ON PSYCHOANALYSIS
411
My reading of the signs is that our tendency will not be to look
for verbal therapies that will not violate the personality of the person
we want to help.
As
our desire to change people becomes more intense
and our disillusion with current techniques increases, it seems to me
that we will be tempted to go beyond words and resort to forms of
treatment that use words only as adjuncts of other processes. Words
themselves are not only the healer's instruments of change, they also
playa role in the patient's successful defense of the self. Indeed, that
self is composed of his ways of explaining his own behavior to the
world and to himself. And if we ignore it we face even more dif–
ficult problems.
One need only look at the most awful creation of our time, the
concentration camp, where the imitation by inmates of their guards
supplies a terrifying example of the possibilities of transforming men.
The Nazis were not running a program of thought reform, but one
of murder; however, by accident they produced a system of total
terror in which the fabric of social life and personality disintegrated,
victim and violator became homologues and, unless by chance, only
the criminal and those who were organized could survive. The Chinese
brainwashing techniques are in some ways like those of the concentra–
tion camp. But the effectiveness of Chinese Communists in shattering
the American dream of American P.O.W.'s was matched by their
ineffectiveness in creating new ideological commitments. They failed
because Chinese behavior models are socially implausible for the
American; however, when these same processes are used against their
own people, they are most effective. In a situation full of terror, anxi–
ety and physical threats, the reformee is questioned over and over
again with no reference to the actual substance of the complaint. He
is forced to repeat again and again the same confessions, dredging
up new feelings of guilt. This process is intensified by the presence
of other guilty people and a healer who is attempting to bring the
sufferer back into the social life of the community. This situation is
similar in many ways to the psychoanalytic process, but it adds bodily
deprivation and disorganization.
It
should be noted that the degrada–
tion of prisoners also occurs routinely in many American penal institu–
tions and is a part of the life of the mental patient in our mental hos–
pitals. People are stripped of their legal identities, have their hair cut
a prescribed length, live as statistical entities in a total institution, rise
