Hatzfeld, J. (2003). Une Saison de Machettes. Paris : Seuil.[English translation, Machette
Season: the Killers in Rwanda Speak, 2006.]
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York, NY: Harper
Collins.