“Here There Is Only Documentation:” Psychodrama and the Eichmann Trial

• In Event: Restorative Justice?

Abstract

This paper re-approaches the well-studied Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (1961) from the perspective of two minor characters, Jacob Moreno and Hans Kreitler. Jacob Moreno, the founder of psychodrama, petitioned then Israeli Attorney General, Gideon Hausner, to afford time at the close of the trial for Eichmann to role-play with his victims. Although Hausner firmly refused to entertain psychodramatic practice in the courtroom, Moreno continued to promote the idea in prolific correspondence with Israeli psychiatrists. Psychodrama is a form of psychotherapy that theorizes the self as an open repertoire of roles. Through the intentional use of theatre methods, participants explore roles that may be emergent, dying, or distorted (Nolte 2014; Moreno 1946). Bringing methods in historical anthropology to bear on questions in Jewish studies and the medical humanities, this paper attends to psychiatric productivities at law’s margins to trace how artifacts produced for the courtroom — that never quite gain a footing within — produce consequences in a social world.
This paper draws from archival research at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Psychiatry, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the Harvard Countway Library to reconstruct an exchange between Moreno and Dr. Hans Kreitler (an Israeli psychiatrist and psychodramatist). In so doing, the paper charts how the clinical concepts of “role-play” and “catharsis” acquire a valence of threat in the shadows of the Shoah. In their correspondence, Moreno and Kreitler debate questions such as whether the scale of violence poses a problem to the concept of catharsis, if and to what extent intention matters in therapeutic role-play, and whether or not forgiveness is possible. Given that most literatures on performance and theatricality in the Eichmann trial have explored such questions at the register of metaphor (Arendt 1964; Bachmann 2010; Leiboff 2018), these psychodramatic correspondences offer an unprecedented pathway to re-approach questions of (ir)repair between the legal and the psychiatric. Moreover, the letters shed light on how catastrophic violence shapes knowledge production in the psychological sciences. Psychodrama’s ultimate exclusion from the trial, but proliferation into clinics and neighborhoods, thus crystalizes something critical about the trial’s social meaning itself .

Author

• Talia Katz, Johns Hopkins University