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Robert Jay Lifton

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Nationality
  
American

Name
  
Robert Lifton


Role
  
Psychiatrist

Robert Jay Lifton FilmForward Review Robert Jay Lifton Nazi Doctors

Born
  
May 16, 1926 (age 97) Brooklyn, New York (
1926-05-16
)

Fields
  
psychiatry, psychohistory, mind control, thought reform

Institutions
  
Washington School of PsychiatryHarvard UniversityJohn Jay College of Criminal JusticeYale University

Alma mater
  
Cornell UniversityNew York Medical College

Known for
  
Author, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism; Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima; The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

Movies
  
The 11th of September: Moyers in Conversation

Awards
  
Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences, US & Canada

Books
  
The Nazi doctors, Thought Reform and the P, Death in Life: Survivors, The protean self, Destroying the World to Save It

Similar People
  
Betty Jean Lifton, Richard A Falk, David Rieff, Roy Gutman, Bill T Jones

Residence
  
United States of America

Dr robert jay lifton jeremy rifkin may 1989 air date


Robert Jay Lifton (born May 16, 1926) is an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory.

Contents

Robert Jay Lifton Robert Jay Lifton Official Publisher Page Simon

Robert jay lifton genocidal mentality nazi doctors and the holocaust


Biography

Robert Jay Lifton Robert Jay Lifton Author of quotThe Nazi Doctors

Lifton was born in 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Harold A. (a businessman) and Ciel (Roth) Lifton. In 1942, he enrolled at Cornell University at the age of 16 and was admitted to New York Medical College in 1944, graduating in 1948. He interned at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn in 1948-49, and had his psychiatric residence training at the Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York in 1949-51.

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From 1951 to 1953 he served as an Air Force psychiatrist in Japan and Korea, to which he later attributed his interest in war and politics. He has since worked as a teacher and researcher at the Washington School of Psychiatry, Harvard University, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he helped to found the Center for the Study of Human Violence.

Robert Jay Lifton The Socialization of Evil Robert Jay Lifton on the Death

He married the children's writer Betty Jean Kirschner in 1952 and has two children. She died in Boston on November 19, 2010, from complications of pneumonia. Lifton calls cartooning his avocation; he has published two books of humorous cartoons about birds. He is a member of Collegium International, an organization of leaders with political, scientific, and ethical expertise whose goal is to provide new approaches in overcoming the obstacles in the way of a peaceful, socially just and an economically sustainable world.

The Wellfleet Psychohistory Group

Robert Jay Lifton New Page 1

During the 1960s, Robert Jay Lifton, together with his mentor Erik Erikson and MIT historian Bruce Mazlish, formed a group to apply psychology and psychoanalysis to the study of history. Meetings were held at Lifton's home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The Wellfleet Psychohistory Group, as it became known, focused mainly on psychological motivations for war, terrorism and genocide in recent history. In 1965, they received sponsorship from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to establish psychohistory as a separate field of study. A collection of research papers by the group was published in 1975: Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers (see Bibliography; Lifton as editor). Lifton's work in this field was heavily influenced by Erikson's studies of Hitler and other political figures, as well as Sigmund Freud's concern with the mass social effects of deep-seated drives, particularly attitudes toward death.

Studies of thought reform

Beginning in 1953, Lifton interviewed American servicemen who had been prisoners of war (POWs) during the Korean War as well as priests and students or teachers who had been held in prison in China after 1951. In addition to interviews with 25 Americans and Europeans, Lifton interviewed 15 Chinese who had fled after having been subjected to indoctrination in Chinese universities.

Lifton's 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, based on this research, was a study of coercive techniques used in the People's Republic of China that he labelled "thought reform" or "brainwashing", though he preferred the former term. The term "thought-terminating cliché" was popularized in this book. Lifton found that when the POWs returned to the United States their thinking soon returned to normal, contrary to the popular image of "brainwashing." A 1989 reprint edition was published by University of North Carolina Press.

