THE NEW YORK PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY & INSTITUTE:
WORKS IN PROGRESS
247 East 82nd St., between 2nd & 3rd, NY, NY 10028
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
8:30 p.m.
The Genocidal Impulse:
The Wish to Destroy in the Large Group
Bennett Roth, Ph.D.
This paper explores one form of murderous behavior that frequently appears in large group behavior with which most of us are vaguely and historically familiar. I refer to this ignored hallucinatory wish and behavior to destroy individuals in groups, in Bion’s terminology as a new basic assumption. In the following I present evidence of a violent basic assumption. I apply this formulation to the holocaust. I will also offer a clinical example from my practice related to this.
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