ALEXA N DER MITSCH ERLICH
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who seemed overtly to derive sexual pleasure from the tortures . I
remember that Max Horkheimer, years ago , also spoke of the differ–
ence between political and sadistic manifestations of cruelty. The latter
ends in orgasm, at least temporarily . What we describe as task-oriented
cruelty can proceed in never-ending pain, like the shift work in a mine,
and is of a rather compulsive nature .
If we were to venture a hypothesis, it would run something like
this : in cruelty as labor-as opposed to sadism-libidinal and des–
tructive drive processes tend to be strictly separated from each other . A
deep-seated separation of drives has taken place . Sexual and aggressive
modes ofexcitation do not alloy ; rather the personality structure is that
of the multiple-personality type , characterized by a periodical and vast
externalization of the superego : the murderer and loving father and
husband all in one , as was found in the Auschwitz commandant Hoss .
The origin of this form of destructive cruelty cannot be explained as a
defense against the fear of sexuality, as in the compulsive neurotic,
because the private sex life of such individuals who commit socially
sanctioned cruelty reveals little or no disturbance .
The inner doubling of the personality has obviously some con–
nection with the lack of guilt feelings one can observe in these perpet–
rators of cruelty . When not commissioned to murder, such people are
positively harmless. They can cast off their roles in the Wehrmacht or
S.S . like the lizard casts off its tail ; this has been amply proven by
events after 1945 .
We must now ask ourselves what infantile instinctual vicissitudes
cause these individuals to kill and maim fellow creatures-clumsily or
elaborately, fanatically or in dumb obedience . Perhaps it will aid in our
clarification if we observe the circumstances in which these outbreaks
of cruelty occur. It appears that many people are moved to cruelty
when the victim is
defenseless.
This must be of overriding significance,
because this very defenselessness allows , on the part of the victimizer,
an experience of omnipotence undisturbed·by the victim . Regularly ,
cruel acts are extended when, in consequence of the enemy's defeat,
one's own mortal fear disappears, and a chance is thus given to play
with the foe's terror and pain. This helps recreate the very early feeling
of infantile , narcissistic omnipotence . The killing of the defenseless
victim is the perverse reversal of the urge to protect, normally evoked
by powerlessness. In wars of faith and ideology , the possibility of
