Abstract
Robert Jay Lifton is one of the leading intellectuals of our age. A research psychiatrist, he has creatively added to psychoanalytic knowledge of the world and of the self. He has defined whole new fields of inquiry as his restless mind has ranged since the 1950s across cultures and settings seemingly diverse and cut off from one another.
The intellectual spine of Lifton’s oeuvre is the five interview studies he conducted over half a century. His first major study (1961) was of people subjected to what he called “ideological thought reform,” loosely then and ever since called “brainwashing,” after the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. This book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, includes the famous chapter 22 that defines in detail his understanding of the eight dimensions of ideological totalism (milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, the cult of confession, the “sacred science,” loading the language, doctrine over person, and, most ominously, the dispensing of existence). In the cultic world of the 1970s, and ever since to a lesser degree, those escaping totalistic environments carried copies of that chapter on their person as a kind of talisman against further contagion.
Lifton was in Asia again in 1962 as he almost accidentally came to the idea of conducting psychological interviews with the survivors of Hiroshima. To his astonishment at the time, no one, after seventeen years, had conducted psychological interviews with the survivors of the first use of an atomic bomb, on August 6, 1945. He took on this task of inquiring into the deeper meanings of Hiroshima and the beginning of the nuclear age with the fervor of what Avishai Margalit (2004) has called the “moral witness.” Lifton’s structured set of empirical interviews resulted in Death in Life in 1968, which won the National Book Award the following year. This timeless book includes as its chapter 12 an extended essay of some sixty pages on the psychology of the survivor that has never been surpassed, only repeated many times and frequently diluted in its power. All those working with survivors of trauma, personal or sociohistorical, must immerse themselves in his work.
The Hiroshima book came out as the Vietnam War was heating up. Lifton was passionately opposed to the war—he even spent a night in a Washington jail for two actions he led involving Yale professors and other academics, as well as writers and artists. He also worked with veterans in “rap” groups leading to the remarkable Home from the War (Lifton 1973). He was very good clinically in helping these tortured vets find peace through accepting their moral responsibility for the evil they committed, to get past the numbing, and make their guilt “animating” (as he wisely characterized it).
Then came the Nazi doctors. In retrospect, those astonishing interviews in the late 1970s and early 1980s seem a logical next step, but that may impose an historicist meaning on the decision to move to Asia for his first two studies, back home for the war, and then to Europe’s greatest crisis in history. Certainly The Nazi Doctors of 1986 is a masterpiece. His individual psychological portraits of those ordinary doctors working in Auschwitz, why and how they stayed, how they justified their profound corruption of their basic oath, is as good an explanation of how evil really works as anything in the literature; in fact it is better, at the very top of any list. But the book is also a profound interpretation of the Nazi movement in general as an apocalyptic biomedical project to “correct” history. The image of the thousand-year Reich was not an empty meme, just as it was not an accident that Joseph Mengele, a medical doctor, led the “selections” on the ramp at Auschwitz. He was selecting out those unworthy of living (Lebensunwertes Leben), who biologically threatened Aryan racial dominance.
Lifton’s last extensive interview study (1999) was of the survivors of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyō after its collapse in 1995, when cult members released sarin gas in the Tokyo subways on March 22. That spring it happened that he and I were team-teaching a Ph.D. course titled “Apocalyptic Violence and the New Terrorism” at the CUNY Graduate Center. We threw out the syllabus and spent the rest of the semester on cults and Aum with its incredible and probably psychotic leader, Shōkō Asahara, and its determination to create an Armageddon with weapons of mass destruction. Aum, working as a cult below the level of the state, was the first such group with the technological means at hand to entertain such ambitions.
