Only Connect: Homage to Robert Jay Lifton

article

Kurt Jacobsen

Abstract

This is an appreciation of what Robert Jay Lifton’s work meant to the writer as well as to the social sciences. E. M. Forster’s deceptively simple epigraph “Only connect!” entails in the social sciences a host of vexing methodological challenges and moral difficulties through which Lifton, with multidisciplinary mastery and no little panache, blazed many an illuminating research trail.

Keywords:

genocide, psychoanalysis, psychobiography, psychohistory, Robert Jay Lifton, social sciences, Vietnam, warfare, Wellfleet Group

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About the author

Kurt Jacobsen

Kurt Jacobsen, PhD, is a research associate in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, where he also earned his doctoral degree. He has published articles and reviews in Psychoanalytic Review, Free Associations, History of Psychiatry and Psychoanalytic Studies. His latest books include a 2011 paperback edition of Freud’s Foes: Psychoanalysis, Science and Resistance (2009) and the forthcoming co-authored Parables of Permanent War (Lexington Books). Dr. Jacobsen can be reached at jkjacobs@uchicago.edu.

How to cite this article

Jacobsen, K. (2026). Only connect: Homage to Robert Jay Lifton. Clio’s Psyche, 33(2), 175-179.

https://doi.org/10.70763/ad16fe8f92f051afbf656271afd7872d