Chapter 12: Outline

Personality Change In Extreme Situations

Chapter 12 of Personality in Culture and Society: An Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Approach focuses on how people respond to extreme situations by focusing on Bruno Bettelheim’s studies and observations at Nazi concentration camps, specifically, the stages of personality changes and various coping mechanisms.

1. Bruno Bettelheim (PhD in Psychology) , pioneer of socio psychological study of concentration camps
   1. Moved to the U.S. and taught at Rockford College after being captured in Germany by Nazis and spending a year in concentration camps
2. Published “Individual and Mass behavior in Extreme Situations” in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology focusing on:
   1. One main purpose of concentration camps was to use prisoners as subjects in the Nazi state through exposure of extreme conditions
   2. Under extreme conditions, different stages or processes of personality changes were observed among prisoners
      1. Nazis focused on breaking them down from individuals into docile masses that couldn’t resist or uprise
      2. Prisoners were exposed to extreme situations such as torture, malnutrition, exposure to heat, rain and freezing temperatures, complete isolation, hard labor, humiliation, and lost sense of human worth
3. Under these conditions, Bettelheim described the changes of personality in prisoners in terms of four stages:
   1. The initial shock of unlawful imprisonment
   2. Emotional Detachment caused by torture and human degradation
   3. Adaptation to the camp situation/ regression into infantile behavior
   4. Acceptance of Nazi values as their own (Identification with the perpetrator)
4. Initial Shock
   1. For the purpose of breaking Prisoners resistance while in camp and during transport
   2. Deprived of civil rights and unlawfully locked up
   3. Tortured, were forced to torture others, curse their god, and accuse wives of prostitution
      1. “He was amused by the repeated statement that guards do not shoot the prisoners but kill them by beating them to death because a bullet costs six pfennings and the prisoners are not worth even so much…All the thoughts and emotions which the author had during the transportation were extremely detached… Later he learned that many prisoners had developed this same feeling.” (Bettelheim 1943)
5. Emotional Detachment
   1. State of apathy
   2. What happened did not happen to them as a person but rather as subjects
   3. Focus was day to day survival in camp
   4. After about three years, focus on returning to the “outside world” was gone
   5. Prisoners adapted to camp as ‘real’ and were expected to be afraid to return
6. Regression into infantile behavior/dependency
   1. Couldn’t plan for future
   2. Immediately gratified instead of delayed
   3. Childlike friendships and conflict occurred
   4. Childlike conversation and competition
   5. Unashamed
7. Identification with aggressors
   1. Practically all  long-time prisoners looked down at “unfit” and new prisoners
      1. Complaints
      2. Difficulty Adjusting
      3. Bad behavior endangered groups
      4. Weaklings didn’t survive and were quick to turn traitors
   2. Prisoners wore pieces of old gestapo uniforms or made their clothes look like theirs
   3. Old prisoners accepted gestapo goals and attitudes
      1. Even though it conflicted with their own
      2. Even the politically-well-educated
8. Coping has multidimensional functions:
   1. To lessen immediate impact of stress
   2. To shape the ongoing stress experience
   3. To chart the future events and actions
      1. Allows a person to maintain sense of self worth and unity with their past and anticipated future According to Dimsdale
   4. Dimsdale classified coping strategies of concentration camps prisoners into ten categories
9. Differential Focus on the Good
   1. Attempt to find a positive aspect in immediate surroundings
   2. Sarah: “We had no work on Sunday and were in camps where we could walk in the fields and sometimes had the luck to catch a potato or a carrot.”
10. Survival for some purpose
    1. Special Purpose to tell what happened, to help relatives, or seek revenge
    2. Psychiatrist Victor Frankl and writer Elie Wiesel describes “meaning in suffering” or fulfilling a “survivor mission”
11. Psychological Removal
    1. Attempt to withdraw or insulate one’s self or insulate from immediate stress
    2. Uses strategies:
       1. Intellectualization
          1. Daydreaming
