A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence: The Holocaust, Group Hallucinosis and False Beliefs

Abstract

S urvivor narratives and descriptions of Holocaust and postHolocaust psychic effects fill voluminous works of history, research, memoir, poetry. I’ve treasured accounts of survival and transcendence —and the illumination of sequelae of massive trauma by such chroniclers as Garwood (2020), who identified a “traumatogenic triad” (p. 98) of annihilation anxiety, powerlessness and loss. The literature has helped me understand the Holocaust’s impact on my survivorparents—indelible wounds, rage, terror, despair, dark shadows lurking even during celebratory events. In the decades since World War II, theorists have vigorously attempted to comprehend the incomprehensible—the grand scale of forced killings, mass displacements and mass murders committed by the Nazi regime. A genocide carried out with the active engagement of a shockingly large proportion of the German populace, stresses Bennett Roth in his extraordinarily insightful book A Group Analytic Approach to Understanding Mass Violence: The Holocaust, Group Hallucinosis and False Beliefs. Endeavors to understand causes, preconditions and motives for the Holocaust and other genocides have turned up, at best, “inadequate or partial explanations,” Roth laments. The glaring absence of “a set of integrative concepts or causal processes from a group psychoanalytic perspective” sent Roth on an in-depth investigation of Nazi group dynamic behavior. He sought to find out how and why it could “appear rational and necessary for a state regime to engage in the costly activity of eliminating a portion of their non-kin population” (p. 84). He wanted to know how the deadly Third Reich so effectively International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 72: 102–105, 2022 © 2021 The American Group Psychotherapy Association, Inc. ISSN: 0020-7284 print/1943-2836 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207284.2021.1995287