Chapter 12 – Personality Change in Extreme Situations

The Concentration Camp Situation

This section focuses on the impact of concentration camps on the inmate’s personality.

• Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990)
  • PhD in Psychology, imprisoned for a year by the Nazis as political prisoner, migrated to the U.S. and became a teacher.
  • Wrote one of the first scientific papers on how personality is impacted in extreme situations: “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” published in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.
    • Two major themes in his article:
      • One of the main purposes of the concentration camp was to change the prisoners into useful subjects of the Nazi state by means of exposing them to extreme situations; and
      • Under such extreme conditions, different stages or processes of personality changes were observed among the prisoners.
    • The article described how the Nazis wanted to break the prisoners as individuals and change them to such an extent that they would no longer resist; and how they attained these goals through torture, malnutrition, hard labor, exposure to harsh environments, etc.

Stages of Personality Change in Extreme Situations

Bettelheim’s four stages of personality change (under Nazi imprisonment)

• The initial shock of unlawful imprisonment,
• Emotional detachment caused by torture and human degradation during the transportation into the camp and the first experiences in the camp,
• A gradual process of adaptation to the camp situation-regression to infantile behavior, and
• The final adjustment to the life in the camp–acceptance of Nazi values as their own.

Stage 1: Initial Shock

• Psychological shock experienced by the prisoners who spent several days in prison before being transported into the concentration camp.
• Feelings of disbelief, resentment, helplessness and worthlessness
• Loss of sense of propriety and self-respect

Individuals even committed suicide while in prison and in the midst of being transported to the camp.

Stage 2: Emotional Detachment

Nazi’s tried to break prisoners’ resistance by assaulting them, forcing them to kill each other, and defiling their cherished values and dignity.

• Bettelheim recalls enduring the transportation from prison to the camp, and everything else that followed, by convincing his self that everything that was happening to him was directly happening to him as a subject but him as an object. He recalls that all of his thoughts and emotions were extremely detached.
• Period of denial, apathy, and depression (isolation of affect)

Although this stage might be a psychological defense, it could lead to the Musselman (German term for those who become numb to the point of being robot-like or “walking corpses”) zombie-like apathy. Those who reached this stage and could not be immediately rescued by their comrades never returned from it and were immediately selected out and killed.

Stage 3: Adaptation

Once a prisoner accepted everything that was happening as “real,” they eventually adapted to the hard reality of survival.

• Division of Prisoners:
  • They began to divide themselves as new and old prisoners. New prisoners were those we had spent less than one year in the camp and still had hope of returning home whereas old prisoners were those who had spent at least three years in the camp were mostly concerned about surviving another day within the camp.
• Child-Like Dependency:
  • Prisoners feared returning to the outer world and developed a child-like dependency on the immediate environment.

Stage 4: Acceptance

Change in prisoners’ personality that accepts the perpetrator’s values as their own.

• Victims identify with aggressors (Gestapo: Secret State Police)
  • Prisoners attained the Gestapo’s ideologies as a feature of their own behavior.
    • Old prisoners would see the newcomers as weak and problematic and took it upon themselves to get rid of the unfit
  • Prisoners adapted the Gestapo’s torturous and slow-killing methods.
    • Believed that weaklings would either die soon or become traitors anyway and that self-protection asked for their elimination.
  • Prisoners obtained a tendency to identify themselves with the Gestapo
    • Similar aggressive behavior
    • Tried to find/make and wear old pieces of Gestapo uniform
    • Began to admire the guards
    • Accepted their goals and values

However, prolonged regression into infantile behavior and complete identification with the aggressor may bring permanent damage to one’s personality.

Note: These four stages are an “ideal” typical process but may not apply to everyone and/or may be experienced differently.

Coping Strategies in Concentration Camps

Involves external changes to one’s relation to environment and internal changes to personality, short and long terms consequences, and both positive and negative effects on personality.

