from History & Memory Volume 8, Number 2
Eichmann, Arendt and Freud in Jerusalem: On the Evils of Narcissism and the Pleasures of Thoughtlessness*
José Brunner
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Ich sass am Schreibtisch und machte meine Sachen.
Adolf Eichmann
Introduction
Hannah Arendt invokes a peculiar notion of "thoughtlessness" in Eichmann in Jerusalem in order to account for the evil deeds of the architect of the Final Solution. In this essay I explore this notion from a psychoanalytic position in order to confront Arendt with Freud on the issues of evil and thoughtlessness, creating a dialogue, as it were,parate thinkers. Indeed, it is the attempt to bridge the notable gap which separates Arendt's political perspective from Freud's psychoanalytic theory, and to hybridize both discourses, which constitutes the challenge of this essay.
It is not difficult to point out differences between Arendt and Freud. The latter's concern with health and pathology is conceived in terms of individual functioning and articulated in terms of intrapsychic stability or balance as well as private relationships. In Arendt's work the mind's life is examined and assessed with reference to its effects on actions in the public sphere. My aim is to demonstrate that despite their differences Arendt and Freud have more in common than might be assumed at first, and that it is worthwhile to point to affinities between psychoanalysis and Arendt's work. On the one hand, such an undertaking elucidates complexities and coherences of Arendt's discourse and reveals psychological insights which are part of her work but which hitherto have been neglected. On the other hand, it demonstrates how psychoanalytic categories can be applied to collective entities and large-scale political structures in a manner which is fruitful and nonreductionist.
However, before I present my argument, a word on what cannot be found in this article: it does not contain a psychoanalytic profile of Eichmann. No attempt is made to place him on the couch, as it were, and to trace his adult behavior to experiences in early childhood. Instead, I wish to unravel what I see as a series of interrelated but unspoken psychological theses that form a hidden thread running through Arendt's entire political discourse.
1. True Appearances
As its title declares, Arendt's The Life of the Mind is devoted to an analysis of mental activities, but it almost completely ignores Freud's work. 1 It is strange to find a treatise on the mind written in the second half of the twentieth century which dismisses the entire terrain of psychology with a few desultory comments. According to Arendt: "psychology, depth psychology or psychoanalysis, discovers no more than the ever-changing moods, the ups and downs of our psychic life, and its results and discoveries are neither particularly appealing nor very meaningful in themselves." 2 A mixture of ethical, aesthetical and factual argument is characteristic of the idiosyncratic polemic in which she expresses her disdain for concern with the unconscious depth of the psyche.
Arendt's attitude should not surprise anyone acquainted with her work, whose trajectory is diametrically opposed to that of Freud's theorizing. While he sought the truth of human conduct in universal principles and processes pertaining to the invisible forces and structures hidden in the unconscious core of the mind, she finds it in the diversity of visible appearances:
The monotonous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and outside of the human body.... Without the sexual urge, arising out of our reproductive organs, love would not be possible; but while the urge is always the same, how great is the variety in the actual appearances of love! 3
Against all those who regard the manifest as a mere epiphenomenon of underlying functions, attributing primacy to a concealed "inside" in comparison with a conspicuous "outside," Arendt quotes the findings of the Swiss zoologist and biologist Adolf Portmann. Following Portmann, she assumes that there is a basic, primal "urge to self-display (Selbstdarstellung)." In her words: "whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched. It is indeed as though everything that is alive ... has an urge to appear, to fit itself into the world of appearances by displaying and showing not its 'inner self' but itself as an individual." 4
Arendt's approach leaves no room for a mental archeology of the Freudian type, whereby external appearances are decoded as serving forces originating in the dark recesses of the psyche. For her, interest in the mind's hidden structures is as misguided as the focus on the body's internal organs; both yield monotonous results which are irrelevant to an understanding of the beautiful and plentiful multiplicity of human existence. 5 Arendt endeavors to transcend the hierarchical division into exterior and interior, performance and reality, appearance and truth. For her the essential is not beneath the surface. Rather, the surface of human conduct itself is the essential, since it reveals the uniqueness, plurality and splendor of life in the here and now. What is important is the individual presentation of an emotion, which is always mediated by thinking:
... feelings, passions and emotions can no more become part and parcel of the world of appearances than can our inner organs.... Every show of anger, as distinct from the anger I feel, already contains a reflection on it, and it is this reflection that gives the emotion the highly individualized form which is meaningful for all surface phenomena. To show one's anger is one form of self-presentation: I decide what is fit for appearance. 6
As we see, Arendt seeks to move beyond the hierarchy conventionally implied in the opposition of an "inside" to an "outside," by positing an inner, underlying urge or basic motivational force which is said to drive all living matter to externalize itself in an individualized self-display. For her the world is a stage, as the Shakespearean saying has it, and life is a spectacle. She borrows the metaphors of her discourse from the sphere of the theater, characterizing the latter in The Human Condition as "the political art par excellence" because, she explains, "only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art." By the same token, Arendt describes the political world as a domain of "heroes," "human performances," "historical scenes" and "spaces of appearance" in which human beings seek "immortal fame." 7
Rather than regarding the city-states of Greek antiquity as attempts to establish systems of stable rule and government, she attributes their foundation to the intention of creating a permanent stage on which one could transcend one's mortality:
The polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win "immortal fame," that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness ... men's life together in the form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech ... would become imperishable. The organization of the polis ... is a kind of organized remembrance. It assures the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing before an audience of fellow men. 8
There is, however, a crucial difference between play-acting and acting in the real world. On the stage of the theater actors create illusions. Instead of showing their true colors and disclosing who they are, they speak a script written by others, enact stories, and display themselves in ways which do not necessarily represent their true being. In contrast, Arendt claims that in acting and speaking in the real world, people "reveal actively their unique personal identities." 9
Reading Arendt from a psychoanalytic angle, one cannot avoid the conclusion that her discourse constructs human nature as naturally and fundamentally narcissistic, albeit without ever using this term and without attributing to the phenomenon any of the unconscious dynamics or pathological features associated with narcissism in psychoanalytic discourse.