          2. Participant observation (Bettelheim’s study for this paper itself)
       2. belief in immortality
          1. Religious belief
       3. time distortion
          1. Recollecting past events or daydreaming for future
          2. Living in the present
       4. sense of humour
       5. profound apathy or ‘musselman.’
          1. “I had no feelings whatsoever… It really didn’t matter”
          2. Virtually guaranteed person’s death
          3. ‘Walking corpse’
12. Mastery (Environmental and Attitudinal)
    1. Engaging in physical and mental activities to resist counter thought
    2. Mental Gymnastics
       1. Building, counting, math
       2. Fantasizing and Daydreaming about the future
13. Group Affiliation
    1. When individuals belong to same region, race, culture, families
    2. Friends made in camp
14. Will to Live
    1. The most basic driving force for all survival strategies
15. The mobilization of hope
    1. Active Hope: the conviction camps could not last and will end
    2. Passive hope: “Where there is life, there is hope”
16. Regressive Behavior
    1. Childlike behavior
    2. Dependency towards help from others
17. Anticoping (Surrender to Stress)
    1. More advanced form of regressive behavior
    2. “[Stress] is right and the self is wrong”
    3. “[Joseph Mengele] is so beautiful, he cannot possibly be bad.”
18. Null Coping (Fatalism)
    1. Conceptually different from apathy
    2. Relies on fate or others
    3. Japanese mindset in camps during WW2: Shikataga-nai or “It can’t be helped.”
    4. Compared to self blame or self pity
19. Coping: a dynamic process  
    1. Often used in different stages or combined
    2. Strategies used specifically and evaluated in criteria:
       1. Temporary vs permanent
       2. Selective or total
          1. (Psychological withdrawal) of building a wall cannot easily face reality
          2. Focus on one reason for survival is dependant on that reason’s survival
          3. Those who compromised integrity faced guilt
20. Bettelheim and Dimsdale’s combined startegies
    1. In order of Initial Shock, detachment, Adapatation, and Acceptance
    2. Mussleman was separate from any category and could happen anytime
    3. Similar coping techniques were used together
       1. Focus on good, humour
       2. Childlike dependency, infantile behavior, submission to aggressor
21. Bloom and Halsema’s study
    1. Japanese internment camp high survival rate
    2. Conditions of  
       1. The physical environment: healthy, individual beds, space for use
       2. Personal Backgrounds: persons equipped to better deal with stress
       3. Socio cultural environment:
          1. Group solidarity and social support
          2. Hope and discomfort influence people to accomplish difficult goals
22. Understanding Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
    1. “Never shall I forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky” -Weisel
    2. “Just as the physical health of  a caisson worker will be endangered if he left his driver’s chambers suddenly (where he is under enormous pressure), so the man who had suddenly been liberated commensal pressure can suffer damage to the moral and spiritual health” – Frankl
    3. Experiences that damage concentration camp survivors
       1. Moral Deformity
          1. Explosive desire for revenge
       2. Bitterness
          1. Towards insensitivity and lack of recognition when returning home
       3. Disillusionment
          1. Family and friends dead
          2. Perpetual suffering
    4. PTSD originally called concentration camp syndrome
       1. Applies to human and natural disasters
       2. Research has accelerated since WW2
    5. Symptoms include nightmares, insomnia, anxiety, chronic depression, social isolation, survivor guilt, substance abuse, emotional numbness, mistrust, moodiness, irritability, irritability, hostility, tormenting memories, flashbacks, dependency, and in general, social maladjustment such as marital and family problems.
    6. More larger controlled studies are needed
23. Two sociological facts need to be reiterated
    1. “Real” situations are “real in consequences”
       1. Survival is dependent on one’s strength in mastery
    2. Man is a wolf to man allegory
       1. Thrown in a world with no chance of escape or change
       2. Creating a world within confines
24. Globally increasing situations of institutionalized oppression, rationalized terrorism and “normalized” anomie
    1. post – industrial world
       1. Iron cage of rationality