Individual Personality of Concentration Camp Prisoners and Authoritarian State Subjects
Bruno Bettelheim and Viktor Frankl,two survivor psychologists who experienced the Nazi concentration camps firsthand,left behind testimonial writings on the psychology of concentration camp inmates,The Informed Heart and Man's Search for Meaning,respectively.This paper discusses these two works and considers the depersonalization of prisoners and its grave consequences:the loss of a sense of dignity and autonomy for the victims.Both Bettelheim and Frank argue that the terms freedom,autonomy of will and dignity are more or less synonymous.No power can completely deprive an individual of the ul-timate choice of behavior,nor can it deprive a person of his ultimate freedom.It is this freedom that de-fines the humanity of each individual.No absolute restriction on human beings,even in concentration camps or totalitarian states,can completely eliminate human nature.But Bettelheim and Frank have dif-ferent perspectives on observing and analyzing human nature in concentration camps,which shapes their differences in understanding human consciousness,the meaning of existence,and the possibilities of re-sistance in extreme circumstances.We need to put them together to better gain a complete understanding of the dehumanized personality.
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