Lifton’s Life Journey

Robert Jay Lifton is a larger than life figure because of his scholarly accomplishments, activism against senseless war, and stance against nuclear weapons and mind manipulation. In his compelling memoir, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2011, 430 pages), he describes and analyzes his intellectual and emotional journey, the relationships that sustained him, and what he learned along the way. Early on in this autobiographical book, readers become acquainted with the familial influences on Lifton’s decision to become a psychiatrist and the roots of his aversion to all-encompassing ideologies that claim to illuminate the whole truth, an idea he later embodied in the term “totalism.”

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The opening section of this book describes the difficult process whereby Lifton decided to pursue his interests in the impact of historical events on the individual psyche and collective behavior. It was a bold move not to follow the traditional path for a psychiatrist in the 1950s—that is, psychoanalytic training and a practice. He indicates somewhat “tongue and cheek” that “it was the military that liberated me.” Conscripted as a medical officer in Korea and Japan, Dr. Lifton had to make decisions regarding soldiers impacted psychologically by combat.

Lifton was fortunate that his wife Betty Jean shared his passions and interests. It was through her that he learned of American soldiers and foreign missionaries who had been brainwashed while held captive by Chinese Communists in North Korea. His interviews with these victims makes for fascinating reading, as Lifton experiences firsthand the coercive power of thought reform. He saw that for most of them, the mind manipulation procedures that they underwent left them confused immediately afterwards, half believing the dogma of their captors that revolution against the “imperialists” was needed. Lifton zeros in on a couple of missionaries, one of whom described the duress his mind was under in the context of his abusive imprisonment, such that he could not differentiate his beliefs from reality. This missionary described to Lifton the convoluted process his mind went through to devise a believable false confession. Lifton saw this as both vulnerability and resilience. Lifton later learned of the apocalyptic impact of thought reform going “berserk” during the Cultural Revolution, as millions of people died.

The second part of the Memoir describes Lifton’s process of becoming immersed in the study of Hiroshima survivors. He indicates an increased sensitivity in the years following the release of the atomic bomb to its destructive potential for human civilization. When visiting Hiroshima in 1962, he was horrified to come across encampments of individuals with keloid scars, effects of radiation, and to see from photographs the widespread destruction of Hiroshima. At those moments, Lifton felt compelled to study the full human impact of the bombs, and he says he is “still trying” to understand and comprehend its impact on the human psyche and our civilization. He intimates that it is difficult to put into words the death dominated aura of what he saw; perhaps only art can approach representation of this kind of annihilation. Before conduct-

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ing his interviews with survivors, Lifton became immersed in Japanese culture and researched the history of Hiroshima, an old castle city founded in 1589. He came to believe that, to some extent, survivor reactions are influenced by their culture. As with the Japanese, he learned that most experienced the Emperor’s surrender as more of a spiritual collapse than the bomb, as the Emperor, after all, was considered like a god. With respect to many individuals, though, who were close to the bomb’s impact, Lifton learned that they lived with the lifelong guilt of not being able to save their loved ones. For most people who were in Hiroshima that day, there was also a profound worry of ill health from the radiation effects to oneself and one’s offspring, and some amorphous feeling of having a stain on one’s genes. Lifton’s later books, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967) and The Broken Connection: Death and the Continuity of Life (1979), touch on these themes.

Lifton’s subsequent foray in to the destructive impact of war on individuals was his work with Vietnam War veterans. In a casual visit with his wife to Saigon in 1954, he saw the futility of getting caught up with Vietnam’s struggles but also knew of America’s fear of the spread of communism. After the My Lai Massacre, Lifton set about trying to understand what he termed “the atrocity producing situation.” By this, he meant the circumstances in which an average person could be capable of committing atrocities. In Vietnam, he found such situations as fighting a war in a far-off place, the frequent impossibility of differentiating enemy fighters from civilians, and certain military policies called search and destroy missions. He also learned that for the soldiers themselves, such psychological reactions as fear, helplessness, and angry grief in response to losses of comrades led to committing these atrocities. Lifton also interviewed a soldier who did not shoot at My Lai and was surprised to find that for this soldier, military ideals prevented him from killing innocents. With Chaim Shatan, a practicing psychiatrist, Lifton organized groups for anti-war Vietnam veterans where they could vent and discuss the trauma of their experience witnessing or participating in grotesque killing and dying, as well as discuss their changing sense of their masculinity, and their feelings of returning to a society that didn’t care about

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them. The Vietnam War galvanized Lifton’s activism that involved sit-ins at the Capitol and resulted in a couple of arrests and widened his professional identity as a “being in the world psychiatrist.”

One of the last systematic research studies that Lifton conducted, and which resulted in an acclaimed book, was his work on Nazi doctors. In the Memoir, he entitles the first chapter as “Strong Enough Stomach?” The latter is a visceral metaphor for Lifton’s fear, agony, and rage at having to face perpetrators who had taken the oath to do no harm, but in the death camps became cold blooded killers involved in the selection for gas chambers or injecting harmful bacteria for experimental purposes. Lifton provides chilling detail from these interviews and how, after 30 plus years, these men often still believed in their Nazi superego, stating in their lovely book-filled homes, that the killing of the Jews was necessary to rid the German race of the stain of the Jews for the recovery of the world. In this section, Lifton coins the term “doubling” to describe a form of dissociation in which the self splits into two separate functioning wholes, an Auschwitz self and a more benign self, enabling the second to behave as an ordinary husband and father. To illustrate doubling, Lifton uses a query from the daughter of a Nazi doctor who asked him whether her father, whom she remembered as a good man, could do such bad things. Dr. Lifton responded, “The first time he did this he became evil.”

In the last section of this Memoir, Lifton ties up some loose ends and follows up on Hiroshima, the death-life continuity, and the resilience of the self. Readers learn that Lifton was called upon because of his work on thought reform to testify at the Patty Hearst trial and are enlightened about other areas in which he became involved in recent years, such as genocide. Lifton lets us into his continual enthusiasm for his yearly Wellfleet Conference, where individuals from various fields discuss timely topics. He also shares his ongoing appreciation of long-standing friendships with individuals like Norman Mailer, David Riesman and Erik Erikson. In the epilogue, Lifton talks about his grief at the loss of his wife in November of 2010.

This book not only propels us into thinking about the dangers of all-encompassing ideologies, and into witnessing an extreme century, but also allows us to be a witness to an extraordinary life.

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