What, then, is narcissism? Of course, only some rudimentary explanatory remarks are possible here. Originally, Freud defined narcissism as a libidinal investment of the ego accompanied by megalomanic fantasies. 10 In the wake of Freud, the notion of narcissism is usually invoked to explain manifestations of exaggerated self-love, self-centeredness and self-aggrandizement, in which one's own value is magnified at the expense of others, who are either greatly depreciated or completely nullified by their assimilation into the narcissist's imaginary comprehensive and grandiose self. What appears as an inflated display of one's own power and self-worth and a lack of empathy for others is interpreted by psychoanalysts as compensating for underlying pervasive feelings of worthlessness, isolation, vulnerability, fragmentation, inauthenticity, depletion and depression. Even though they do not necessarily accept Freud's libido theory, all psychoanalytic schools of thought trace the origins of narcissism to the earliest relationship of the self to the surrounding world. They ascribe a hidden, unconscious dynamic to narcissistic appearances, and even though as eminent a psychoanalytic theorist as Heinz Kohut may suggest that there are also healthy forms of narcissism, psychoanalytic discourse usually pathologizes the phenomenon.
Typically, in narcissistic personality disturbances all that is pure, good, lovable, valuable and admirable is seen as part of one's own self, while all that is contemptible, impure, base, despicable and bad is projected outside onto others. Thus a narcissistic person appears in his or her own eyes as unique, extraordinary and immensely valuable, while others seem deeply flawed, mean and worthless. Moreover, concerns with omnipotence and powerlessness are bound to have a central position in the mental life of narcissistically disturbed persons. Finally, since on a deeper level they inevitably feel unloved, defenseless and worthless, all manifestations of attractiveness, celebrity, success and power of others are experienced as a threat. In order to avoid such threats narcissists have the tendency to turn others into "selfobjects," to use Kohutian terminology, that is, deny their independence in reality or fantasy -- whatever is possible -- incorporate them into their own extended self-conception and use them as mirrors which serve only to provide the acknowledgment, approval, admiration and love which are needed to maintain a feeling of security, existence and value. 11 As Otto Kernberg puts it, narcissistically wounded people "feel they have the right to control and possess others and to exploit them without guilt feelings -- and, behind a surface which is often very charming and engaging, one senses coldness and ruthlessness." 12
Evidently, human beings are constructed as natural narcissists by Arendt: they are presented as propelled by fantasies of grandeur, seeking to impress others and performing in front of them in order to gain admiration and fame and to overcome fears of their own mortality. Similarly, Arendt presents the web of human relations as a realm of exhibitionist encounters in which reality is bestowed upon one's words and deeds only by their being seen and heard by others. Yet, in her depiction such behavior is possible without devaluing others or incorporating them into one's own grandiose self. On the contrary, for Arendt such self-displays can be reciprocal, thus affirming the plurality and diversity of human existence and the uniqueness of all individuals.
As mentioned above, according to Kohut it is possible to speak of a healthy narcissism. He points out that a certain degree of narcissistic motivation is necessary to undertake ambitious projects and to exercise one's natural gifts and abilities. In many cases a narcissistic need for approval by others may impel people to acquire the skills necessary to impress their surroundings. Driven by a healthy narcissism, people may become creative artists, performers or leader figures who come close to realizing their grandiose fantasies in reality, and if their capacities are integrated with realistic aims and pursuits in this fashion, they may also acquire an autonomous capacity for self-admiration.
Arendt's hypothesis of a basic urge to self-display and appearance in front of others can easily be translated into this Kohutian concept of a healthy narcissism. Nevertheless, the concept of health that is implied in her discourse significantly differs from the psychoanalytic one, which refers to the intrapsychic dynamics of forces, as well as the well-being and efficient functioning of the individual at work and in the family. While psychoanalysts like Kohut inquire into underlying unconscious pleasures and fears, satisfactions and anxieties, Arendt stays on the political surface of the phenomenon. Her concern is not with a concept of health that can be applied to the inner world of actors and their private lives, but with the visibility and the impact of their actions on spectators in the public sphere and on the social ethos as a whole. For her, it is the health of the polity which is at stake, and individual self-display is considered healthy because it provides an active contribution to and enactment of human uniqueness, plurality and reciprocity.
As we have seen, she attributes to the Greek polis the role of forming a stage on which one can achieve glory and immortality by means of public speech and action. This theatrical understanding of the Greek politics in antiquity also guides her views on modern politics. Writings in which she treats topics such as council democracy, political participation, civil disobedience, revolution and the public sphere can be read as assembling a theory of the ideal modern polis which offers avenues for the satisfaction of a politically healthy narcissism. By supplying a republican ethos and a democratic structure which protects human plurality, a polity with an open and lively public sphere is supposed to encourage its members to seek ways and means to gain admiration and immortal fame, while at the same time affirming the uniqueness of all human beings and establishing avenues of communication with them.
