Genocide and Mass Destruction: Doing Harm to Others as a Missing Dimension in Psychopathology

Abstract

Psychology and psychiatry lose much of their common-sense credibility so long as they offer no way of defining execution of and participation in mass murder and genocide as pathological. This paper proposes an expansion of the standard classification system in psychopathology to include abuses and destruction of other people, so that persons who terminate the lives of others are defined as "disturbed."

2000 award winners.

“…As was the case when my forebears emigrated in the early 20th century, the past few decades have witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of people emigrating from one country to another in an effort to escape genocides caused by religious and ethnic cleansing campaigns or nationalistic persecution (Charny, 1996). They are pursuing a dream similar to that of my family of origin.…”

“…I took a part-time job at the Philadelphia Fellowship Commission, which had this lofty goal as its mission, and learned how demagogues spread their virulent hatred and how they cluster together insecure, frightened individuals who build their own sense of importance by scapegoating and belittling others as "the enemy." The forces of hatred, manifested in racism and religious persecution, were rampant, and I wanted then, as now, to raise my voice and rail against the evils committed in the name and cause of ethnic or religious superiority (Charny, 1996).…”

Permission, obedience, and continuities: A contribution to the sociological theory of genocidal processes

“…The Holocaust model for the study of genocidal processes was common in the first generation of scholars (Mazower, 1994: 6; Shaw, 2015: 54) and made the paradigm of obedience prevalent (Hinton, 2012: 7, 11). The obedience paradigm is build upon the effort of trying to understand how, in certain social environments, ordinary individuals become perpetrators (Charny, 1986; Haritos-Fatourus 1988) and analysing how hierarchical authority in bureaucratic environments (Bauman, 1989; Hilberg, 1985), ‘anticipatory obedience’ (Bloxham, 2008: 212) and/or group pressure (Semelin, 2005: 403–15), ‘behavioral expectations’ and ‘punishments’ (Bhavnani, 2006: 666) lead to conformity and to the conversion of individuals into perpetrators.…”

Channeling anger and hate for protecting human life.

“…All of the above are natural forces of life. Psychotherapy should not be aimed at removing all hate, anger, and power, but at assisting patients to have sufficient power to fight for life together with an awareness and control that enables them to inhibit potential harm and destructiveness to others (Charny, 2017a); when one has failed to do so-as will be the case for all of us at certain times in our 3 An early publication of the concept that psychological and psychiatric diagnosis of doing harm to oneself must always be accompanied by diagnosis of whether one is doing harm to others was in Charny (1986). lives-we need to be able to acknowledge rather than deny the harm we have done others and to make some measures of restitution (Charny, 2016).…”