Psychanalyse du meurtre totalitaire

Abstract

« We are all murderers ». Murder is not issued from personalities devoted to crime; it is the consequence of activation of certain potentialities of our mind. Otherwise the murder of 15 millions civilians (among them 6 millions Jews), essentially carried out by ordinary citizens, would for ever remain an enigma. « Normal » societies prohibit murder, helped in that purpose by the ego which inhibits the deadly desires of its own id. Freud warns us : « The unconscious holds all the evil of human soul ». What happened in the heads of these ordinary persons which removed this inhibition ? How did nazism alter their psychical functioning ? This work proposes a psychoanalytical methodology for the investigation of such phenemena, and tries to specify the conditions which allowed the most horrible crime against mankind of all times, the Shoah. In front of present slaughters, the author questions on what could break the trajectory which binds absolute belief to murder.