Thus, an open public sphere permits the satisfaction of the narcissistic urge which Arendt assumes to be fundamental to human nature. However, it channels this urge into avenues which are healthy both in the psychoanalytic and the political sense of the word. For while the existence of an open and democratic public sphere enables individual self-display, its ethos, laws and procedures are also supposed to prevent individuals from relating to others as selfobjects, that is, from captivating and subsuming them into an imaginary, expansive self.
2. Killing for Power
In this section I wish to show that Arendt's early work on totalitarianism can be read as an analysis of a political order which she holds to be radically evil because it systematically thwarts healthy expressions of narcissism. In her view, this is done by the abolition of the public sphere, that is, by the elimination of the stage where narcissistic displays can be performed freely and seen by others. When read from a psychoanalytic perspective it becomes evident that Arendt depicts totalitarianism as a regime which redirects the natural narcissism of human beings into collective channels. In contrast to individual narcissism, which centers on the appearance in front of others, collective narcissism is depicted as pathological in the political sense of the term, that is, as obliterating human plurality by the denigration, devaluation and dehumanization of others, as well as by their control, domination or extermination.
Thus, I regard Arendt's publications of the early 1950s, and above all the last chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, as pointing to the evil caused by the pathologically narcissistic features of totalitarianism. For the aspects of totalitarianism which are stressed by Arendt in order to demonstrate that it constitutes a novel form of radical evil -- and hence a political phenomenon sui generis -- are precisely those which characterize it as an expression of collective narcissism. In a letter to Karl Jaspers written in March 1951, shortly after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she makes the following comment:
Evil revealed itself to be more radical than had been assumed.... The occidental tradition suffers from the prejudice that the worst deeds of man derive from the vice of self-interest; but we know that the worst evil (Böseste), or radical evil (radikal Böse), has nothing to do with sinful motives which can be grasped by human understanding. I don't know what radical evil actually is, but it seems somehow related to ... the making superfluous of men as men (not their instrumentalization, which leaves their humanity untouched and only violates their human dignity).... Men in the plural are made superfluous when one abolishes all their unpredictability or spontaneity, and the attempt to do so derives from, or is related to, a delusion of omnipotence (Wahn von einer Allmacht) (not simply a drive to power). If man qua man were omnipotent, it would indeed not be evident why there should be a plurality of men -- just as in monotheism it is the omnipotence of God which turns Him into ONE. In this sense it can be said that the omnipotence of man makes men superfluous. 13
It is not difficult to translate this passage into the psychoanalytic discourse on narcissism; for the latter traces a specific form of aggression -- which is directed against human diversity as such -- to an attitude which may well be described with Arendt's notion of a "delusion of omnipotence." According to Kohut the need to cover up the narcissist's inner vulnerability may explain the eruption of a boundless rage against those who refuse to be incorporated into the narcissist's extended self so as to feed fantasies of absolute power and grandeur. Kohut argues that there is "a specific psychological flavor" to narcissistic rage which differentiates it from other forms of aggression:
The narcissistically injured ... cannot rest until he has blotted out a vaguely experienced offender who dared to oppose him, to disagree with him, or to outshine him.... The enemy ... who calls forth the ... rage of the narcissistic vulnerable is seen by him not as an autonomous source of impulsions, but as a flaw in a narcissistically perceived reality. He is a recalcitrant part of an expanded self over which he expects to exercise full control and whose mere independence or other-ness is an offense. 14
As can be seen, the narcissistic aggression diagnosed by Kohut is also said by him to be motivated by a "delusion of omnipotence" such as Arendt refers to in her letter, in which any otherness or plurality is experienced as a violation, threat or affront and has to be annihilated.
Of course, the parallels between Arendt and psychoanalysis are not exhausted by a passage in one of her letters. In fact, in three points there are significant affinities between the psychoanalytic approach to narcissism and Arendt's views on the nature of totalitarianism as they are presented in the early 1950s. Thus, the structure of the totalitarian state, as depicted by Arendt, appears to be a metaphorical transposition of the narcissistic personality in psychoanalytic discourse. This might be an opportunity to comment, perhaps, that by putting the Third Reich and the Stalinist Soviet Union under a common heading, Arendt ostensibly writes about a general political phenomenon when she refers to totalitarianism, but the emphases and structure of her book -- for instance, a third is devoted to anti-Semitism in Western Europe -- leave no doubt that what really concerns her is National Socialism.