• Benner, Roskies, and Lazarus (1980, p. 228) define: “Coping represents the attempt to manage stress either by resolving the disturbed person-environment relationship directly or by diminishing the emotional distress resulting from it.”
  • Multidimensional Functions of Coping:
    • Lessen immediate impact of stress,
    • Shape the ongoing stress experience, and
    • Chart the future events and actions.
  • Dimsdale (1980, p. 164), states, “truly functional [positive] coping behavior not only lessens the immediate impact of stress but also allows the person to maintain some sense of self-worth and unity with his past and anticipated future.”
    • Ten coping strategies by concentration camps survivors:
      • Differential Focus on the Good- attempt to find the good/positive aspect of things in the immediate surroundings (selective attention) by:
        • Focusing on small gratifications such as getting through the food line without a beating; and
        • Ignoring the larger tragedies of the camps.
        • Positive Function: prevent emotional breakdown under extreme stress.
      • Survival for Some Purpose: special purpose, strong reason, or deep meaning for survival such as
        • helping other relatives,
        • telling the world what happened, or
        • Seeking revenge.
        • Psychiatrist Victor Frankl (1959) and writer Elie Wiesel (1958) emphasized “meaning in suffering” or fulfilling a “survivor mission.”
        • However, the individual in this state may be in danger when their reason for survival is destroyed.
      • Psychological Removal-attempt to withdraw self from immediate impact of stress through
        • Intellectualization,
          • Takes place when inmate attempts to lessen their subjective emotional suffering by transferring it into an object of scientific study.
            • Frankl (1959), also a survivor, describes this in a form of daydreaming
          • Belief in immortality,
            • Personal survival: it can happen to everyone except you
            • Religious belief/prayers
          • Time distortion/selective focus on time,
            • Recollection of all happy memories previously lived or imagining the future of freedom and comfort; or
            • Focus solely on the present and on one’s survival from one moment to another
          • A sense of humor, and
            • Widely known positive coping strategy for psychological removal
            • Finding humor in the current situation
          • Profound apathy (musselman)
            • Found to be usually fatal
          • Mastery (Environmental and Attitudinal)-an effort to manipulate or resist the stress system by engaging in physical and mental activities.
            • Gathering information,
            • Helping fellow prisoners,
            • Resisting camp machinery even in the most trivial ways
            • counter thought-not accepting the aggressor’s dehumanizing definition of the victims
            • Aka “mental gymnastics.
              • A former Vietnam POW expressed physical labor, dreaming, thoughts about families and friends, mathematics and science
            • Group Affiliation- a sense of belonging to a group
              • Makes it easier to accomplish the prior coping strategy of Mastery
              • Is a positive function for mitigating the impact of stress and enhancing the chance of survival because it provides information, advice, and protection.

Note: The size of the group was not of key importance because even a two-person friendship group was found to be very effective. However, if an inmate was unsuccessful in affiliating with a group within the first few days of internment, his or her chances of survival were very limited” (1980, p. 171).

• • • Will to Live-most basic driving force for all surviving strategies
      • Seems trivial but is one of the most important aspects of coping.
    • The Mobilization of Hope-a basic survival strategy, particularly to religious belief in mastery and the will to live.
      • Two forms of hope observed amongst survivors:
        • An active hope- belief that the camps wouldn’t last, this cannot go on forever; and
        • Passiveness- “where there is life, there is hope.”
      • Belief that someone will come to the rescue
      • Consistent belief in one’s survival
    • Regressive Behavior: child-like behavior and dependency in an effort to receive help from other inmates or camp guards.
      • A fervor of sobbing and pleas for help
      • Complete submission to and identification with aggressor
    • Anticoping-a slightly functional strategy that removes the dissonance/tension of the situation
      • Complete surrender to stress and
      • Acknowledgment that the current situation is right and the Self is wrong.
      •  Even this strategy is slightly functional

Dimsdale noted that this was not a common strategy among the survivors of German concentration camps but cites an example that hints such “anticoping” where a female prisoner recalls seeing a handsome man who she thought couldn’t possibly be bad but really was.

• • • Null Coping (fatalism)- the individual attains a fatalistic attitude where they choose to no longer do anything, internally or externally, to mediate stress but rather rely on fate or on others.
      • Dimsdale notes that this coping method:
        • Doesn’t decrease the impact of stress but alters the perception of it
        • Is a better coping tactic than self-pity or self-blame
      • Similar behavior was also noted by Kitano (1969, p. 45) among the Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in the “Relocation Centers” during World War II.

Dimsdale admits that his classifications of the ten strategies are not definite.  He states that these coping strategies are psychological withdrawal strategies which are experienced in the process of building a wall between the experiencing self and an oppressive reality. Thus, it is suggested that there may be a hierarchy of functional coping strategies and that some may be functionally interlinked.

