Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who peered into some of the darkest corners of contemporary history, including Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, in search of lessons about individual and collective consciousness, died on Thursday at his home in Truro, Mass. He was 99.
His death was by confirmed by his daughter, Natasha Lifton.
Dr. Lifton was fascinated by “the reaction of human beings to extreme situations,” as the psychiatrist Anthony Storr wrote in The Washington Post in 1979, an interest that began with his study of brainwashing by the Chinese Communists in the 1950s and continued through his analysis of the American fight against terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001. He wrote, helped write or edited some two dozen books and hundreds of articles about the meanings of what The Times Literary Supplement of London called “the seemingly incomprehensible.”
Dr. Lifton’s often somber quest was inspired and guided by mentors and friends like the psychologist Erik Erikson, the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the sociologist David Riesman.
It led him from troubled Vietnam veterans to the trial of Patricia Hearst, at which he was an expert witness on thought control — testifying, as he wrote in The New York Times in 1976, on “the crucial question of her voluntary or involuntary participation” in an armed bank robbery by a politically radical group that had abducted her. He examined the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995 and the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American troops at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war.
Perhaps his most vivid work concerned the role of medical doctors in the Nazi genocide. Reviewing Dr. Lifton’s book “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” (1986), Bruno Bettelheim, the psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, worried that the empathy Dr. Lifton displayed in illuminating the psyches of the killers might seem tantamount to forgiveness.
“I believe there are acts so vile that our task is to reject and prevent them,” Dr. Bettelheim wrote in The Times Book Review, “not to try to understand them empathetically as Dr. Lifton did.”
Dr. Lifton countered in a letter to the Book Review that his purpose in writing the book was to reveal the broader potential for human evil. “We better serve the future by confronting this potential than by viewing it as unexaminable,” he wrote.
Other critics questioned the usefulness of the approach he called psychohistory, the study of historical influences on the individual — not least because of the fuzziness of the term. Some, including both supporters and critics, suggested that psychohistory amounted to mass psychoanalysis.
Perhaps his sharpest critics were those who found his scholarship inextricably entwined with his passionate leftist, antiwar views. Reviewers used phrases like “transparently polemical” to describe his work.
Dr. Lifton responded that he could not be the sort of godlike figure that he believed people expected a psychiatrist to be. “I believe one’s advocacy should be out front,” he said in an interview with Psychology Today in 1988.
“What we choose to study as scholars is a reflection of our advocacies, our passions, spoken or otherwise,” he wrote in his 2011 memoir, “Witness to an Extreme Century.”
Dr. Lifton early on focused on nuclear war as the ultimate catastrophe, suggesting that the new possibility of humankind’s sudden, perhaps total annihilation fundamentally changed the way people thought about death. His book “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima” (1968) won the National Book Award for its penetrating study of 90,000 people who survived the explosion of the first atomic bomb dropped on a population.
That the bomb could be used again at any time amounted to an “ill-begotten imagery of extinction” pervading man’s consciousness, he wrote in “The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life” (1979).
Dr. Lifton suggested that a new kind of person, with new tools for adaptation, was emerging, a product of the breakdown of traditional institutions and the threat of human extinction. He christened this new being Protean Man, named for Proteus, the Greek god who constantly changed forms.
Dr. Lifton hated heavy-handed prose, and one of his delights were the cartoons of long-necked birds he doodled to express his sense of the absurd. In 1969, he published a book of them, titled simply “Birds.”
In one cartoon, a bird says: “All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling: ‘I am me!’”
“You were wrong,” says the other.
Robert Jay Lifton was born in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn on May 16, 1926, to Harold and Ciel (Roth) Lifton. His grandparents on both sides were born in shtetls in today’s Belarus, and soon after they emigrated to the United States, his parents were born. Dr. Lifton said in a 1999 interview that he had been greatly influenced by the liberal views of his father, a businessman who sold household appliances.
At 16, Robert won a scholarship to Cornell University to study biology in its premedical program. He continued his studies at New York Medical College, received his M.D. in 1948 and interned at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn.
During that time he was drawn into a social circle revolving around the lyricist Yip Harburg (“Brother Can You Spare a Dime”), a friend of his father’s. He was soon mingling in Harburg’s Central Park West apartment with the iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone, the actor and singer Paul Robeson and Henry A. Wallace, the former vice president and progressive presidential candidate.