First, Arendt explains that the totalitarian regime rests upon a "planned shapelessness" whose purpose is to introduce obscurity into politics. 15 As she puts it, even the knowledge of whom one has to obey would introduce a degree of transparency and stability into the state -- which would allow one also to notice the limitations of the state's power. According to Arendt, it is typical of the totalitarian state that its official hierarchy of ranks, agencies and echelons provides but a veneer behind which its true nucleus of power is hidden: the secret police. 16 In her words, in the totalitarian state "real power begins where secrecy begins." 17 Thus, the totalitarian state is presented as a narcissistically disturbed individual: it projects a façade of power and develops an internal structure which is designed to hide its weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
Second, the totalitarian state regards manifestations of autonomy, difference and independence as threatening and seeks to eradicate all diversity or plurality. In this, too, it exhibits a narcissistic pathology. Arendt stresses that in contrast to authoritarian regimes of the more traditional type, the totalitarian secret police begins its actual career after the consolidation of the state, that is, after the opposition has been liquidated, and therefore often appears superfluous to observers. 18 But she emphasizes that the totalitarian secret police is not primarily active against opponents of the regime, such as dissidents, rebels or agitators, as it would be in despotic regimes. Rather, it is active against those whom the regime declares to be "objective enemies." 19 Arendt explains:
The category of the suspect thus embraces under totalitarian conditions the total population; every thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently changing line is already suspect, no matter in which field of human activity is occurs. Simply because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspect by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior, for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change one's mind.... Mutual suspicion, therefore, permeates all social relationships in totalitarian countries and creates an all-pervasive atmosphere even outside the special purview of the secret police. 20
This role of the secret police points to a crucial difference which distinguishes the totalitarian state from its authoritarian counterparts -- and which distinguishes narcissistic aggression from other forms. While authoritarian regimes aim to restrict freedom, totalitarian rule is directed toward its complete abolition and "even at eliminating human spontaneity in general." 21 According to Arendt, the goal of totalitarian regimes is to reduce human existence to "a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other." 22
Third, Arendt attributes the establishment of totalitarian concentration camps to a quest for omnipotence which reminds one of a narcissistic disorder. She emphasizes that as opposed to other instances where concentration camps were used, such as in the Boer War in South Africa, totalitarian concentration camps were economically useless and not established for the sake of forced labor. 23 Already before her publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism she strongly opposed the tendency of social scientists and historians to seek utilitarian explanations for the establishment of totalitarian concentration camps. In her words: "If we assume that most of our actions are of a utilitarian nature and that our evil deeds spring from some 'exaggeration' of self-interest, then we are forced to conclude that this particular institution of totalitarianism is beyond human understanding." 24 In contrast, she explains that the totalitarian concentration camps "are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not." 25
Arendt distinguishes three steps by means of which the systematic destruction of the human being is achieved in the concentration camp and she explains each of them as serving a delusion of omnipotence: "The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man." The second step, after the person has been deprived of rights and any other forms of legal protection, is "the murder of the moral person in man." 26 According to Arendt, this is achieved by corrupting human solidarity in the camp, making any testimony impossible and denying the dying the ability to endow their death with meaning. Above all, however, this is realized by making the victim an accomplice of the murderers in one way or another. 27 Finally, in the last step the unique identity of the individual is destroyed by inhuman physical conditions: the transport to the camps, during which people are herded like cattle, and the suffering in the concentration camps, which includes a unique form of torture, whose aim is not to make the victims confess but simply to display power. Thus, Arendt states, concentration camps seek to produce "living corpses"; for "the society of the dying established in the camps is the only form of society in which it is possible to dominate man entirely." 28 In this fashion the nonutilitarian pursuit of omnipotence begets radical evil; for as Arendt declares on the last page: "we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous." 29
To sum up: Arendt portrays totalitarianism as a system of government which exercises power for power's sake, since it is driven by an insatiable desire for omnipotence. As she stresses, "[t]otalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous.... As long as all men have not been made equally superfluous -- and this has been accomplished only in concentration camps -- the ideal of totalitarian domination has not been achieved." 30 The totalitarian state abolishes the spontaneity, plurality and human dignity of all individuals for the sake of its institutional omnipotence, Arendt explains. Even though she deals with a political institution, her account has affinities with a psychoanalytic sketch of narcisssistic pathology since she stresses the nonutilitarian nature of National Socialist aggression and emphasizes the latter's dehumanization and devaluation of its victims, as well as the insatiable but also cold and systematic nature of its murderous practices, which are designed to satisfy a collective delusion of omnipotence, rather than a realistic political aim.
3. The Silent Type
A psychoanalytic reading of Arendt not only has the effect of turning The Origins of Totalitarianism into a treatise on the radical evil caused by institutional narcissism. By introducing a new perspective on Eichmann in Jerusalem, it also allows one to draw her early and later work closer toeach other and to perceive some of the ways in which the latter complements her analysis of totalitarianism.
As I wish to show in this section, her report on the Eichmann trial suggests not only that the totalitarian system eliminates possibilities of healthy narcissistic satisfactions by the abolition of an open public sphere, but also that its efficient functioning relies on those who are ready to totally abandon or suppress their healthy narcissism. I propose to read Arendt's depiction of Eichmann as presenting the paradigmatic example of a person who completely renounced his individual narcissism for the sake of a collective cause. In addition, I suggest that Eichmann could become a capable operator in the National Socialist apparatus, according to Arendt, because he lacked narcissism on another level as well, which I label "intrasubjective." As I shall show, the Arendtian notion of "thoughtlessness" serves to describe this absence of intrasubjective narcissism within her discourse. Conversely, I also claim that her discourse makes the ability to think contingent upon the presence of narcissism on an intrasubjective level, and that it presents this form of narcissism as an obstacle to collaboration with totalitarianism.
Let us, then, turn to Arendt's portrait of Eichmann as a man devoid of all features that psychoanalysts associate with narcissism.
In Arendt's narrative, Eichmann appears as neither a particularly successful nor charming or engaging person. Surprisingly enough, he was no anti-Semite: he showed neither a deep-seated fear of Jews nor a passionate hatred or rage against them. 31 According to Arendt, "he never harbored any ill feelings against his victims, and, what is more, he never made a secret of that fact." 32 He was not even particularly eager to have the Jews deported and killed; when he first heard of the Führer's order to exterminate the Jews, he was quite unhappy about it. 33 He would have preferred a "political solution" to the Jewish question, that is, to send them into forced emigration to Madagascar rather than dispatching them to their death in Eastern Europe. 34
His grade in the SS remained low. Although he had a tendency to brag, he sought neither admiration nor publicity. On the contrary, he was ready to remain in the shadows, doing his job at the desk as an anonymous bureaucrat, as the quintessential cog in the big wheel of the National Socialist movement. Throughout Arendt's book, Eichmann is depicted as incapable of saying or doing anything unique, anything at all that would reveal who he is. He even lacked a language of his own. Arendt quotes him as saying that officialese -- Amtssprache -- was his only language. In her view, "officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché." 35 Finally, Eichmann is made to appear as a man of monologues rather than dialogues. Either he listened to the voice of the Führer and did as he was told or he disseminated stock phrases. Lacking thoughts and a voice of his own, he was incapable of entering into an internal dialogue with himself or a conversation with others. As Arendt puts it:
The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. 36
Arendt reiterates time and again that Eichmann committed his evil deeds because he was incapable of thinking. Let me therefore examine her definition of "thinking" and its relationship to the psychoanalytic model of the mind.
