Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations
Sensitive Content
This entry contains material that some people may find disturbing.[ . . . ] On a terribly cold winter night when a snowstorm was blowing, all prisoners were punished by being forced to stand at attention without overcoats—they never wore any—for hours.1 This was after having worked for more than twelve hours in the open, and having received hardly any food. The prisoners were threatened with having to stand all…
“Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” first appeared as an article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and was rooted in Bruno Bettelheim’s experiences as a prisoner in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps in 1938 and 1939. As a psychoanalyst, Bettelheim adopted the role of a detached observer and sought to understand how the Nazis systematically used terror and deprivation to strip individuals of their autonomy and sense of humanity. The essay was one of the first academic attempts to analyze the psychological mechanisms of the concentration camp system, written while the war was still ongoing. Bettelheim expanded on these themes in his book, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (1960).
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