2. Selective Focus
Narrowed focus on survival: The brutality of the camps forced everyone to think only at the bare survival level. Every thought tended to focus on how to get a crumb of bread, stay warm, and avoid beatings by the guards. A tremendous amount of thought went into planning the simplest details of survival.
3. Normal Emotions Shut Down/High Suggestibility
Victor Frankl: "Disgust, horror, pity [could not be felt] anymore. Suffering, dying and the dead became such commonplace sights to him that they could not move him anymore." Apathy took over. Prisoners could not afford their normal ways of responding. For survival, they shut down responses of anger or indignation.
New responses were "suggested" by the horrific situation: the desire to save one's life; to not antagonize the guards; to submerge into the crowd. The guards got the responses they wanted: unquestioning obedience, abject submission, having no will other than what the guards demanded.
Suggestions were thus implanted that human beings had no worth, only usefulness to authority.
4. Lack of awareness of trance.
Frankl states that inmates who descended into the trance of being degraded - succumbing to despair and hopelessness - did not last long, even if they had superior physical build. They did not realize that they'd been inducted into a trance, the purpose of which was to destroy their inner lives; in this way they allowed their inner lives to die. The trance of dehumanization overcame them without their awareness. Others realized that a trance was being imposed and resisted it. They did not allow themselves to be convinced that they were subhuman.
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