Arendt uses the term "thinking" to denote a "soundless dialogue ... between me and myself." 37 Thus, despite the fundamental differences in their outlook on human affairs, Arendt's picture of the mind has one important feature in common with Freud's. She, too, regards the subject as decentered, that is, as divided into a plurality of sub-subjects who can be involved in an internal conversation with each other -- a conversation which, however, in her frame of reference takes place exclusively on a conscious level. Moreover, due to its self-examining nature, in which it performs as the subject's conscience, Arendt's concept of thinking involves something like the psychoanalytic notion of the superego. The silent dialogue of thinking creates a two-in-one, in which part of the self has to live up to the moral standards of the other part, which acts as an inner spectator, judge and witness: "The partner who comes to life when you are alert and alone is the only one from whom you can never get away -- except by ceasing to think." 38
However, a comparison between Arendt and Freud reveals more differences than similarities. The Freudian superego imposes conventional values on the subject by internalizing and reinforcing socially established moral standards and ideals which have been adopted from parental authority figures. In contrast, Arendtian thinking questions and subverts dominant social conventions and mores. For her, thinking is a solitary process; the close presence of others may prevent it from taking place, since they force an unthinking oneness upon the subject's internal plurality. Thinking demands solitude because it always induces a temporary paralysis, a moment in which one cannot act, but reflects instead. It perplexes, examines established conventions, rules and prescriptions and undermines them without positing new ones. As Arendt emphasizes, thinking "does not create values; it will not find out, once and for all, what 'the good' is; it does not confirm but, rather, dissolves accepted rules of conduct." 39
Arendt deciphers Socrates' famous claim that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong as deriving from the need to come to an agreement with oneself by means of an inner dialogue. In her words: "It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer." 40 She also interprets Kant's categorical imperative -- "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law" -- as based on this understanding. 41 Thus, Arendt turns her notion of thinking as internal dialogue into the implicit rationale of some of the most important Western philosophical conceptualizations of moral conduct.
The psychoanalytic viewpoint helps to explain the role which the Socratic picture of thinking plays in Arendt's work in general and in her report on the Eichmann trial in particular. In the opening chapters of The Life of the Mind Arendt posits that human beings tend to act with the purpose of being seen by a spectator whose approval or admiration is vital to them. One wonders, then, how it is possible for an individual to achieve autonomy; for if she assumes an urge to narcissistic satisfaction as basic to all human beings, she faces the challenge of explaining how autonomy and separation can be a desirable, stable and satisfying condition. The vision of thinking as intrapersonal dialogue offers a way out of this problem that is consistent with her basic assumption. What she suggests, in fact, is that one can gain independence from others by introjecting others -- or at least one other -- into oneself, thereby enabling oneself to conduct an internal dialogue and to supply one's own narcissistic satisfaction. Indeed, because narcissism is a natural given for Arendt, the only way for her to conceive of autonomy is to describe it as a condition in which an actor has managed to introject the role of the spectator into his or her self and to be both actor and spectator in one.
Of course, the ability to satisfy one's narcissism intrasubjectively and autonomously -- i.e. generating self-admiration by performing for oneself -- is a capacity which Kohut also posits as an essential feature of healthy narcissism, since it means that one has no need to turn others into one's "selfobjects." However, in this instance, too, it has to be stressed that Arendt is concerned with the moral and political effects of mental activities rather than with the mental health of political actors and their private relationships. In her discourse the ability to think on one's own is considered healthy not because it promotes the well-being of the thinking individual and allows him or her to establish stable and satisfying friendships and love-relations, but because it induces those who are capable of a healthy narcissism to oppose or at least refuse cooperation with totalitarian evil -- and thus seek to restore the health of a sick polity.
Arendt postulates that those who think will not only refuse to initiate evil deeds of their own but also refrain from collaborating with forces of evil, even when these have obtained power, such as happened in the Third Reich. As she explains: "At these moments, thinking ceases to be a marginal affair in political matters. When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action." 42 In her view, those who failed to be swayed by the evil of Nazism were not those who adhered to specific moral maxims but those who were capable of thinking in the dialogic sense in which she defines it. As she puts it:
The non-participants, called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who were able to judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they [had] a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience but, I would suggest, because their conscience did not function in [an] as it were automatic way -- as though, we [have] a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises.... Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they could still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds.... The presupposition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but merely the habit of living together explicitly with oneself, that is, of being engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which since Socrates and Plato we usually call thinking.... The total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that those who are reliable in such circumstances are not those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards..... Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good and doubting wholesome, but because [these people] are used to [examining things and making up their own minds]. Best of all will be those who know that, whatever else happens, as long as we live we are condemned to live together with ourselves. 43
In other words, in Arendt's work the capacity for thinking derives from the possibility of an inner split in which one becomes one's own spectator, whose approval for one's actions one has to seek. On the one hand, the development of this intrasubjective narcissism is a guarantee of moral conduct according to Arendt. On the other hand, thoughtlessness, i.e. a lack of intrasubjective narcissism, leads to evil deeds which she describes as banal, precisely because she regards them as motivated by thoughtlessness.
