Numbing, a Modern Temptation

"My hands went right through my face. I felt I had lost all bones in my body. There was no way to go. . .1 saw a man without feet, walking on his ankles. I passed out. By the time I woke up, black rain was falling. We thought it was oil...I thought I was blind but I got my eyes open and I saw the dead city nobody standing up, nobody walking around." "I saw a streetcar full of people sitting and standing, then I realized all those people were dead."

This was a part of the testimony by survivors of the nuclear bomb at HIROSHIMA, given on Capitol Hill recently. It was said that there was not a dry eye in the room. Yet the impact of this testimony, as well as that from scientists, doctors and military experts, will have questionable effect on society at large mainly because of a protective device in our psychic make-up called numbing. Possibly the world's foremost expert on numbing is Dr. Robert J. Lifton, the psychiatrist who first studied the psychological effects of the atom bomb on the Japanese people. His monumental work "Death In Life-The Survivors of Hiroshima" will go down as a classic of the century. Dr. Lifton has also studied the effects of the Vietnam War on our veterans, and most recently did a study of the medical profession which functioned in Germany during the Holocaust.

From his studies he has developed a profound understanding of the phenomenon of numbing. At the Stauros Congress on the Meaning of Human Suffering, Dr. Lifton delivered a paper on Apathy and Numbing A Modern Temptation. I reproduce parts of that paper. here as a most pertinent addition to the growing debate over nuclear war, as well as a most important personal consideration in facing the massive suffering we witness today.

Virtually all of the people I spoke to reported a particular experience which I heard versions of again and again. They would tell of observing the grotesque scene of the dead and dying right after the bomb fell - a kind of sea of death, in which they were immersed. Very quickly, they would cease to feel. They would cease to feel very much about what they were witnessing, although they were quite clear about what they were seeing. They would say such things as, "I saw everything but felt nothing," or 'I became insensitive to human death." Or, as one writer put it, 'II experienced a paralysis of the mind." I came to understand this phenomenon as a form of diminished capacity to feel - what I came to call psychic numbing, or in its acute form, psychic closing off.

Under those extreme conditions, it was clearly a useful defense mechanism -a way of coping with experiences and images that were simply too threatening - too overwhelming to absorb but to respond to in ordinary ways. Such images had to be warded off if one were to retain one's sanity. In that sense psychic numbing was a temporary deadening of the mind in order to prevent a death of the mind - that is, a kind of psychosis; or of the body, in the sense that psychic numbing helped one to take so~e measures toward survival. Of course, as with any such defense mechanism, it turned out not to be so temporary - and to outlast its usefulness.

I was also to undergo a more personal lesson in psychic numbing, and in a sense, professional numbing. I When I arrived in Hiroshima, I discussed with various people there the human impact of the atomic bomb, and I was astonished to discover that no one had ever made a systematic psychological study of that impact. There had been cornmentaries on various aspects of spiritual suffering, but nobody had carried through a comprehensive investigation of the human consequences of the bomb. I came to see that strange fact - and it was a very strange fact to me, the failure to address psychologically one of the most significant and threatening events in human history - I came to see that as a manifestation of vast professional numbing. Indeed, one has the impression that the more broadly significant an event, the less likely it is to be studied or professionally addressed. Because its very significance defies our existing professional categories, and we tend to prefer to address instead events of lesser significance to which we can more comfortably apply these conventional interpretive categories, nor was I, myself, immune to these pitfalls.

I had experienced first an impulse to flee - to hold on to the kind of professional numbing that distances one from massive death...I had to call forth...selective professional numbing...in order to be able to carry out the investigation. One can see the delicate balance between feeling and numbing...the pitfalls on either side...the greater danger...m most professional life...is the danger of too much numbing and not enough feeling.

Dr. Lifton goes on to explain how numbing is a natural process whereby one is able to exclude/block out those things which are harmful and troubling...and that is necessary for a person to survive or cope. However, it can also be used to block out those feelings about situations which one needs to feel and do something about. Among the forms of numbing he treats are the following.

The Numbing of Everyday Life, concerns us particularly when we think of widespread apathy. I've mentioned the numbing of everyday life to protect us from being overwhelmed and consumed by a mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge (that's in the words of a neurophsysiologist~so that only a very small and special selection that is likely to be practically useful comes through. Of course, a psychologist has to ask immediately how one determines what is largely useless and irrelevant, and what is likely to be practically useful-and that's where one's responses to what is threatening and what can be received by the mind, become bound up with either numbing or feeling. What is useful or manageable for one person may be deeply threatening and unmanageable for another. But, at a time of threat or massive holocaust there are certain issues that threaten us all.

At a certain point, one can postulate how the normal numbing process being useful for individual survival may be dysfunctional for collective survival. And that, of course, has to do with the threats of nuclear weapons or other forces or extermination. Numbing involved things like image-overload; being bombarded with images from all over, that we can't absorb - especially with the media revolution.

During the Vietnam War, it was frequently said that the mass media perpetuated the country's numbing, because you would see the killing right on the Walter Cronkite news show every night, and it became inseparable from a John Wayne episode. On the other hand, what wasn't said so often but what I was struck by, was the extent to which once you began to have doubts about the war, or the sense that it was wrong or bad, every time you saw one of the those images, those doubts would intensify, and you would get angrier and more upset - because the images could connect with very powerful feelings. The mass media are always at least, a two-edged sword. They can reach us very profoundly, as well as superficially, and can be agents, both of numbing or breakout from numbing.

