Significant Moments: Of Architects, Autonomy, and Overweening Government Power

It may be said that the results which the gestapo tried to obtain by means of the camps were varied; the author was able to identify [several], although intimately related, gestapo goals[, including the following aim, which seemed preeminent]: to break the prisoners as individuals and change them into docile masses from which no individual or group act of resistance could arise . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations.
From his own observations when he was a prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim concluded that the prisoners who gave up and died were those who had abandoned any attempt at personal autonomy; who acquiesced in their captors' aim of dehumanizing and exercising total control over them.
Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self.
He himself preserved his life and sanity by deliberately and . . .
Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle.
. . . methodically going through the four parts of each of the Beethoven quartets, which [he] knew individually by heart . . .
Yehudi Menuhin, Theme and Variations.
 . . . in order to preserve . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . .some measure of . . .
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop.
. . . personal autonomy in the face of overweening government power.
Linda Greenhouse, Justices Restrict Forced Medication Preceding a Trial: Mental Competency Issue.
Most authorities who have studied creative people agree that one of their most notable characteristics is independence. This shows itself particularly in the fact that they are much more influenced by their own, inner standards than by those of the society or profession to which they happen to belong. In a study of architects in which the subjects were divided into three groups according to their creativity, the most creative group were primarily concerned with meeting an inner artistic standard of excellence which they discovered within themselves; the least creative group with conforming to the standards of the architectural profession. It is not unlikely that this trait of independence may be related to the precocity of ego development noted by Freud in obsessionals. To be primarily 'inner-directed' argues the early development both of the ego and also of a sensitive superego; a conscience providing an inner standard to which reference is made, and which is likely to demand a higher performance than any collective, professional group could ask.
Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation.
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