My psychoanalytic reading of Arendt's portrait of Eichmann can be summed up as follows: Eichmann became a paragon of banal evil because he renounced the two forms of healthy narcissism. First, since he did not seek to display himself as an individual in the public sphere to gain the approval of others, Eichmann was perfectly suited to be a grey, anonymous and loyal operator in the service of an institutionalized collective narcissistic pathology. Second, because he was ready to give up his intrasubjective narcissism, and thus his ability to think, he had no qualms about doing what he did. As mentioned above, this leads to the following conclusion: while totalitarianism as a political system is pathologically narcissistic on an institutional or collective level, its servants are marked by a disastrous absence of narcissism on an individual and an intrasubjective level.
4. Dying with Pleasure
Arendt's attempt to explain Eichmann's deeds by an absence or a lack leaves her with the claim that Eichmann's evil was caused by a perverted Kantianism, that is, a thoughtless commitment to duty. However, psychoanalysis has taught us to be suspicious of apparently unmotivated mental states, lapses and absences and to regard them as hiding unconscious wishes and desires. In this section I articulate such a psychoanalytic suspicion vis-à-vis Arendt's position and counsel skepticism concerning Kantianisms of all kinds by pointing to the secret pleasures gained in the fulfillment of a duty which seems opposed to desire. So far I have attempted to interpret and enrich Arendt's work from a psychoanalytic point of view and to show that there are unexpected affinities between these two lines of thought, which are markedly different in so many ways. Now I deploy psychoanalytic insights to criticize Arendt's concept of thoughtlessness in her portrait of Eichmann.
Thoughtlessness, I contend, cannot be taken as an ultimate cause. It did not afflict Hitler's accomplices and henchmen at random; therefore it has to be analyzed as a motivated and purposeful mental condition -- which from a psychoanalytic angle is done by reference to the pleasures gained by an action or a mode of behavior. Adopting such a viewpoint, I argue that what brought Eichmann to renounce thinking -- and hence his autonomy -- was the pleasurable feeling he derived from the symbolic destruction of his own self.
In Arendt's presentation the Nazi regime was based on a grotesque inversion of the Kantian categorical imperative. The categorical imperative -- which has been quoted earlier -- demands that one's acts be motivated by duty rather inclination. It is a formal principle designed to universalize dignity and respect among human beings and prevent that anyone instrumentalize anybody else. Contrary to Eichmann's own claim to having abandoned the attempt to live according to this Kantian principle when he was put in charge of the extermination of the Jews, Arendt argues that Eichmann perverted rather than rejected the categorical imperative -- she speaks of an "unconscious distortion" -- when carrying out the Final Solution. 44 As she puts it: "in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant's precepts: a law was a law, there could be no exceptions ... this was proof that he had always acted against his 'inclinations,' whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his 'duty'." 45 According to Arendt, what Eichmann preserved from Kantianism was "the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law -- the source from which the law sprang." However, Arendt also points to the important distinction which separated Kant's ethical design from Eichmann's reading of it: "In Kant's philosophy, that source was practical reason; in Eichmann's household use of him, it was the will of the Führer." 46
When he said in the police examination that he would have sent his own father to his death if it had been required, he did not mean merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey them; he also meant to show what an "idealist" he had always been. The perfect "idealist," like everybody else, had of course his personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his "idea." 47
In the topsy-turvy world of Nazi values good Germans were to seek their pride in the ability to dehumanize others and to murder them without feeling compassion and sympathy. According to this twisted Kantianism, fulfilling one's duty without making exceptions allowed one to feel virtuous -- even if this duty included genocide. Arendt comments with bitter irony: "Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognized it -- the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom.... But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation." 48
For Kant, the ability to act out of respect for the law is a sign of moral autonomy. For Eichmann, however, the ideas of obedience to the law and of death were intertwined with one another. He chose the common but suggestive German term "Kadavergehorsam," i.e. "the obedience of a corpse," to describe his obedience to the law. 49 By depriving himself of his autonomy, that is, by denying himself of a will, conscience and a voice of his own, Eichmann had indeed lost most of his human attributes. But by dying as an autonomous subject he also achieved control over spontaneity, desires and inclinations, attaining superhuman predictability and consistency. Moreover, by killing himself symbolically as an individual he became an active part of an omnipotent political apparatus which caused death and destruction on an unprecedented scale.
Thus, in Eichmann's case it may be appropriate to have recourse to Erich Fromm's concept of the necrophilous character, which denotes "the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical." 50 It seems to me that Eichmann's commitment to duty was reinforced by a necrophilic passion which found its ultimate satisfaction in the systematic destruction of others and, simultaneously, in his own symbolic demise as a subject.
All descriptions of moments of elation and enjoyment in Eichmann's life that Arendt mentions in her book involve references which he made to his own death and the death of others. As she recounts, shortly before the war was over Eichmann bragged to his associates: "I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews [or 'enemies of the Reich,' as he always claimed to have said] on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction." 51 According to Eichmann's own statement, it gave him "an extraordinary sense of elation to think that [he] was exiting from the stage in this way." 52 When his moment of death finally arrived, he bid the world goodbye with the following words: "After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them." As Arendt comments: "In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was 'elated' and he forgot that this was his own funeral." 53 It takes a strange sense of irony and a great calm to tell one's executioners in the last minutes of one's life that they, too, are bound to die. Moreover, one has to have a bizarre personality to cherish one's execution as a final moment of elation. However, such passages evoke the impression that the idea of dying gave Eichmann pleasure.
