trust and rely on themselves. "Trauma," in other words, "loosens this glue, crippling

psychological life" and leaves them "plunged into a nightmare world of self-

fragmentation in which sanity, indeed the very continuity of existence, can no longer be

taken for granted."170

 The Holocaust is a quintessential example of trauma that illustrates many

detrimental effects of the prolonged attack on selfhood. Desubjectification is at the core

of Holocaust experience and it is a type of what Robert Jay Lifton calls the "perversion

of meaning" that affirms one's sense of self by destroying others. The Nazis used the

constant degradation and lack of autonomy in concentration camps as a means of

annihilating the humanity of the Jews. 17 As Dominic LaCapra explains, Nazi ideology

needed a demonized outsider group that could be perceived as a threatening Other and

hence help stabilize the insecure inner solidarity in post-World War I Germany. The Jew

conveniently served as the projectivee carrier of anxieties "or a "phantasmatic cause of

all evil."172

 Behind Nazi ideology and its obsession with a pure "racial hygiene" lies a complex

and morbid group psychology that reflects a humiliated people's narcissistic fury and a

desperate need for an easy target for the pent-up aggression they could not give vent to

due to post-World War I international sanctions. In other words, the Holocaust was the

Nazis' witch hunt by which they implemented their will and desire to start over and

restore the old glory of the Volk at the expense of the innocent Jews. Lifton insightfully

analyzes this intergroup dynamic: "You cannot kill large numbers of people except with a

claim to virtue, so that killing on a large scale is always an attempt at affirming the life

power of one's own group."173 To achieve this purpose, the Nazis made the Jews