one of the issues that the German historian's methodenstreit addressed was the point we are considering. oiy. this is really making the brain hurt coz i have to dig back to a course on historical methods to recall, so bear with me. one of the issues was: is germany rotten to the core (are attempts to trace some grand chain of cultural/political evilness appropriate) or are there good things about german cultural and political life that are worth retrieving. if so, isn't the problem idealism in historical scholarship which traces the causes of the rise of Nazi germany to "bad" ideas, rather than material economic factors?
the guy who recruited me to the grad program was from Nazi Germany. the guy who taught the course on hist. methods was German, too. one of the things that was truly difficult for them to deal with--an intellectual puzzle to manny, actually--was that they both loved and despised Germany and, at least with Manny, who was Jewish, felt very contradictory feelings about that since they also internalized this and hated themselves. Manny was honest about that and would speak of a text--which I read, but can't recall--in which the author--a Freudian, i believe--interviews children of Nazi war criminals to ask how they felt about their fathers. It's a fascinating question in Freudian theory: how children learn to identify with the agressor (the punitive [sometimes abusive] parent) and resolve their contradictory feelings toward their parent by identifying with the aggressor AND identifying with the victim. (it is not surprising that Manny's obsession was one of the nature of the relationship between self and society (the Law of the Father, for ken mack :):
i was intrigued by manny's obsession b/c i'd read this a few years before, as an undergrad. i'd say that it can be used as a template to understand all the positions in this debate.
"What is so powerful in the mechanism of identification w/ the victim is that i transforms an identification with the aggressor into an identification with the nurturer (since aggressor and nurturer are one and the same for the child). Faced with another human in a hapless situation, two primitive negative modes of responding are inevitable. First, one perceives the victim as a loser in life, one destined for failure; a slight feeling of terror that the same could happen to oneself creates the need for distance and objectification, and one withdraws, announcing, in effect, "He is not me." Second, one responds with aggression; the victim is a perfect vehicle to carry one's aggressive needs to satisfaction; he cannot hit back. Aggression also helps maintain the barrier between oneself and the unfortunate one. <...
The only positive alternative to these negative responses is to identify with the victim's pain and to offer compassion--in effect, to play the role of nurturer toward someone in need. Margaret Mahler tells the story of a child, Teddy, who consistently alternatives between these two fundamental modes of reacting to others' suffering:
Teddy's reaction to another child's crying...were interesting
to observe. He would not bear to hear another child cry. This
seemed somehow to stimulate his aggressive defensiveness; he
would attack other children. His undeniable awareness of separate-
ness and vulnerability seemed, however, to have given rise to a
new capacity for empathy, which was expressed in positive ways
as well. Teddy, at other times, reacted quite sympathetically to
the moods of other children. For example, he would approach Harriet
with great sympathy and interest on a day when she was in an
obviously low mood.
We must ask why it is that some people--if not most people--are incapable of an adequate identification with the victim. We may then begin to see that such an ability results from failure to handle problems of aggression, failure to separate self adequately from others. If we see such matters in this light, we might start to perceive that moral action and psychic health are intimately related to each other.
In summary, the capacity to identify with both the nurturer and the victim is essential to both conscience and a healthy psyche. this conclusion never could have been reached by a psychoanalytic theory restricted to oedipal and post-oedipal life. The fundamental weakness in Freud's theory of morality and the superego is that it ignores the pre-oedipal life of the child. <...>
From Eli Sagan's _Freud, Women, and Morality_