To sum up: contra Arendt I suggest that thoughtlessness is motivated by a desire and that evildoers like Eichmann refuse to think because the absence of thought provides them with more pleasure than its presence. Thus, it is not enough to say that thoughtlessness caused Eichmann to commit evil deeds; for his thoughtlessness derived from a desire to disappear as an autonomous subject and turn into a cog in a purportedly all-powerful apparatus.
Here we return to the connection between Arendt's concept of radical evil in The Origins of Totalitarianism and that of banal evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem. As we have seen, in the former book she argues that "radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous." 54 Her statement indeed applies to all human beings, perpetrators and victims alike -- albeit in a significantly different manner: while the latter are exterminated physically, the former merely have come to regard their own individuality as superfluous. It is by making themselves superfluous in this fashion that they become capable of committing their evil deeds without feeling guilty, as Arendt illustrates in the chapter in Eichmann in Jerusalem on the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 where the decision on the Final Solution was taken and at which Eichmann acted as secretary. Arendt sums up and quotes from Eichmann's testimony in order to portray the moment at which he realized that the established civil servants of the Third Reich "were vying and fighting with each other for taking the lead in these 'bloody' matters. 'At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.' Who was he to judge? Who was he 'to have [his] own thoughts in this matter'?" 55 As Arendt presents it, Eichmann was incapable of being an autonomous individual. He could not stick to his own thoughts in the presence of others; instead, his thinking simply mirrored theirs; and by subordinating his moral judgment to that of others, he silenced his internal moral spectator.
One may wonder why anyone would abandon his autonomy, thought and judgment in the presence of others and accept his symbolic death as a subject. Eichmann's own response to this question was quite straightforward. He rationalized his behavior by pointing to his alleged powerlessness in the Nazi apparatus, stating that "from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution he ... had consoled himself with the thought that he no longer was 'master of his own deeds,' that he was unable 'to change anything'." 56 Eichmann's answer is unconvincing, but since Arendt presents thoughtlessness as unmotivated, she cannot answer this question at all.
Moreover, Arendt's failure to attribute a motive to Eichmann's thoughtlessness leads her discourse into a contradiction. On the one hand, her description of Eichmann as thoughtless is part of her provocative presentation of him as terrifyingly normal. As is well known, Arendt stresses that Eichmann "was quite ordinary, common-place, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness." 57 Strongly intent on underscoring Eichmann's normality, she opposes all attempts at pathologizing his character. Her sarcastic comment on Eichmann's certification as normal by half a dozen psychiatrists is that "behind the comedy of the soul experts lay the hard fact that this was obviously no case of moral let alone legal insanity." 58
However, as Mary McCarthy points out in a letter which she wrote to Arendt in June 1971, by tracing Eichmann's deeds to a lack of a basic human capacity -- that is, to an inability to think -- Arendt nevertheless ends up by describing him as a monster. "Perhaps I'm dull-witted, but it seems to me that what you are saying is that Eichmann lacks an inherent human quality: the capacity for thought, consciousness -- conscience. But then isn't he a monster simply? If you allow him a wicked heart, then you leave him some freedom, which permits our condemnation." 59 Alluding to Kant, McCarthy claims: "One cannot help feeling that this mental oblivion is chosen, by the heart or the moral will -- an active preference." 60
I agree with McCarthy that by refusing to attribute any deeper, underlying motives to Eichmann's evil deeds -- i.e. considering them to be banal -- and turning thoughtlessness into an inert and unexplained feature, Arendt presents Eichmann as a monster after all. Indeed, it is not entirely clear why a creature incapable of thought should be responsible for his or her actions and be punishable for them. Ironically, by tracing Eichmann's thoughtlessness to an underlying, pleasure-seeking motive -- albeit an unconscious one -- a psychoanalytic approach humanizes the phenomenon of thoughtlessness and diminishes Eichmann's monstrosity. And even if it may pathologize Eichmann in the process, a psychoanalytic perspective by no means frees him from criminal responsibility. On the contrary, it holds him fully responsible for his thoughtlessness. 61
What, then, may be said from a psychoanalytic vantage point on Eichmann's motivation to renounce thinking? The answer I suggest here relies on a comment made by Heinz Kohut and links Eichmann's thoughtlessness with his necrophilia, i.e. with the elation he felt when facing death. Kohut explains that people may be ready to commit collective suicide under certain circumstances -- such as prolonged economic and cultural deprivation -- because sharing a spectacular fantasy of grandeur and omnipotence may be more important to them than their individual lives. 62 Eichmann did not commit suicide, of course, but it may be possible that he was ready to become a cog because this enabled him to fuse with the eternal life of his nation, which he conjured up at the moment of his individual death. As Arendt puts it: "From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely into a Movement that always kept moving and in which somebody like him -- already a failure in the eyes of his social class, of his family, and hence in his own eyes as well -- could start from scratch and make a career." 63 In other words, being a thoughtless bureaucrat in the National Socialist apparatus endowed Eichmann's life with more meaning than it had before he joined the Party, since being a Nazi official allowed him to partake in the institutional narcissism of the Third Reich. His own ordinary individuality was a small price to pay to join a collective fantasy of omnipotence, moral purity, greatness and eternity.