These interview studies, based on Lifton’s method of “shared themes,” define a very much underappreciated way to engage in psychoanalytic and psychosocial inquiry that avoids the scientism that fetishizes the superficial quantitative methods so prevalent in the social sciences today. “Lifton’s method,” as I called it in an essay (with Michael Flynn) in 1992, is grounded in a “formative perspective” in which the self is engaged in an “ongoing process of symbolization.” The self is continually involved in the process of giving form to all experience and encounters in its struggle to avoid formlessness or death. Images are thus basic to the self and its motivations, an approach that leads to Lifton’s idea of shared themes. Such individual and collective themes can be explored systematically in psychological interviews, which he argues is one of the great discoveries of psychoanalysis—alas, seldom applied to more general group issues within history.
Much creative work and numerous books were spun off from Lifton’s five major interview studies. Lifton wrote, for example, a wonderful psychological study of Mao in 1967, titled Revolutionary Immortality; published a famous article in 1982 that introduced the term psychic numbing; published any number of collected essays and documents, along with Richard Falk, of war crimes during the Vietnam era that led in time to a series of books in the 1980s—especially Indefensible Weapons in 1982—on the meanings, and dangers, of nuclear weapons that was an adjunct to his concerted antinuclear activism, and to books in the 1990s, such as his study (with Greg Mitchell, 2000) of the death penalty in America, asking the question who owns death, and a book (with Eric Markusen, 1990) on the psychology and mindset of genocide that compares nuclear threat with the Nazi Holocaust. More recently, he has become fascinated with climate change, an interest eventuating in The Climate Swerve in 2017. In his latest book, from 2019, Losing Reality, Lifton returns to a major theme in his work since the 1950s, that of fundamentalism and his personal and political allergy to it.
Isiah Berlin (1993), once reprised the ancient fable of the fox, who knows many things, and the hedgehog, who knows one big thing. In my own reprisal of Berlin’s reprisal, I would say great foxes include Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Honoré Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Gertrude Stein, and Norman Mailer. The list of course could be greatly extended. Foxes readily inhabit and enliven any number of other selves. They are not always steady, but they are wildly creative. Their counterpart is the hedgehog, who knows one big thing. Hedgehogs include religious leaders like Jesus, the Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi, but also writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky or Margaret Atwood, and of course political leaders like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.
Robert uniquely combines in his writings, his activism, and his life these often contending self styles. There is no question that Robert Jay Lifton is a hedgehog. As a young academic, his friend Kenneth Keniston would marvel at how Lifton had such a complete intellectual system worked out (Lifton, personal communication, May 10, 2019). His most extensive discussion of that system is his major theoretical work, The Broken Connection, published in 1979. The theory there is that of the meaning of death in terms the continuity of life and especially the way we symbolize immortality to give life meaning. The book is an extended argument with Freud over the true legacy of psychological thought in a world with apocalyptic, ultimate means of destruction actually in human hands. Its central thesis can be extended. In The Climate Swerve in 2017 Lifton refers to the “twin apocalyptic” dangers of nuclear threat and climate change. The Broken Connection defines a thread of meaning that makes sense as nothing else of Greta Thunberg’s remarkable eco-advocacy as a young person today.
It is the special curse of foxes that they revel in their proteanism (as Lifton called it in The Protean Self, 1993) but often yearn for the groundedness and certainty of that one great idea, that truth, propounded by the hedgehogs. Lifton transmutes the two self styles. For he has always lived as a fox. For fifty years he hosted meetings on history and psychoanalysis at his summer home in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. He has befriended many writers over the years, loves the theater, and can engage in conversation with an enthusiasm that only someone in the foxy Platonic tradition values. He has been my mentor/guru for some forty-five years. I sometimes think I should asterisk my own writings with the note “based on endless conversation with Robert Jay Lifton.”
Robert Jay Lifton knows the great truth of life in the modern era with apocalyptic threats hanging over us. That’s his hedgehog side. But he leavens that understanding as a fox with a commitment to proteanism, with his dry humor, his diverse intellectual interests, and his determined hope for a human future. Lifton as few others understands the dark and dangerous world in which we live, but he also helps us see the light of survival. He is our most important philosopher of death in life, as he titled his Hiroshima book, but one full of hope. That is a combination to treasure.
