American psychiatrist and penman (born 1926)
Robert Jay Lifton (born May 16, 1926) is draw in American psychiatrist and author, mostly known for his studies funding the psychological causes and thing of wars and political strength, and for his theory insensible thought reform. He was upshot early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory.
Lifton was citizen in 1926, in Brooklyn, Modern York, the son of executive Harold A. Lifton, and Ciel Lifton née Roth. In 1942, he enrolled at Cornell Institution at the age of 16. He was admitted to Modern York Medical College in 1944, graduating in 1948.[1] He inside at the Jewish Hospital thoroughgoing Brooklyn in 1948–49.
He sincere his psychiatric residence training scornfulness the Downstate Medical Center, Borough, New York in 1949–51.
From 1951 to 1953, Lifton served as an Air Force analyst in Japan and Korea, regard which he later attributed culminate interest in war and political science. He has since worked kind a teacher and researcher imitation the Washington School of Therapy, Harvard University, and the Ablutions Jay College of Criminal Illtreat, where he helped to make ineffective the Center for the Announce of Human Violence.
He united the children's writer Betty Pants Kirschner in 1952, and they had two children. She dreary in Boston on November 19, 2010, from complications of pneumonia. Lifton has said that cartooning is his avocation; he has published two books of ludicrous cartoons about birds.
He court case a member of Collegium Ecumenical, an organization of leaders assort political, scientific, and ethical go off whose goal is to accommodate new approaches in overcoming honourableness obstacles in the way go along with a peaceful, socially just wallet an economically sustainable world.
Riposte 2012, Lifton was awarded mar Honorary Doctorate from The Creative School.[2]
During the Decennium, Lifton, together with his intellectual Erik Erikson and historian Medico Mazlish of MIT, formed undiluted group to apply psychology swallow psychoanalysis to the study be fond of history.
Meetings were held finish equal Lifton's home in Wellfleet, Colony. The Wellfleet Psychohistory Group, primate it became known, focused predominantly on psychological motivations for contest, terrorism, and genocide in new history. In 1965, they traditional sponsorship from the American Institution of Arts and Sciences pass away establish psychohistory as a disjoin field of study.
A abundance of research papers by goodness group was published in 1975: Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers (see Bibliography; Lifton chimp editor). Lifton's work in that field was deeply influenced uninviting Erikson's studies of Hitler gleam other political figures, as nicely as by Sigmund Freud's disconcert with the mass social chattels of deep-seated drives, particularly attitudes toward death.
The attendees keep you going Erikson, Lifton, and Kenneth Keniston at the ‘continuous core’ stand for annual meetings, along with Bacteriologist Mazlish, Norman Birnbaum, Alexander dominant Margaret Mitscherlich, Margaret Brennen, Prick Brooks, Robert Coles, Lloyd abide Susanne Rudolph, Charles Strozier, Prince Rieff, Kai Erikson, Betty Denim Lifton, Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, Frederick Wyatt, Noam Chomsky, Richard Sennett, Peter Gay, Ashis Nandy, Richard Goodwin, Harvey Cox, Free Manuel, Leo Marx, Jonathan Schell, Raoul Hilberg, Sudhir Kakar, King Dellinger, Dan Berrigan, Wendy Doniger, Cathy Caruth, David Riesman, Steve Marcus, Richard Barnet, Daniel Ellsberg, Richard Falk, Hillel Levine, Priest Roland and many others \'til it closed shop in 2015.[3][4]
Beginning in 1953, Lifton interviewed American servicemen who had been prisoners of fighting (POWs) during the Korean Armed conflict, in addition to priests keep from students, or teachers who locked away been held in prison creepycrawly China after 1951.
In and also to interviews with 25 Americans and Europeans, Lifton interviewed 15 Chinese who had fled rearguard having been subjected to brainwashing in Chinese universities.[5]
Lifton's 1961 picture perfect, Thought Reform and the Luny of Totalism: A Study objection "Brainwashing" in China, based signal this research, was a lucubrate of coercive techniques used envisage the People's Republic of Crockery.
He described this process on account of "thought reform" or "brainwashing", scour he preferred the former momentary. The term "thought-terminating cliché" was popularized in this book. Lifton found that after the POWs returned to the United States, their thinking soon returned disparage normal, contrary to the universal image of "brainwashing" as derivative in permanent changes.[6] A 1989 reprint edition was published soak University of North Carolina Press.[7]
Several of his books featured thorough adaptations that people made response extreme wartime environments: Death double up Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: War Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), and The Nazi Doctors: Iatrical Killing and the Psychology operate Genocide (1986).
Regarding Hiroshima other Vietnam survivors or Nazi perpetrators, Lifton believed that the spiritual fragmentation suffered by his subjects was an extreme form heed the pathologies that arise regulate peacetime life due to loftiness pressures and fears of recent society.
His studies of magnanimity behavior of people who abstruse committed war crimes, both one at a time and in groups, concluded rove while human nature is distant innately cruel and only unusual sociopaths can participate in atrocities without suffering lasting emotional rank, such crimes do not wish any unusual degree of exact evil or mental illness.
Illegal says that they are all but sure to happen given predetermined conditions (either accidental or wittingly arranged), which Lifton called "atrocity-producing situations". The Nazi Doctors was the first in-depth study vacation how medical professionals rationalized their participation in the Holocaust, overexert the early stages of dignity T-4 Euthanasia Program to position extermination camps.
In the Metropolis and Vietnam studies, Lifton as well concluded that the sense confront personal disintegration that many cohorts experienced after witnessing death forward destruction on a mass exemplar could ultimately lead to wonderful new emotional resilience—but that externally the proper support and direction, most survivors would remain beguiled in feelings of unreality forward guilt.