In connecting Bettelheim’s stages of personality change and Dimsdale’s classification of coping behavior, we can analyze the differential efficacy of these ideal types in various stages of the adaptation process and create a hypothetical model in which we categorize the strategies into five major ideal groups:

1. Mastery
2. Denial
3. Psychological removal
4. Regression
5. Dependency/identification
6. Musselman

In this hypothetical model, Musselman, identified as a type of psychological removal in Dimsdale’s model, is now in its own category because it is the most fatal coping method. While other strategies are functional for survival, this method is totally dysfunctional and can happen in any stage of the coping process. Mastery, on the other hand, is seen as the foundation for all survival strategies as it requires resistance against and unacceptance of the dehumanization process in the camps and includes Dimsdale’s classifications of the will to live, mobilization of hope, struggle for meaning purpose for survival, etc. As such, Mastery and Musselman are seen to be complete opposites of each other.

Note: This hypothetical model is an attempt to better understand the dynamics of human responses to cataclysmic events and extraordinary stress. It is solely for heuristic purposes but is largely based on the real experiences of survivors of extreme situations.

Coping behavior in an extreme situation is a highly complex and dynamic process. Most of the strategies are used in variety and differ upon each individual.

During WWII, Bloom and Halesma’s 1983 study noted an unusually low mortality rate among the 500 American civilians/internees who were incarcerated in the Japanese internment camp in the Philippines. After exploring the psycho-social-environmental configurations, they hypothesized the following was responsible for this phenomenon:

1. Physical environment-a healthy climate, a bed for each internee, carefully managed camp space for multiple use (privacy, physical exercise);
2. Personal backgrounds of the internees-a self-selected and highly educated group of persons (missionaries, doctors, teachers, business persons, engineers and their dependents) who were well prepared to deal with stressful conditions in a foreign land; and
3. Sociocultural environment-the internees’ strong group solidarity and social support functioned as the most important survival factor (“camp morale and group supports were able to flourish because the captors let the internees pretty much run their own camp so long as there was no violation of military rules”) (Bloom and Halsema 1983, p. 205).

Researchers stressed that social values and supports were the most influential factors in determining the survival rate in Camp Holmes.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD

(Earlier referred to as: Concentration Camp Syndrome)

One’s traumatic experience has a long-term effect on personality.

• Victor Frankl- Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor
  • Three kinds of experiences that may damage character of concentration camp survivors:
    1. Moral deformity
    2. Bitterness, and

• Disillusionment

• Moral deformity
  1. Results from sudden release of mental pressure
  2. Refers to the survivors’ explosive desire for revenge by any means of similar brutality that surrounded them
• Bitterness
  1. Feeling experienced by survivors against their former home town upon return as their sufferings in the camp were neither recognized nor well understood.
  2. Survivors heard insensitive phrases such as “we didn’t know about it” or “we, too, have suffered,” causing them to feel bitter and wonder why they had to suffer so much.
• Disillusionment
  1. Refers to the survivor’s perception of his/her fate as a perpetual sufferer even after liberation and under normal life conditions: “A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could still suffer, and even more intensely” (p. 92).
  2. Upon their return, many of them found their families and friends had already died.

These feelings are only party of a broader category of PTSD.

PTSD

• A broad range of various physical and psychosocial disorders that are prevalent among those who experienced severe stress under extreme conditions.
• Generally applies to survivors of all kinds of disasters.
  • Research on PTSD has accelerated since the end of WWII and has revealed many significant finding on the long-term effects of severe trauma experienced in extreme situations.
    • Commonly found symptoms:
      • Nightmares
      • Insomnia
      • Anxiety
      • Chronic depression
      • Social isolation
      • Survivor guilt
      • Substance abuse
      • emotional numbness
      • mistrust
      • moodiness
      • irritability,
      • hostility
      • tormenting memories
      • flashbacks
      • dependency, and
      • Social maladjustment such as marital and family problems.
    • Note: Although there are many other extreme situations in which individuals experience similar coping strategies, there is still a huge gap in research relating to PTSD in those survivors.

Conclusion

• In revisiting William Isaac Thomas’ classic victim-“When one defines the situation as real, it is real in its consequences”-we see an explanation as to what happens to people who undergo extreme situations.
  • One’s ability to survive in extreme situations is depends on the strength of their subjective sense of mastery over the situation, as opposed to a fatal sense of submission to the traumatic stress.
  • In Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning from Death Camp to Existentialism, he writes: “…man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes…he has made out of himself… we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself, which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
• Second, the study of personality change in extreme situations has far reaching implications beyond the framework of disaster stress research. Ultimately, the study has to deal with the globally increasing extreme situations of institutionalized oppression (systematic mistreatment of people within a social identity group with support from society and its institutions, based on an individual’s identity), rationalized terrorism, and “normalized” anomie.