Ideology - I was very struck by various dimensions of ideology in my recent work in Europe, where I had been studying medical behavior in Auschwitz, and the medical behavior under national Socialism, and interviewing both survivor physicians, who had been in Auschwitz as inmates, and former Nazi doctors, who had done various kinds of medical work, including work in camps and other places, under the Nazi Regime. Very often, there would be a combination in this group of ideological numbing along with other elements, but certainly, the experience of strong ideological conviction. In the case of Nazi Germany, a kind of feeling had swept the country that Germany was having a rebirth around a new ideology. It was crude, and yet, it was powerful for many people. The ideological energies are a very great source of numbing, particularly around the process of harming other groups. And, of course, that becomes much easier and more a possibility when that other group is perceived as different - as of a different ethnic source; different racial group; different religious group.

Technological Distancing - That's of the greatest importance - certainly, the atomic bombing from the standpoint of those who dropped the bomb is a case in point, and I've tried to address that subject in other places. In Vietnam it was significant that people had psychological experiences in relationship to how close they were to the people whom they were killing. It's a very simple and, perhaps, not surprising principle. But those who were on the ground had a whole constellation of experiences of a kind that I and others tried to describe, but involving terror and guilt and a sense of corruption and inauthentic environment -counterfeit universe as I called it - those who flew on helicopters very close to the ground shared almost a similar constellation. Those who flew medium level planes saw some of this - saw some distant figures on the ground and had some explaining to do about what they were doing in order to avoid guilt or, at least, some questioning of the situation. But those on the high level bombers saw nothing. They had no visual or other form of contact with the people they were killing, and for them to even mobilize a sense of responsibility of guilt would require an act of moral imagination rarely actually achieved.

It's of the greatest significance, going back to the making of the atomic bomb, that no voices of questioning or protest came from Los Alamos. When you read the literature on people 5 experiences at Los Alamos, they were preoccupied with getting the bomb made, and they wanted to end the war, but they were also fascinated with the question, would it work? They were struggling for months. They didn't know whether this thing would work, and the scientists' and technicians' curiosity took hold of them. Their main preoccupation became at a certain point: can it work? Can we make it work? The voices of protest began at Chicago, where they had finished their work on the bomb - they had no more to do because the bomb had to be completed and assembled at Los Alamos. It was there that the scientists began to question - raise little questions and big questions - and there is one very moving passage in the memoirs of Eugene Rabinowitch, who as one of the leaders in Chicago, in which he describes walking down a street in Chicago on a hot summer day, and suddenly having the vision of all. the skyscrapers exploding, being destroyed, first in Chicago, and then, in all of the great cities of the world. And, of course, he knew what that meant. He immediately went to his hotel room and began. to draft the first draft of what became a classical scientist statement -the very first - asking that the bomb not be dropped on a human population without warning. Of course, that protest didn't succeed, but it created a beginning orientation around which later protest and questions have been raised. My point is that someone like Rabinowitch or other scientists had to break out of the Technicism that surrounds nuclear weapons. It surrounds the making of them; it surrounds the scenarios back and forth about First Strike, Second Strike, and various claims of the weapons killing five million, ten million - these figures just dazzle the mind and become unmanageable until they reach out of the technicism and having an image of a moral kind of vision, so to speak, which enabled Rabinowitch to break through and initiate a moral act along with his colleagues. And it's that struggle to replace technicism with difficult questions of value that is the heart of numbing in relationship to nuclear weapons and other sources of potential annihilation.

These technological weapons threaten to do us in. The very inorganic, unreeling technology, serves constantly to distance and befuddle us, as though we continually expect it to take some human form, to feel pain when it causes us pain, to be subject to some kind of reason or coherence, which it does not have. Sometimes the matter is even worse: we want the weapons to deliver us to save us and then we get in to a pattern I call Nuclearism or the worship of the very agents of our potential annihilation. That, of course, is one aspect of scientism, the worship of science. It becomes, of course, grotesque and profoundly dangerous. Around nuclear weapons, one can see it in certain public figures...in the reliance upon weapons to protect from every danger, and the insistence that we not restrict our making of nuclear weapons or our potential use of nuclear weapons. And the weapons really become a deity - A deity that is expected to create, as well as destroy.

A prominent scholar has said: "Nuclear War is the central issue of our age - everything else is a footnote." Since the United Nations' special session on disarmament this June is crucial to the future of the human race, we encourage our readers to engage in this "central issue of our times" by prayer, study and action.

Resources and Contacts

• "The Big Game", 35 mm. color slide show with cassette. Challenges the belief that increased armaments bring increased security. Available from: American Friends Service Committee, 15 Rutherford Place, New York, NY 10003. Rental: $7.00.
• "The Last Slide Show", 21 mm. color slide show. Documents the possibility of a nuclear war as well as the possibilities for successful disarmament. Available from: American Friends Service Committee (above).
• Office of International Justice and Peace, USCC, 1312 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington D.C., 20005. Publications/Information on War/Peace and international social justice issues within the framework of Catholic social teaching, and the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Statements.
• Pax Christi, U.S.A., 3000 N. Mango Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60634. Publishes newsletter 4 times per year for members.("Campaign to Stop New Weapons" is a new program focusing on disarmament.)
• Sojourners, 1029 Vermont Avenue, N.W., Washington D.C., 20005. Published packet, "The Nuclear Challenge To Christian Conscience: A Study Guide for Churches", $2.50. (Packet includes the Vatican Statement on Disarmament of 1976).