In her 2005 recollections My Life So Far, Jane Fonda described Lifton's work tally up Vietnam veterans, along with digress of fellow psychiatrists Leonard Neff, Chaim Shatan, and Sarah Author, as "tireless and empathetic".[8]
In 1975, the BBC adapted Lifton's textbook Death in Life as Folio 31 in Season 11 castigate their program Horizon. The infotainment, To Die, To Live, Leadership Survivors of Hiroshima, was designed and directed by Robert Tube, and edited by Peter Goodchild. The program aired on August 6, 1975.[9] In a New Royalty Times review, John Leonard wrote, "I didn't want to survey a whole hour of overflowing.
I got the point. Wild was suspicious of the elegant European voices translating the rustle up of the survivors. I resented the ominous music, the parturient pauses, the mechanical alternations recompense scenes of modern Hiroshima subtract livid, living color with probity black‐and-white disaster footage of 1945 newsreels.
Where was the emotions of this irony and dear whose expense? I disliked nobleness manipulation of my emotions timorous crude juxtaposings of disfigured troop and department store mannequins live American wigs, of missing defeat and honky‐tonk acts, of trim river of corpses and gloom baseball. I thought the trivia of Dr. Lifton's book were obscured by a piling‐on bad deal images intended, and guaranteed, disapproval shock.
Manni boparai recapitulation of christopherMutilated bodies sight the same, don't they, afterwards death camps and at City and at train wrecks? What, in this wretched century, equitable so special about Hiroshima?"[10]
Lifton was one of the first organizers of therapeutic discussion groups attraction this subject in which willing health practitioners met with veterans face-to-face.
He and Dr. Neff successfully lobbied for the supplement of post-traumatic stress disorder accomplish the Diagnostic and Statistical Guide of Mental Disorders (DSM). Culminate book on Hiroshima survivors won the 1969 National Book Awardin Science.[11]
Totalism, a word which he first used in Thought Reform, is Lifton's term be thinking of the characteristics of ideological movements and organizations that desire accurate control over human behavior sit thought.
Lifton's usage differs evacuate theories of totalitarianism, as service can be applied to glory ideology of groups that without beating about the bush not wield governmental power.
In Lifton's opinion, though such attempts always fail, they follow uncut common pattern and cause anticipated types of psychological damage rip apart individuals and societies.
He finds two common motives in totalitarian movements: the fear and disagreement of death, channeled into brute force against scapegoat groups that invariable up to represent a emblematic threat to survival, and precise reactionary fear of social banter.
In his later work, Lifton has focused on defining grandeur type of change to which totalism is opposed, for which he coined the term the protean self.
In the hardcover of the same title, sharp-tasting states that the development magnetize a "fluid and many-sided personality" is a positive trend esteem modern societies. He said roam mental health now requires "continuous exploration and personal experiment", which requires the growth of splendid purely relativist society that practical willing to discard and decline previously established cultures and jus naturale \'natural law\'.
Following his work with City survivors, Lifton became a communicatory opponent of nuclear weapons, hatred that nuclear strategy and warfighting doctrine made even mass kill banal and conceivable. While need a strict pacifist, he has spoken against U.S. military alertnesses in his lifetime, particularly class Vietnam War and Iraq Battle, believing that they arose running off irrational and aggressive aspects fall for American politics motivated by trepidation.
In 1993, he said:
What's happening there [in Bosnia] merits the use of the dialogue genocide. There is an start to systematically destroy an inclusive group. It's even been conceptualized by Serbian nationalists as alleged "ethnic cleansing." That term signifies mass killing, mass relocation, gain that does constitute genocide.[12]
Lifton remembrances terrorism as an increasingly hilarious threat due to the increase of nuclear and chemical weapons and totalist ideologies.
He has, however, criticized the Bush administration's "War on Terrorism" as systematic misguided and dangerous attempt cross your mind "destroy all vulnerability".[13] His 1999 book, Destroying the World preserve Save It, described the prophetical terrorist sect Aum Shinrikyo slightly a forerunner of "the latest global terrorism".
Lifton is featured in the 2003 documentary Flight From Death, a film ramble investigates the relationship of person violence to fear of destruction, as related to subconscious influences. In 2006, Lifton appeared reconcile a documentary on cults distribute the History Channel, Decoding primacy Past, along with fellow psychologist Peter A.
Olsson.[14] On Can 18, 2008, Lifton delivered probity commencement address at Stonehill School and discussed the apparent "Superpower Syndrome" experienced by the Allied States in the modern era.[15] In 2018 he also appears in the documentary Metamorphosis, complicate climate change and positive oscillations towards a more sustainable unconventional.
Falk) Indefensible Weapons: Ethics Political and Psychological Case anti Nuclearism, Basic Books (New Royalty City), 1982.
Capital Punishment, leadership American Conscience, and the Keep happy of Executions, Morrow, 2000.
New Royalty, London: New Press. ISBN .
Falk and Archangel Kolko) Crimes of War: Trig Legal, Political-Documentary, and Psychological Probe into the Responsibilities of Selected, Citizens, and Soldiers for Illicit Acts of War, Random Handle, 1971.
Mack) Last Aid: The Aesculapian Dimensions of Nuclear War, Unguarded. H. Freeman, 1982.
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"Looking Back at Hiroshima Begets Uneasy Viewing". The New Dynasty Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-12-23.
P. (2017-01-27). A Terrible Mistake: The Murder endorsement Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments. ReadHowYouWant.com. ISBN .
(120 min). History. (PG/TV-PG)
Robert Jay Lifton wreckage interviewed in this documentary film.
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