Studies of war and atrocity survivors

Several of his books featured mental adaptations that people made in extreme wartime environments: Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). Regarding Hiroshima and Vietnam survivors or Nazi perpretators, Lifton believed that the psychic fragmentation experienced by his subjects was an extreme form of the pathologies that arise in peacetime life due to the pressures and fears of modern society.

His studies of the behavior of people who had committed war crimes, both individually and in groups, concluded that while human nature is not innately cruel and only rare sociopaths can participate in atrocities without suffering lasting emotional harm, such crimes do not require any unusual degree of personal evil or mental illness, and are nearly sure to happen given certain conditions (either accidental or deliberately arranged) which Lifton called "atrocity-producing situations". The Nazi Doctors was the first in-depth study of how medical professionals rationalized their participation in the Holocaust, from the early stages of the T-4 Euthanasia Program to the extermination camps.

In the Hiroshima and Vietnam studies, Lifton also concluded that the sense of personal disintegration many people experienced after witnessing death and destruction on a mass scale could ultimately lead to a new emotional resilience—but that without the proper support and counseling, most survivors would remain trapped in feelings of unreality and guilt. In her 2005 autobiography My Life So Far, Jane Fonda would come to describe Lifton's work with Vietnam veterans, along with that of fellow psychiatrists Drs. Leonard Neff, Shaim Shatan, and Sharah Haley, as "tireless and empathetic".

Lifton was one of the first organizers of therapeutic discussion groups on this subject in which mental health practitioners met with veterans face-to-face, and he and Dr. Neff successfully lobbied for the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). His book on Hiroshima survivors won the 1969 National Book Award in Science.

Theories of totalism and the protean self

Totalism, a word first used in Thought Reform, is Lifton's term for the characteristics of ideological movements and organizations that desire total control over human behavior and thought. Lifton's usage differs from theories of totalitarianism in that it can be applied to the ideology of groups that do not wield governmental power.

In Lifton's opinion, though such attempts always fail, they follow a common pattern and cause predictable types of psychological damage in individuals and societies. He finds two common motives in totalistic movements: the fear and denial of death, channeled into violence against scapegoat groups that are made to represent a metaphorical threat to survival, and a reactionary fear of social change.

In his later work, Lifton has focused on defining the type of change to which totalism is opposed, for which he coined the term the protean self. In the book of the same title, he states that the development of a "fluid and many-sided personality" is a positive trend in modern societies, and that mental health now requires "continuous exploration and personal experiment", which requires the growth of a purely relativist society that is willing to discard and diminish previously established cultures and traditions.

Critiques of modern war and terrorism

Following his work with Hiroshima survivors, Lifton became a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons, arguing that nuclear strategy and warfighting doctrine made even mass genocide banal and conceivable. While not a strict pacifist, he has spoken against U.S. military actions in his lifetime, particularly the Vietnam War and Iraq War, believing that they arose from irrational and aggressive aspects of American politics motivated by fear.

In 1993, he said:

What's happening there [in Bosnia] merits the use of the word genocide. There is an effort to systematically destroy an entire group. It's even been conceptualized by Serbian nationalists as so-called "ethnic cleansing." That term signifies mass killing, mass relocation, and that does constitute genocide.

Lifton regards terrorism as an increasingly serious threat due to the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons and totalist ideologies. He has, however, criticized the current "War on Terrorism" as a misguided and dangerous attempt to "destroy all vulnerability". His 1999 book, Destroying the World to Save It, described the apocalyptic terrorist sect Aum Shinrikyo as a forerunner of "the new global terrorism".

Appearances

Lifton is featured in the 2003 documentary Flight From Death, a film that investigates the relationship of human violence to fear of death, as related to subconscious influences. In 2006, Lifton appeared in a documentary on cults on the History Channel, Decoding the Past, along with fellow psychiatrist Peter A. Olsson. On May 18, 2008 Lifton delivered the commencement address at Stonehill College and discussed the apparent "Superpower Syndrome" experienced by the United States in the modern era.

References

Robert Jay Lifton Wikipedia