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Much has been written in the literature of psychology, medicine, alternative healing modalities, shamanism, and mythology, about the wounded healer and the ways in which the healer's own wounds become instrumental in the healing process. "The power of the wound," according to Bennet (1979) "lies in its ability to foster empathy, understanding, and acceptance in the healer" (p. 4). This article explores the roots of healing compassion in Eastern philosophy and in alternative healing modalities, and connects to current research in Western psychology on the common factors contributing to success in psychotherapy. It is a description of the process of compassion arising out of the healer's own wounds, flowing to the other and then returning to the helper in a circle of healing energy. It also speaks to the risks of compassion, drawing from research in professional psychology, nursing, and alternative healing practices such as Reiki and shamanism.And those who follow compassion find life for themselves, justice for their neighbor and glory for God. (Meister Eckhardt

The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding a human dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war as festival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra (‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedl‰nder (‘Rausch’ or ‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’.

have become widely known. With the exception of the USA, which is often examined along with Britain, the impact of eugenics in other European countries and on other continents is only now becoming clear, as a recent reviewer points out. 1 That fact does not, however, mean that only an international approach, desirable as that undoubtedly is, remains the sole task for scholars. 2 There is as yet confusion about eugenics in Britain.The most pressing problem in the historiography of eugenics, though one which most scholars assume to have been settled, concerns the relative stress laid by eugenicists on class and race. The latter, ostensibly more pernicious, emphasis is usually associated with the strict hereditarianism and its 'perversion' into blood and soil ideology in certain strands of Rassenhygiene of Weimar Germany and the racially motivated genocide of the Third Reich. 3 The former, by contrast, is associated with the class-ridden societies of Britain and, to a lesser extent, the USA. The middle classes in Britain, so the assessment goes, felt trapped between a still dominant old elite and an emerging working class clamouring for rights. The differential birth-rate between the professional classes and the fast-breeding lower orders, especially the 'submerged' (the lumpenproletariat) and those labelled 'feeble-minded', was supposedly at the root of the eugenics

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