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12 The Survivor
- The University of North Carolina Press
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THE SURVIVOR I have assumed throughout this book that psychological occurrences in Hiroshima have important bearing upon all of human experience. I have suggested in a variety of ways that we are all survivors of Hiroshima and, in our imaginations, of future nuclear holocaust. The link between Hiroshima and ourselves is not simply metaphorical, but has specific psychological components which can be explored in relationship to the general psychology of the survivor. We may define the survivor as one who has come into contact with death in some bodily or psychic fashion and has himself remained alive. From this broad perspective we may compare patterns we have observed in Hiroshima to those of other "extreme" historical experiences, particularly the Nazi persecutions, but also the plagues of the Middle Ages; to relevant Japanese cultural practice pertaining to death and survival; and to responses to "ordinary" forms of disaster, as well as to individual survival in association with "the dying patient/' I have found it convenient to pursue these comparisons under five general themes—the death imprint, death guilt, psychic numbing, nurturance and contagion, and formulation. As we examine these categories we find ourselves dealing with universal psychological tendencies; the survivor becomes Everyman. But the holocausts of the twentieth century have thrust the survivor ethos into special prominence, and imposed upon us all a series of immersions into death which mark our existence. I) Death Imprint The key to the survivor experience, the basis for all survivor themes, is the imprint of death. This imprint occurs whatever one's pre-existing psychological traits, though its quality and force are influenced by contact it makes with "survival" emotions experienced from the beginning of life. The death imprint of Hiroshima survivors is made unique by three aspects of their ordeal: the suddenness and totality of their death saturation, the permanent taint of death associated with radiation aftereffects, and their continuing group relationship to world fears of nuclear extermination. Nazi concentration camp victims, in contrast, underwent an experience less directly associated with contemporary death anxiety, but involving more prolonged humiliation and terror, and more generalized psychic and bodily assaults—including exposure to starvation, suffocation in crowded boxcars, extreme heat and cold, beatings, forced labor, epidemic diseases, and medical and surgical experimentation. Concentration camp survivors, therefore, are likely to retain more diffuse and severe psychic impairment, while in hibakusha death imagery tends to be more exclusively predominant. But various kinds of residual death imagery have also been noted in concentration camp survivors. And I would go further and claim that less intense forms of death imprint are of great importance in all disasters, natural or manmade, and that the tendency to ignore or minimize these has more to do with psychological resistances of investigators than with the experiences being studied. With both Hiroshima and Nazi concentration camp survivors the grotesqueness surrounding the death imprint had additional significance : it conveyed the psychological sense that death was not only everywhere, but was bizarre, unnatural, indecent, absurd. Hiroshima survivors experienced this grotesqueness through a sense of monstrous alteration of the body substance—also resembling feelings suggested by accounts of the "Black Death" or "Great Dying," the plagues which swept Europe during the fourteenth century. These accounts convey not only the grotesque symptoms of the plague (gangrenous inflammations violent chest pains, vomiting and spitting of blood, and "pestilential odour" from the bodies and breath of the ill), but also a dramatic [18.116.13.113] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:38 GMT) The Survivor 481 perception of selective destiny ("From the carbuncles and glandular swellings many recovered; from the blood-spitting none")1 reminiscent of the hibakusha's sense of supernatural victimization in relationship to the early "epidemic" of A-bomb disease. There was also a very important difference: for those afflicted with the plague recovery from the original attack meant release from the encounter with death ("The few who recovered had no second attack, or at least not of a serious nature"),2 while for the atomic bomb victim what appeared to be recovery turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong sense of vulnerability to the same grotesque death. After any such exposure the survivor internalizes this grotesqueness as well as the deaths themselves, and feels it to be inseparable from his own body and mind. As Wiesel has written in relationship to the Nazi concentration camp experience: "In every stiffened corpse I saw myself."3 Concerning the issue of vulnerability, there is a distinct polarity...