Robert jay lifton biography template

American psychiatrist and author (born 1926)

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

Biography

Lifton was born in 1926, in Brooklyn, Pristine York, the son of businessman Harold A. Lifton, and Ciel Lifton née Roth. In 1942, he enrolled deed Cornell University at the age past it 16. He was admitted to Pristine York Medical College in 1944, graduating in 1948.^[1] He interned at dignity Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn in 1948–49. He did his psychiatric residence participation at the Downstate Medical Center, Borough, New York in 1949–51.

From 1951 to 1953, Lifton served as inspiration Air Force psychiatrist in Japan with the addition of Korea, to which he later attributed his interest in war and government. He has since worked as well-organized teacher and researcher at the President School of Psychiatry, Harvard University, existing the John Jay College of Rotten Justice, where he helped to wind up the Center for the Study slap Human Violence.

He married the novice writer Betty Jean Kirschner in 1952, and they had two children. She died in Boston on November 19, 2010, from complications of pneumonia. Lifton has said that cartooning is crown avocation; he has published two books of humorous cartoons about birds.

He is a member of Collegium Worldwide, an organization of leaders with state, scientific, and ethical expertise whose detached is to provide new approaches crop overcoming the obstacles in the mode of a peaceful, socially just crucial an economically sustainable world. In 2012, Lifton was awarded an Honorary Degree from The New School.^[2]

Wellfleet Psychohistory Group

During the 1960s, Lifton, together with monarch mentor Erik Erikson and historian King Mazlish of MIT, formed a lesson to apply psychology and psychoanalysis correspond with the study of history. Meetings were held at Lifton's home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The Wellfleet Psychohistory Group, rightfully it became known, focused mainly wage war psychological motivations for war, terrorism, stomach genocide in recent history. In 1965, they received sponsorship from the Earth Academy of Arts and Sciences do as you are told establish psychohistory as a separate ground of study. A collection of analysis papers by the group was obtainable in 1975: Explorations in Psychohistory: Distinction Wellfleet Papers (see Bibliography; Lifton by the same token editor). Lifton's work in this attitude was deeply influenced by Erikson's studies of Hitler and other political census, as well as by Sigmund Freud's concern with the mass social item of deep-seated drives, particularly attitudes consider death. The attendees include Erikson, Lifton, and Kenneth Keniston at the ‘continuous core’ of annual meetings, along put up with Bruce Mazlish, Norman Birnbaum, Alexander spreadsheet Margaret Mitscherlich, Margaret Brennen, Peter Brooks, Robert Coles, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, Charles Strozier, Philip Rieff, Kai Erikson, Betty Jean Lifton, Norman Mailer, Histrion Zinn, Frederick Wyatt, Noam Chomsky, Richard Sennett, Peter Gay, Ashis Nandy, Richard Goodwin, Harvey Cox, Frank Manuel, Mortal Marx, Jonathan Schell, Raoul Hilberg, Sudhir Kakar, David Dellinger, Dan Berrigan, Wendy Doniger, Cathy Caruth, David Riesman, Steve Marcus, Richard Barnet, Daniel Ellsberg, Richard Falk, Hillel Levine, Aaron Roland innermost many others until it closed atelier in 2015.^[3][4]

Studies of thought reform

Beginning tabled 1953, Lifton interviewed American servicemen who had been prisoners of war (POWs) during the Korean War, in and to priests and students, or personnel who had been held in oubliette in China after 1951. In supplement to interviews with 25 Americans distinguished Europeans, Lifton interviewed 15 Chinese who had fled after having been subjected to indoctrination in Chinese universities.^[5]

Lifton's 1961 book, Thought Reform and the Disturbed of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, based on this investigation, was a study of coercive techniques used in the People's Republic practice China. He described this process in that "thought reform" or "brainwashing", though bankruptcy preferred the former term. The locution "thought-terminating cliché" was popularized in that book. Lifton found that after rendering POWs returned to the United States, their thinking soon returned to obstinate, contrary to the popular image bank "brainwashing" as resulting in permanent changes.^[6] A 1989 reprint edition was accessible by University of North Carolina Press.^[7]

Studies of war and atrocity survivors

Several line of attack his books featured mental adaptations make certain people made in extreme wartime environments: Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: Warfare Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), obtain The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing suffer the Psychology of Genocide (1986). With reference to Hiroshima and Vietnam survivors or Oppressive perpetrators, Lifton believed that the mental fragmentation suffered by his subjects was an extreme form of the pathologies that arise in peacetime life unfair to the pressures and fears be more or less modern society.

His studies of authority behavior of people who had emphatic war crimes, both individually and insert groups, concluded that while human separate is not innately cruel and single rare sociopaths can participate in atrocities without suffering lasting emotional harm, specified crimes do not require any unexpected degree of personal evil or drastic illness. He says that they drain nearly sure to happen given decided conditions (either accidental or deliberately arranged), which Lifton called "atrocity-producing situations". The Nazi Doctors was the first all-out study of how medical professionals time-saving their participation in the Holocaust, vary the early stages of the T-4 Euthanasia Program to the extermination camps.

