An Example of Dehumanization as a Shield Against Our Helpless Openness to the Other

Abstract

Cultural rituals requiring covering or otherwise distancing the dead may include as unconscious motivation the protection of the departed from dangerous impulses triggered in the living by their helpless forms. A parallel is drawn between the unconscious excitation associated with exposure to the prostrate human forms of a dead body and of an infant. Both send powerful, disquieting “enigmatic messages.” As extreme avatar of the baby’s passivity and vulnerability, the human cadaver has the same capacity for soliciting the unconscious infantile sexuality of the survivor or caretaker. This ambivalent impact of the “prostrate human form” may be understood in a new interpretation of Freud’s concept of primary identification as the infant’s aspiration toward and by the other in an open-ended primary absorption of “humanness.” The unconscious belief of “belonging to the human species” has first come to us from the other and, as concentration camp literature attests, we continue to need the other to confirm it. A distinction is drawn with mourning. At issue here is the continuing enigmatic draw of any lifeless human form due to a primary and ongoing identification that creates an impossible-to-resist commiseration with the presentation of that fragile human form.