Yesterday, I began to tell the story of Gudrun, who was in her mid-20's when she sought treatment for her chronic difficulty in getting along with people. She was a gifted, attractive German woman who often wore a Jewish star around her neck, had lived in Israel for a year when she was 18, and spent a fair amount of time contemplating a conversion to Judaism. She discovered during her therapy that she had been named after her mother's childhood best friend, a Jewish girl named Giselle, who had disappeared into the concentration camps of Nazi Germany in the late 1930's, never to be seen or spoken of again.
[In my post yesterday, I failed to point out that Gudrun's naming by her mother had been in keeping with the Ashkenazi (European Jewish) tradition of using the first initial to denote a connection to a lost loved one.]
Despite what Gudrun was able to learn about herself, self knowledge which went a long way toward helping her understand the ways in which she unconsciously provoked others to attack her, she was never able to find and maintain a suitable long term relationship. This was puzzling since we both thought we understood much of what had interfered with her relationships in the past and she was very frequently courted by men who to all appearances were thoroughly appropriate.
Ultimately, we learned that there was an irreducible conflict that prevented Gudrun from ever finding the long term relationship she craved.
Even after many years of work, Gudrun could not fully appreciate the enormity of what her family had lived through and how they had dealt with their own roles in the events surrounding the Holocaust. Although she was not a religious person and had had minimal religious training and teaching (in a Protestant denomination), she felt that the stain of the Holocaust on her family was, in effect, an original sin, for which she could never fully atone. Where Christians felt that their "original sin" was redeemed by Christ's sacrifice, especially in the post-Holocaust highly secular world of post-war Europe, there was no equivalent redemption available. It took a very long time for Gudrun to put into words her deeply held feelings that the shameful stain at her core could never be erased.
Gudrun felt that her familial complicity in the horrors of the Holocaust made her unsuitable for a decent person to love; she knew she was likable and could even convince herself that she was lovable, but she deeply felt that she was not lovable. The gap between what she knew intellectually (that she had no responsibility for what had happened) and what she felt (that she was the descendant of evil) was unbridgeable. We worked on this for a very long time. During that time she successfully established her own business, bought a home, and became involved in her community, but she could never tolerate the kindness of the kind of man she most wanted; it never felt right or fair. Further, the idea of bringing a child into the world who would, potentially, contain the same evil she did, lurking and waiting to one day be re-expressed, was a source of unimaginable horror to her. She could not shake the feeling that no matter how much good she did in the world, she came from people capable of the greatest horrors, and could not risk being even in a small way responsible for such evil once again being loosed in the world. It is hard to describe how deeply she felt this horror and how powerful it was.
I cannot emphasize enough that this woman was the most gentle of souls; the idea that she could hurt another person was enough to make her feel physically ill. Yet she could never shake the feeling that at her own core was a horror. Ultimately, she consciously made the decision to remove herself from the gene pool. She renounced her own future and the possibility of love for herself. Nonetheless, she felt the therapy had been extremely helpful and had clarified for her the inchoate feelings that had plagued her much of her life. She no longer had to provoke in quite the same way as in the past and could work well with others. People were no longer turned off by her and chronically angry at her, but genuinely liked her. She could not explain to friends and colleagues why she was always alone, but she knew why she had decided on the course she had taken.
Although caution is always advisable when extending from the particular to the general, I can't help wondering if what I saw in Gudrun does not represent an unconscious dynamic at work in the Europe of today. The dirty secret that Europe has never acknowledged is the high degree of complicity in the Holocaust by the majority of not only Germans, but French, Poles, Bulgarians, Hungarians, et al. Eastern European countries did some penance, in a fashion, held captive by the totalitarian communists in the post-war generations; the Communists consciously attempted to erase all signs of their people's complicity in the fascist Holocaust that was directed at Jews above all. Even in Western Europe, the complicity of so many has been hidden, if not fully erased. By not dealing with this directly, the shameful secret at the core of Europe has continued to fester, as all shameful secrets do.
