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, Rcit 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 without any difficulty. I cant
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: Its a Rwandan custom for small boys to imitate their fathers, thats
how they learn
agricultural methods of sowing and cutting from an early age. Thats how
a large number of them started going around with dogs to sniff out the
Tutsi. Thats how a certain number of children began killing out in the
bush.
Jean Hatzfelds 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
Freuds 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 (tats opratoires) , P. Syfnos with

the notion of

secondary alexithymia, Andr 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

ones internal productions originating on the inside or returning from the
outside, fear of ones 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 cant think, I
cant think, the nagging complaint of one of my patients, who is
suffering atrociously at those moments, is quite different from that of an
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.

engineer suffering from hemorrhagic rectocolitis who says, I dont want

to speak about my dreams. It is different, too, from

the discourse of

Joseph-Dsir 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 Reichs enterprise of extermination. They
may be summarised thus: I obey, therefore I dont think.
So whatever the forms of psychic treatment or pathologies, two distinct
common denominators can be identified:
The first is: Thinking terrifies me; Im afraid of suffering too much.
The second is: I dont think, I obey; if I obey, I dont think. Thinking
hurts and is dangerous for me; not thinking is comfortable.

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, thats outside me, thats not me, it
doesnt come from inside me, so I didnt think that, I dont want to recognise myself in
that.
Freuds 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, its 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 childs 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
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
5

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.
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 Melvilles 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 subjects 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 Andr 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 (tats opratoires) 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 (pense opratoire) 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).
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 lobeissance. Libres cahiers pour la psychanalyse, 4, 93-97,
Editions In Press.
Aisenstein, M. (2010). Conceptual Framework from the Paris Psychosomatic School: a
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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, Rcit 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.