ABSTRACT
How did my commitment to genocide studies begin? I am, after all, also a committed psychologist, practicing individual, marital, and family psychotherapy well over forty years and truly devoted to knowledge of the many layers of consciousness as well as the multiple “compartments” that sit alongside of one another, too often without good communication between them, in the organization of our psyches. We students of genocide certainly know that ostensibly good people can also be drawn into and commit horrible behaviors; psychology has certainly demonstrated to us all that even ostensibly good behaviors can be fed by streams of dark foreboding motivations, and even by efforts to cleanse oneself of evil, and not only by the humanistic foundations that are the conscious intentions, albeit sincere. So I have certainly needed to ask myself, what in the name of God led me into a firm, even fierce, lifelong commitment to the study of genocide and its prevention—and I am happy to begin my story in this special setting of a book of invited autobiographies of the first generation of genocide scholars with this aspect of the “dark side” of my motivations.
