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A prominent scholar born in Germany, who left at the age of twelve on one of the last Gestapo supervised immigration trains to occupied France and then escaped to Spain, spent a sabbatical at a university in Germany. During a casual encounter with a German woman close to his age, she asked about his origins, remarking on his accent. He explained that he had spent most of his life in the United States. “Oh, then you must be Jewish,” she responded. “You were so lucky you got out. It was so terrible here. You didn’t live through the bombing and war.” This vignette serves as a paradigm for a form of tainted knowing that precludes empathic knowledge of the unlucky Jewish refugee who, had he not run for his life, would not have lived through bombing and war but been exterminated. It screens out the other and elides genocide, hermetically sealing off interaction with reality and truth. It also eerily echoes concerns of many Germans during the war, who considered the ultimate victims of atrocities to be non-Jewish Germans, especially their own children, upon whom extermination would be avenged (Kohut 2012). It is reenacted in analyses where failure to know the history of places patients have been confounds perpetrators with victims, as if differentiating them does not matter.
Committal of atrocity throws a light switch within perpetrators, turning off vision and entailing withdrawal of recognition of atrocity not only through refusing to know and remember it, but also through refusing to imagine it. Psychic experiences are constricted so that no mental space is allotted to the representation of atrocity, amounting to its disavowal. The disavowal that sets in over time, having evolved from often initial horrific reactions to first perpetrations, is characterized by constricted emotional and imaginative functioning that precludes self-awareness, acknowledgment, taking responsibility, guilt and atonement. Shame remains in the foreground as the most common response preve