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How individuals manage to psychologically, socially, and spiritually sustain themselves within an “extreme” situation is a topic with which I have been preoccupied for some time. In a previous publication (Marcus and Rosenberg, “Value”), I have described how a religious framework helped some devout Jews maintain their selfhood and humanity as they were violently assaulted in the Nazi concentration camps. Religion created a reservoir of meaning, a world of significance that nourished certain camp inmates when the outside world was assaulting both their physical existence and psychological integrity.
In contrast, this essay deals with the problem of sustaining the self in the extreme situation from the point of view of those who were less capable of surviving as “human beings” (Bettelheim, Heart 16) in the camps: the “intellectuals,” as the Auschwitz survivors Jean Améry and Primo Levi have called them. Whether this was the man of letters, the philosopher of science, the naturalist, the sociologist, the mathematician, or I would add, the psychoanalyst, these “intellectuals” were more vulnerable to the Nazi assault than the “believers,” those with strong religious, political, or moral convictions, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, practicing Catholics, devout Jews, militant Marxists, or Zionists.
As Améry writes:
One way or the other, in the decisive moments their political or religious belief was an inestimable help to them, while we skeptical and humanistic intellectuals took recourse, in vain, to our literary, philosophical, and artistic household gods. Their belief or their ideology gave them the firm foothold in the world from which they spiritually unhinged the SS state. Under conditions that defy the imagination they conducted Mass, and as Orthodox Jews they fasted on the Day of Atonement although they actually lived the entire year in a condition of raging hunger. They survived better or died with more dignity than their irreligious or intellectual comrades, who often