Robert Jay Lifton
Encyclopedia
Robert Jay Lifton is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 psychiatrist
Psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...

 and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of war
War
War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...

 and political violence and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory
Psychohistory
Psychohistory is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It attempts to combine the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present...

.

Holocaust Research

A leading scholar of the Holocaust and an internationally renowned author of several books, including "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide" and "The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and the Nuclear Threat", agrees that what happened to the Bosnian Muslims "merits the use of the word genocide." He is a recipient of a Nobel Lectureship, the Holocaust Memorial Award, and the Gandhi Peace Award. Since the 1960s, Dr. Lifton has been recognized internationally for his research on genocide. According to Dr. Lifton,

"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."

In 2006, Lifton appeared in a documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 on cult
Cult
The word cult in current popular usage usually refers to a group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre. The word originally denoted a system of ritual practices...

s on the History Channel: "Decoding the Past", along with fellow psychiatrist Peter A. Olsson
Peter A. Olsson
Peter A. Olsson is an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author. He is author of the book, Malignant Pied Pipers of Our Time: A Psychological Study of Destructive Cult Leaders from Rev...

.

Biography

Lifton was born in 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Harold A. (a businessman) and Ciel (Roth) Lifton. He was fifteen when the United States declared war on Japan and Nazi Germany (December 1941). He studied medicine at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 and New York Medical College
New York Medical College
New York Medical College, aka New York Med or NYMC, is a private graduate health sciences university based in Westchester County, New York, a suburb of New York City and a part of the New York Metropolitan Area...

 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. From 1951 to 1953 he served as an Air Force
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...

 psychiatrist in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 and Korea
Korea
Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...

, 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
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice is a senior college of the City University of New York in Midtown Manhattan, New York City and is the only liberal arts college with a criminal justice and forensic focus in the United States. The college offers programs in Forensic Science and Forensic...

, where he helped to found the Center for the Study of Human Violence.

He married the writer Betty Jean Kirschner in 1952 and has two children. Lifton calls cartooning his avocation
Avocation
An avocation is an activity that one engages in as a hobby outside one's main occupation. There are many examples of people whose professions were the ways that they made their livings, but for whom their activities outside of their workplaces were their true passions in life...

; he has published two books of humorous cartoons about bird
Bird
Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

s.

He is a member of Collegium International
Collegium International
International Ethical, Scientific and Political Collegium, also called Collegium International is a high-level group created in 2002.-Origin:...

, 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

During the 1960s, Robert Jay Lifton, together with his mentor Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson was a Danish-German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on social development of human beings. He may be most famous for coining the phrase identity crisis. His son, Kai T...

 and MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 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
Wellfleet, Massachusetts
Wellfleet is a New England town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States. Located halfway between the "tip" and "elbow" of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the town had a population of 2,749 at the 2000 census, which swells nearly sixfold during the summer...

. 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
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

 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
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

's concern with the mass social effects of deep-seated drives, particularly attitudes toward death.

Theory of thought reform

Lifton investigated the thought-reform procedures used against American POWs returning from the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...

 while involved in their psychiatric evaluation.
Lifton's 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China was a study of coercive techniques that he labelled thought reform or "brainwashing", though he preferred the former term. Others have labelled it also as "mind control
Mind control
Mind control refers to a process in which a group or individual "systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator, often to the detriment of the person being manipulated"...

". Lifton describes in detail eight methods which he says are used to change people's minds without their agreement:
  • Milieu Control – The control of information and communication.
  • Mystical Manipulation – The manipulation of experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated.
  • Demand for Purity – The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection.
  • Confession – Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group.
  • Sacred Science – The group's doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute.
  • Loading the Language – The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand.
  • Doctrine over person – The member's personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group.
  • Dispensing of existence – The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not.


The term thought-terminating cliché was popularized by Robert Lifton in this book.

Studies of war and atrocity survivors

His most influential books, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
During the final stages of World War II in 1945, the United States conducted two atomic bombings against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the first on August 6, 1945, and the second on August 9, 1945. These two events are the only use of nuclear weapons in war to date.For six months...

(1967), Home from the War: Vietnam Veteran
Vietnam veteran
Vietnam veteran is a phrase used to describe someone who served in the armed forces of participating countries during the Vietnam War.The term has been used to describe veterans who were in the armed forces of South Vietnam, the United States armed forces, and countries allied to them, whether or...

s—Neither Victims nor Executioners
(1973), and The Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

 Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...

(1986), focused on the mental adaptations made by humans in extreme wartime environments—whether as survivors of atrocities or, in the latter case, perpetrators. In each case 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 crime
War crime
War crimes are serious violations of the laws applicable in armed conflict giving rise to individual criminal responsibility...

s, both individually and in groups, concluded that while human nature is not innately cruel and only rare sociopath
Psychopathy
Psychopathy is a mental disorder characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. Psychopaths are highly prone to antisocial behavior and abusive treatment of others, and are very disproportionately responsible for violent crime...

s 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
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...

