I Was a Protégé of Robert Jay Lifton

article

Eva Fogelman

Abstract

Robert Jay Lifton is honored as one of the most important moral witnesses of the past century, a psychiatrist and psychohistorian who confronted historical catastrophe through disciplined listening to survivors, perpetrators, and those caught within totalistic systems. From Hiroshima to Nazi doctors, from Chinese thought reform to apocalyptic movements, Lifton’s work illuminated how cruelty, destructiveness, and moral disorientation take shape under conditions of extreme historical violence, while never relinquishing the question of individual responsibility.

Keywords:

Betty Jean (BJ) Lifton, Holocaust survivors, ideological totalism, psychobiography, psychohistory, Robert Jay Lifton, witnessing

This article is currently unavailable to the public due to its recent publication.

To access it, please become a member of the Psychohistory Forum.

Membership page

About the author

Eva Fogelman

Eva Fogelman, PhD, is a social psychologist, a psychotherapist in private practice in New York, a filmmaker, and the author of the award-winning Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (1995). She was Co-Founder and Co-Director of Psychotherapy with Generations of the Holocaust and Related Traumas, TIMH. She was the Founding Director of the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers, ADL (originally the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous). She is currently the Co-Director of Child Development Research. She moderates the podcast The Blue Card Stories of the Holocaust: Overcoming Historical Traumas and a Zoom program, “Transforming Moments: Second Generation of Holocaust Survivors,” for the Museum of Jewish Heritage. She may be contacted at .

How to cite this article

Fogelman, E. (2026). I was a protégé of Robert Jay Lifton. Clio’s Psyche, 33(2), 168-171.

https://doi.org/10.70763/1906f3350e1fa43adced642ff351c943