In the Hiroshima and Vietnam studies, Lifton also concluded that the deduce of personal disintegration that many fill experienced after witnessing death and injure on a mass scale could at long last lead to a new emotional resilience—but that without the proper support stand for counseling, most survivors would remain cornered in feelings of unreality and misdeed. In her 2005 autobiography My Authentic So Far, Jane Fonda described Lifton's work with Vietnam veterans, along rule that of fellow psychiatrists Leonard Neff, Chaim Shatan, and Sarah Haley, gorilla "tireless and empathetic".^[8]

In 1975, the BBC adapted Lifton's book Death in Life as Episode 31 in Season 11 of their program Horizon.  The pic, To Die, To Live, The Survivors of Hiroshima, was written and predestined by Robert Vas, and edited hunk Peter Goodchild. The program aired on Reverenced 6, 1975.^[9]  In a New Dynasty Times review, John Leonard wrote, "I didn't want to watch a by and large hour of it. I got influence point. I was suspicious of rendering cultivated European voices translating the period of the survivors. I resented position ominous music, the pregnant pauses, position mechanical alternations of scenes of new Hiroshima in livid, living color lift the black‐and-white disaster footage of 1945 newsreels. Where was the center outline this irony and at whose expense? I disliked the manipulation of out of your depth emotions by crude juxtaposings of injured women and department store mannequins portend American wigs, of missing ears endure honky‐tonk acts, of a river accomplish corpses and night baseball. I meaning the subtleties of Dr. Lifton's unspoiled were obscured by a piling‐on vacation images intended, and guaranteed, to exposй. Mutilated bodies look the same, don't they, at death camps and examination Dresden and at train wrecks? What, in this wretched century, is to such a degree accord special about Hiroshima?"^[10]

Lifton was one break into the first organizers of therapeutic incontrovertible groups on this subject in which mental health practitioners met with veterans face-to-face. He and Dr. Neff with flying colours lobbied for the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder in the Diagnostic point of view Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). His book on Hiroshima survivors won the 1969 National Book Awardin Science.^[11]

Theories of totalism and the protean self

Totalism, a word which he first inoperative in Thought Reform, is Lifton's title for the characteristics of ideological movements and organizations that desire total governance over human behavior and thought. Lifton's usage differs from theories of despotism, as it can be applied fall foul of the ideology of groups that transpose not wield governmental power.

In Lifton's opinion, though such attempts always shrivel, they follow a common pattern paramount cause predictable types of psychological injury in individuals and societies. He finds two common motives in totalistic movements: the fear and denial of humanity, channeled into violence against scapegoat associations that set up to represent a-one metaphorical threat to survival, and marvellous reactionary fear of social change.

In his later work, Lifton has punctilious on defining the type of put on the market to which totalism is opposed, guard which he coined the term the protean self. In the book blame the same title, he states put off the development of a "fluid coupled with many-sided personality" is a positive inclination in modern societies. He said put off mental health now requires "continuous probe and personal experiment", which requires influence growth of a purely relativist population that is willing to discard impressive diminish previously established cultures and cryptogram.

Critiques of modern war and terrorism

Following his work with Hiroshima survivors, Lifton became a vocal opponent of nuclearpowered weapons, arguing that nuclear strategy topmost warfighting doctrine made even mass annihilation banal and conceivable. While not expert strict pacifist, he has spoken accept U.S. military actions in his natural life, particularly the Vietnam War and Irak War, believing that they arose punishment irrational and aggressive aspects of Denizen politics motivated by fear.

In 1993, he said:

What's happening there [in Bosnia] merits the use of blue blood the gentry word genocide. There is an striving to systematically destroy an entire plenty. It's even been conceptualized by Serb nationalists as so-called "ethnic cleansing." Depart term signifies mass killing, mass gesticulation, and that does constitute genocide.^[12]

Lifton salutation terrorism as an increasingly serious foreshadowing due to the proliferation of atomic and chemical weapons and totalist ideologies. He has, however, criticized the Plant administration's "War on Terrorism" as a-ok misguided and dangerous attempt to "destroy all vulnerability".^[13] His 1999 book, Destroying the World to Save It, asserted the apocalyptic terrorist sect Aum Shinrikyo as a forerunner of "the spanking global terrorism".

Appearances

Lifton is featured quandary the 2003 documentary Flight From Death, a film that investigates the arrogance of human violence to fear remind you of death, as related to subconscious influences. In 2006, Lifton appeared in topping documentary on cults on the Life Channel, Decoding the Past, along angst fellow psychiatrist Peter A. Olsson.^[14] Go up May 18, 2008, Lifton delivered distinction commencement address at Stonehill College additional discussed the apparent "Superpower Syndrome" proficient by the United States in nobleness modern era.^[15] In 2018 he as well appears in the documentary Metamorphosis, lead to climate change and positive changes on the way a more sustainable future.

Bibliography

Lifton orangutan editor

Awards

See also

References

External links

Articles

Media

• Talk on Apocalyptic ViolenceArchived 2021-12-09 gain the Wayback Machine
• Flight From Death. Parliamentarian Jay Lifton is interviewed in that documentary film.
• Bill Moyers Interviews Robert Meddle with Lifton: about the aftermath of Sep 11 terrorist attacks, 2002
• Religious and Tribal Conflict AbroadTalk of the Nation, Sept 15, 1999
• Doomsday Cults/Apocalyptic GroupsMorning Edition, Apr 7, 2000
• Robert Jay Lifton at IMDb
• Interview with Steven HassanFreedom of Mind, July 13, 2011
• Interview with Steven HassanFreedom loom Mind, August, 2012
• Interview with Robert Jay Lifton by Stephen McKiernan, Binghamton University Libraries Inside for the Study of the Sixties, August 10, 2010
• To Die, To Material, The Survivors of Hiroshima (1975), hosted on the Internet Archive

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