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Dr. Hoppe lays great stress on the psychodynamic importance of the narcissistic regression which took place in concentration camp victims, and which, he feels, prepared the ground for later-developing psychopathological states of chronic reactive depression and chronic reactive aggression. I agree that regressive behavior, to some extent, was almost universal in the camps, being induced in the prisoners by the overwhelming infantilizing pressures to which they were subjected.
However, it is worth pointing out that such behavior may have actually served an adaptive function, thus constituting a kind of regression in the service of the ego, since regressive prisoners, immersed in fantasies, were likely to be docile and submissive toward the SS, and thus have a better chance of escaping retaliatory measures.
Unlike Dr. Hoppe, I do not find evidence, as a result of my admittedly relatively superficial examinations of concentration camp victims, for the hypothesis that a neurotic predisposition had survival value because of, “stronger defense mechanisms and childhood fixations.” It was my impression, rather, that many of these individuals had been active, enterprising persons who had not been “Musselmen” in the camps, but who had tried hard, sometimes with much ingenuity, to save their lives, an observation which would suggest a certain degree of emotional health.
The somewhat related question of whether psychological and physical trauma can alone produce the symptoms of a traumatic neurosis without participation of the deeper layers of the personality laid down as a result of earlier traumatic experiences is one of great theoretical
interest for psychoanalysis. It seems to me that the evidence from studies of sufferers from the Concentration Camp Syndrome, the combination of anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms, obsessive rumination and depression which is the most common form of later psychopathology, although inconclusive because of the paucity of reliable accounts of th