From 1949 to 1951, he studied psychiatry at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. (He said he chose to specialize in psychiatry in part because he was afraid of blood.) He also met Betty Jean Kirschner, a Barnard graduate who was working in the nascent television industry. They married in 1952. By then, Dr. Lifton had enlisted in the Air Force, which sent him to Japan, where he and his new wife learned Japanese. She went on to write and lecture widely on adoption reform before her death at 84 in 2010.
Dr. Lifton spent six months in Korea, where he studied the effects of what the Chinese called thought reform — and others characterized as brainwashing — on American prisoners of war. He was discharged from the military in 1953, and he and his wife embarked on a trip around the world.
They got only as far as Hong Kong, where he began to hear stories about more intense versions of brainwashing. Through interviews, he ascertained that the technique involved a combination of external force and evangelical exhortation. His research led to his first major publication, “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’” (1961).
Dr. Lifton was on the faculty of the Washington School of Psychiatry from 1954 to 1955 and worked as a research associate at Harvard from 1956 to 1961. He also taught at Yale.
At Harvard, Erik Erikson became his friend and mentor, and Dr. Lifton became immersed in Erikson’s theories of human identity, as well as his pioneering work in bringing psychological insights to historical figures like Martin Luther and Gandhi. Dr. Lifton veered from Erikson, however, in applying psychology not just to influential individuals, but also to people in general. And he began to think about death’s place in psychological theory, something he felt that psychologists from Freud to Erikson had neglected.
With another Harvard professor, Dr. Riesman, Dr. Lifton grew active in protesting against nuclear weapons. He said these concerns impelled him to go to Hiroshima to see firsthand the bomb’s destruction
There he found people suffering a range of psychological traumas. They were most damaged, he wrote, by their realization that they had been used as guinea pigs to test a terrible new weapon. Describing their response, he developed his concept of psychological “numbing.”
Dr. Lifton published his study on Hiroshima in 1968, the same year he published “Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.” This book offered a psychohistorical look at the upheaval in China, and suggested that Mao and other leaders were motivated by an unconscious sense of personal immortality.
He published books of essays, lectures and cartoons before turning his attention to Vietnam veterans. Drawing from intense rap sessions with 35 veterans, he examined their bitter, contradictory emotions. Some critics contended that Dr. Lifton’s personal opposition to the Vietnam War obscured his scientific objectivity.
After arriving at theories about death, symbolic immortality and the horror of nuclear war in several books, Dr. Lifton came to focus on the Holocaust. He explored how doctors could turn against their training and do things like select which prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp would die. His explanation was that the doctors had developed “double” personalities. (His quest to understand them was explored in a 2009 documentary film, “Robert Jay Lifton: Nazi Doctors.”)
He later identified the same phenomenon in the murderous Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, whose release of sarin gas in a Tokyo subway in 1995 killed 13 people and injured thousands. He wrote that Ikuo Hayashi, a surgeon and a member of the cult that carried out the attack, had formed “two selves that are morally and functionally antithetical although part of the same psyche.”
After Sept. 11, 2001, Dr. Lifton wrote extensively about terrorism, counterterrorism and the war in Iraq, including in his book “Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World” (2003). His vision was exceedingly dark.
“The war on terrorism is apocalyptic, then, exactly because it is militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and has no clear end,” he wrote in The Nation in 2003. “It therefore enters the realm of the infinite.”
In one of his last books, “The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival” (2017), he examined what he called “the powerful shift in our awareness of climate truths.”
“The swerve forces us to look upon ourselves as members of a single species in deep trouble,” he wrote in The Times.
Dr. Lifton is survived by his partner, Nancy Rosenblum; his daughter and his son, Kenneth Lifton; and four grandchildren.
His last academic position was as visiting professor at Harvard Medical School. Before that, he taught for many years at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.
In an interview with Newsweek in 1970, Dr. Lifton said that people who studied death were complicated, but were “not without humorous dimensions.” His cartoon birds told the jokes.
“Now that you have completed your thirty-year investigation of human mortality, could you tell us some conclusions?” one bird says.
“When you’re dead,” the other replies, “you’re dead.”
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