Shame is the most intolerable of feelings because it is about the self. Dr. Sanity has written quite lucidly about shame and its effects in the public sphere:
Excessive or inappropriate shame is another thing altogether, communicating forcibly to the individual that he or she is worthless. Shame can be an exceedingly devastating and painful experience.
Children who live with constant hostility and criticism learn to defend against the bad feelings and shame within; and to externalize blame onto others. Projection and paranoia, which are both external assignments of blame, are psychological defenses against shame.
Often this excessive shame is dealt with by humiliating someone perceived as weaker or more worthless than the shamed person (e.g., the family pet, women, Gays, or outside groups serve this function for both individuals and cultures).
Guilt is an emotion that rises after a transgression of one's own or cultural values. Guilt is about actions or behavior; while shame is about the self. There is an important psychological difference in saying to someone that their behavior is bad; as contrasted with saying that they are bad. The former leads to guilt; the latter to shame.
Inherent in this formulation is the fact that shame and humiliation often lead to rage. When the rage is internalized, it is directed toward the self and can create suicidal despair (of which Gudrun's resolution is an ameliorated derivative); when rage is directed outward it can become homicidal. Often the two are co-mingled. The suicide bomber destroys himself and the hated (usually envied) other who is seen as the source of their shame.
The European elites show a great deal of pathology in their culture. They attempt to deal with their shame by attacking what they see as the source of their shame. If the Jews would only disappear, the memory of the Holocaust could be consigned to the distant past and never thought of again. This did not work for Gudrun and cannot work for Europe. In their efforts to forget their complicity, they threaten to repeat the atrocities of the past. The shameful attacks on the legitimacy of Israel are nothing more than thinly disguised anti-Semitism, the evil at the core that Gudrun could never fully metabolize.
Interestingly, Neo-neocon has reminded me of a real world family in which these trends have been expressed. In her post yesterday, she described how Zacharias Moussaoui is using the death penalty phase of his trial to redress his shame at his humiliating failure to carry out his glorious martyrdom operation:
Ah, the sorrow of missing out on all the glory! Failed suicidal jihadis such as Reid (and probably Moussaoui) seem to be plagued by their own version of the student anxiety dream. Bummer.
It is probable that, once a person makes up his/her mind to be a suicide mass murderer, a line is crossed. The person has accepted the necessity and reality of his/her death (I'm tired of this PC gender stuff; from here on in this essay I am just using the masculine, since the vast majority of these people are men); visualized it and gloried in it, as well as expecting that this martyrdom will lead to lasting glory. It must be a cruel cheat to be deprived of such a "consummation devoutly to be wished."
Here we see the expression of co-mingled inner and outer expressions of the rage that his shame has produced in the wish to murder innocents for his own aggrandizement. At the end of her post, she links to an older post of her own which suggests an alternative resolution. Zacharias Moussaoui came from a dysfunctional family. That is not a surprise, but the some of the particulars may be surprising; he has two sisters and Nadia is the older:
Like her brothers, Nadia has a complicated relation to her religious background. Unlike her brothers, she speaks Arabic fluently and spent many summers as a child with her mother's family in Morocco. But if her brothers left mostly secular homes to devote themselves to Islam, Nadia looked altogether elsewhere, developing, when she was in her 20's, an abiding devotion to Judaism. ''In my heart,'' she tells me, ''in my heart, I am Jewish.'' What's more, she loves Israel, would go tomorrow if she could, without blinking; her dream is to see the Brooklyn Bridge, to go to Brooklyn, ''because that's where all the Jews are in America.'' If you mention Palestine, she'll point out sternly that no such nation has been recognized; she returns frequently to the subject of Israel with a passion that cannot be circumnavigated. She regularly listens to Radio Shalom or Radio Communaute Juive, reads books like ''Jewish Thought'' and ''Bibliotherapy.'' She has written her brother to say that she loves him but says that even if she could fly to the United States to visit him, he would refuse to see her.
Anti-Semitism is an illness that destroys a person and a culture from within (see also Pity the Poor Anti-Semite); it can, of course, do terrible damage to its intended victims, the feared, envied, and idealized Jews, but it also erodes the core of the sufferer. Perhaps Gudrun exemplified one of the ways in which it conveys its effects through the generations.
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