, 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 his work with Vietnam veterans, Lifton was one of the first organizers of therapeutic discussion groups in which mental health practitioners met with veterans, and he lobbied for the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Posttraumaticstress disorder is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that results in psychological trauma. This event may involve the threat of death to oneself or to someone else, or to one's own or someone else's physical, sexual, or psychological integrity,...

 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders...

.

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
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...

 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
Death
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....

, channeled into violence against scapegoat groups that are made to represent a metaphorical threat to survival, and a reactionary
Reactionary
The term reactionary refers to viewpoints that seek to return to a previous state in a society. The term is meant to describe one end of a political spectrum whose opposite pole is "radical". While it has not been generally considered a term of praise it has been adopted as a self-description by...

 fear of social change
Social change
Social change refers to an alteration in the social order of a society. It may refer to the notion of social progress or sociocultural evolution, the philosophical idea that society moves forward by dialectical or evolutionary means. It may refer to a paradigmatic change in the socio-economic...

.

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
Proteus
In Greek mythology, Proteus is an early sea-god, one of several deities whom Homer calls the "Old Man of the Sea", whose name suggests the "first" , as protogonos is the "primordial" or the "firstborn". He became the son of Poseidon in the Olympian theogony In Greek mythology, Proteus (Πρωτεύς)...

 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's 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
Nuclear strategy
Nuclear strategy involves the development of doctrines and strategies for the production and use of nuclear weapons.As a sub-branch of military strategy, nuclear strategy attempts to match nuclear weapons as means to political ends...

 and warfighting doctrine made even mass genocide banal and conceivable. While not a strict pacifist
Pacifism
Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...

, he has spoken against U.S. military actions in his lifetime, particularly the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

 and Iraq War, believing that they arose from irrational and aggressive aspects of American politics motivated by fear.

Lifton has also criticized the current "War on Terrorism
War on Terrorism
The War on Terror is a term commonly applied to an international military campaign led by the United States and the United Kingdom with the support of other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as well as non-NATO countries...

" as a misguided and dangerous attempt to "destroy all vulnerability". However, he regards terrorism
Terrorism
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...

 itself as an increasingly serious threat due to the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons and totalist ideologies. His 1999 book Destroying the World to Save It described the apocalyptic terrorist sect Aum Shinrikyo
Aum Shinrikyo
Aum Shinrikyo was a Japanese new religious movement. The group was founded by Shoko Asahara in 1984. The group gained international notoriety in 1995, when it carried out the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway....

 as a forerunner of "the new global terrorism".

Notable Appearances

Lifton is featured in the 2003 docmentary Flight From Death
Flight from death
Flight from Death is a documentary film that investigates the relationship of human violence to fear of death, as related to subconscious influences. The film describes death anxiety as a possible root cause of many human behaviors on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level. It was directed...

, a film that investigates the relationship of human violence to fear of death, as related to subconscious influences.

On May 18, 2008 Lifton delivered the commencement address at Stonehill College
Stonehill College
Stonehill College is a private Roman Catholic college located in Easton, Massachusetts, United States, founded in 1948. Situated in North Easton, Massachusetts, a suburban community of 23,329 people, Stonehill is located south of Boston on a campus, the original estate of Frederick Lothrop Ames...

 and discussed the apparent "Superpower Syndrome" experienced by the United States in the modern era.

Lifton as editor

  • The Woman in America, Houghton (Boston), 1965.
  • America and the Asian Revolutions, Trans-Action Books, 1970, second edition, 1973.
  • (With Richard A. Falk and Gabriel Kolko) Crimes of War: A Legal, Political-Documentary, and Psychological Inquiry into the Responsibilities of Leaders, Citizens, and Soldiers for Criminal Acts of War, Random House, 1971.
  • (With Eric Olson) Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers, Simon & Schuster, 1975.
  • (With Eric Chivian, Susanna Chivian, and John E. Mack) Last Aid: The Medical Dimensions of Nuclear War, W. H. Freeman, 1982.
  • (With Nicholas Humphrey
    Nicholas Humphrey
    Professor Nicholas Keynes Humphrey is an English psychologist, based in Cambridge, who is known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His interests are wide ranging...

    ) In a Dark Time: Images for Survival, Harvard University Press, 1984.

External links

Articles
Media
NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...

 Fresh Air
Fresh Air
Fresh Air is an American radio talk show broadcast on National Public Radio stations across the United States. The show is produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its longtime host is Terry Gross. , the show was syndicated to 450 stations and claimed 4.5 million listeners. The show...

interviews:
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