Thus, Eichmann's thoughtlessness may have brought him narcissistic satisfaction after all. However, the pleasures obtained in this form of narcissism were necrophilic in a number of ways: they turned Eichmann into a living corpse and caused the physical death of his victims. Ultimately they also led to Eichmann's execution. They were the pleasures of death.
Conclusions
Throughout this essay I have used psychoanalytic categories to bring to the surface a psychological argument which is implicit in Arendt's work. However, this reading has not only "psychologized" Arendt's discourse; in the interface between psychoanalysis and Arendt's writings the psychoanalytic categories deployed have been "politicized" in return. Thus, two types of lessons can be drawn, referring to (a) the politics of narcissism and (b) the psychological depth of Arendt's discourse.
The hybrid created by the amalgamation of two dissimilar discourses leads to a distinction between three interrelated levels of narcissism and hypotheses concerning their political implications, which cannot be found in the psychoanalytic literature. Despite the methodological problems involved, the latter tends to consider societies and polities simply as individual souls writ large. In contrast, the politicized and differentiated psychoanalysis generated by the fusion of Arendt and Kohut postulates a complex relationship between the individual and the institutional level. It posits that there is a trade-off between individual and intrasubjective narcissism on the one hand, and collective or institutional narcissism on the other. The more one is equipped with individual and intrasubjective narcissism, the less likely one is to become a cog in the wheel of totalitarianism; but the more readily one abandons one's intrasubjective and individual narcissism in order to fuse with institutionalized narcissism, the closer one comes to Eichmann's example.
A psychoanalytic reading of Arendt suggests that despite her declared intention to keep a safe distance from psychology, her discourse nevertheless contains assumptions and insights which show striking affinities with psychoanalytic postulates. Moreover, it has been shown that Arendt's work follows a logic that makes much sense from a psychoanalytic point of view. Thus, despite Arendt's attempt to stay on the surface of things, her work can be enriched and expanded into the depth of the psyche. By pointing to a continuous but unstated -- and probably unintended -- concern with various levels and forms of narcissism, such a reading stresses the continuity and consistency of Arendt's thinking from The Origins of Totalitarianism through Eichmann in Jerusalem to The Life of the Mind. However, a psychoanalytic perspective also points to a serious contradiction in her thinking, which stems from her refusal to seek underlying motivations for all human actions and mental attitudes.
Notes
I am grateful to Leora Bilsky and Eyal Chowers for their incisive comments on an earlier draft. I am also indebted to Arnona Zahavi, my most careful and critical reader, for completely undermining the argument in that draft, thus provoking me to develop my current thesis.
Arendt's commentators, too, have done next to nothing to confront her concept of the psyche with the psychoanalytic model. The only articles in which I have found at least some attempts in this direction are C. Fred Alford, "The Organization of Evil," Political Psychology 11 (1990): 5--27; and Juliet F. MacCannell, "Fascism and the Voice of Conscience," in Joan Copjec, ed., Radical Evil (London, 1993).
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, 1971), 35.
Ibid.
Ibid., 29. (All emphases in citations are original.)
Ibid.
Ibid., 31.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), 188, 184, 179, 180, 199, 197 (respectively).
Ibid., 197--98.
Ibid., 179.
Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London, 1953--1974), 14:75.
Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York, 1971), xiv; and How Does Analysis Cure? (Chicago, 1984), 54.
Otto F. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York, 1975), 228. Within the limits of this paper it is impossible to discuss differences between theorists who focus on the topic of narcissism, such as Kernberg and Kohut, nor is it possible to elaborate on their departure from Freud's original theory of narcissism.
Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1926--1969, ed. Lotte Köhler and Hans Saner (Munich, 1985), 202 (my translation).
Heinz Kohut, "Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage," Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 27 (1972): 385--86.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; San Diego, 1973), 402.
Ibid., 420.
Ibid., 403.
Ibid., 422.
Ibid., 423.
Ibid., 430.
Ibid., 405.
Ibid., 438.
Ibid., 443--44.
Hannah Arendt, "Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps" (1950), reprinted in Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers, eds., Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time (Philadelphia, 1988), 365; see also 367.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, 438.
Ibid., 447, 451.
Ibid., 452.
Ibid., 456.
Ibid., 459.
Ibid., 457.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; Harmondsworth, 1976), 26.
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 41, 76--78.
Ibid., 48.
Ibid., 49.
The Life of the Mind, 185.
Ibid., 188.
Ibid., 192; and Hannah Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture," Social Research 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1971): 445.
The Life of the Mind, 188. See also "Thinking and Moral Considerations," 442.
Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (1785; Indianapolis, 1959), 39.
Arendt, "Thinking and Moral Considerations," 446.
Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship," The Listener, 6 Aug. 1964, cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Mind and the Body Politic (New York and London, 1989), 16.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136.
Ibid., 137; see also 135.
Ibid., 137.
Ibid., 42.
Ibid., 150.
Ibid., 135.
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Harmondsworth, 1977), 441.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, 46.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 252.
The Origins of Totalitarianism, 459.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, 114.
Ibid., 136.
The Life of the Mind, 4.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, 26.
Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949--1975, ed. Carol Brightman (New York, 1995), 297.
Ibid., 296.
For clear expositions of the argument that a psychoanalytic approach, which stresses unconscious motivation, does not entail a denial of culpability and criminal responsibility, see Morris N. Eagle, "Responsibility, Unconscious Motivation, and Social Order," International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 6 (1983): 263--91; and Michael S. Moore, "Responsibility for Unconsciously Motivated Actions," International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 2 (1979): 323--47.
Heinz Kohut, Self Psychology and the Humanities (New York, 1985), 229.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, 33.
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