Of Mind and Murder: Toward a More Comprehensive Psychology of the Holocaust by George R. Mastroianni (review)

In Of Mind and Murder experimental psychologist George Mastroianni produces a detailed and insightful account of the voluminous psychological literature on the Holocaust. Mastroianni declares that his book has three purposes: the first is to "resurrect and perhaps rehabilitate some psychological approaches" used in early attempts to understand the Holocaust (p. xxv); the second is to "assess the current state of psychological understanding" (p. xxvi) of the Holocaust; and the third is to "suggest some avenues for future psychological scholarship" (p. xxviii). It is thus the central aim of the book to produce not just a history of attempts to theorize human behavior in the Holocaust, but to begin to develop a comprehensive psychology of such behavior. In pursuit of this aim, Mastroianni seeks to surmount a longstanding disciplinary emphasis on social influence on the behavior of perpetrators and victims, what he labels the "situationist" perspective associated with Stanley Milgram and others. The author is particularly drawn to the personality theory of psychologist Gordon Allport, which seeks to avoid what Allport saw as the extremes of a psychoanalysis too obsessed with the details of an individual's past and a behaviorist approach that was too superficial when it came to human motivation. Uniting Mastroianni's historical and psychological subject matters, his book opens with an urgent and timely statement on "Human Nature and the Peace" authored and signed by Allport and many other American psychologists in 1945. Mastroianni's thus seeks to "construct a post-situationist psychology of the Holocaust" (p. 65) based to a significant degree on Allport's The Nature of Prejudice (1954), as well as the work of psychologists and historians since the 1940s, on problematic (vagueness, essentialism, enthnocentrism), though also promising, dynamics of culture, character, and personality.

Six core chapters survey and analyze the relevant areas of existing psychological study of the Holocaust: Clinical/Abnormal Perspectives; Personality, Learning and Conditioning; Cognition and Memory; Age and Development; and Social Psychology Early approaches to the subject reflected the dominance of Freud's psychoanalysis in psychology at the time. While Mastroianni is critical of psychoanalysis, he regrets that, for example, the findings of the interviews of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg by psychologists Gustave Gilbert and Douglas Kelley have been largely ignored or dismissed in a field subsequently dominated by social psychologists, whose concentration on the effects of social environment has "eschewed specificity in favor of universal potential for such behavior" (p. 38). This interest in the value of specificity manifests itself throughout the book in Mastroianni's appreciation for the work of historians and their reliance on data, that is, the contents and contexts of time and place. In this, he rightly regrets the lack of tradition and training among psychologists for this kind of rigor regarding detailed documentation of the lives of individuals and societies.

For Mastroianni, a key debate among historians concerns the relative importance of existing antisemitism (dispositional) and the role of the immediate institutional environment (situational) in motivating Nazi killers. Throughout the book, Mastroianni returns to the debate between historian Christopher Browning and political scientist Daniel Goldhagen. In Ordinary Men (1992) Browning, influenced by social psychologist Stanley's Milgram's obedience experiments, argued that the behavior of German police battalions charged with the mass shootings of Jews in Poland were the product of a variety of situational factors and were not simply motivated by unalloyed hatred of Jews. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) countered that Nazi killers acted out of an "exterminatory" variety of antisemitism peculiarly strong in Germany before 1945. Mastroianni also notes that other historians, such as Omer Bartov in Hitler's Army (1992), have documented more widespread antisemitism in the German military than was discovered in previous research by social psychologists and historians. Despite Mastroianni's view that the situational psychology of Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo has been too influential in the field of social psychology, his...