#Robert Jay Lifton | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mariacallous · 1 year ago

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In the first half century of his career, Robert Jay Lifton published five books based on long-term studies of seemingly vastly different topics. For his first book, “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism,” Lifton interviewed former inmates of Chinese reëducation camps. Trained as both a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, Lifton used the interviews to understand the psychological—rather than the political or ideological—structure of totalitarianism. His next topic was Hiroshima; his 1968 book “Death in Life,” based on extended associative interviews with survivors of the atomic bomb, earned Lifton the National Book Award. He then turned to the psychology of Vietnam War veterans and, soon after, Nazis. In both of the resulting books—“Home from the War” and “The Nazi Doctors”—Lifton strove to understand the capacity of ordinary people to commit atrocities. In his final interview-based book, “Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism,” which was published in 1999, Lifton examined the psychology and ideology of a cult.

Lifton is fascinated by the range and plasticity of the human mind, its ability to contort to the demands of totalitarian control, to find justification for the unimaginable—the Holocaust, war crimes, the atomic bomb—and yet recover, and reconjure hope. In a century when humanity discovered its capacity for mass destruction, Lifton studied the psychology of both the victims and the perpetrators of horror. “We are all survivors of Hiroshima, and, in our imaginations, of future nuclear holocaust,” he wrote at the end of “Death in Life.” How do we live with such knowledge? When does it lead to more atrocities and when does it result in what Lifton called, in a later book, “species-wide agreement”?

Lifton’s big books, though based on rigorous research, were written for popular audiences. He writes, essentially, by lecturing into a Dictaphone, giving even his most ambitious works a distinctive spoken quality. In between his five large studies, Lifton published academic books, papers and essays, and two books of cartoons, “Birds” and “PsychoBirds.” (Every cartoon features two bird heads with dialogue bubbles, such as, “ ‘All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling: I am me!’ ” “You were wrong.”) Lifton’s impact on the study and treatment of trauma is unparalleled. In a 2020 tribute to Lifton in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, his former colleague Charles Strozier wrote that a chapter in “Death in Life” on the psychology of survivors “has never been surpassed, only repeated many times and frequently diluted in its power. All those working with survivors of trauma, personal or sociohistorical, must immerse themselves in his work.”

Lifton was also a prolific political activist. He opposed the war in Vietnam and spent years working in the anti-nuclear movement. In the past twenty-five years, Lifton wrote a memoir—“Witness to an Extreme Century”—and several books that synthesize his ideas. His most recent book, “Surviving Our Catastrophes,” combines reminiscences with the argument that survivors—whether of wars, nuclear explosions, the ongoing climate emergency, COVID, or other catastrophic events—can lead others on a path to reinvention. If human life is unsustainable as we have become accustomed to living it, it is likely up to survivors—people who have stared into the abyss of catastrophe—to imagine and enact new ways of living.

Lifton grew up in Brooklyn and spent most of his adult life between New York City and Massachusetts. He and his wife, Betty Jean Kirschner, an author of children’s books and an advocate for open adoption, had a house in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, that hosted annual meetings of the Wellfleet Group, which brought together psychoanalysts and other intellectuals to exchange ideas. Kirschner died in 2010. A couple of years later, at a dinner party, Lifton met the political theorist Nancy Rosenblum, who became a Wellfleet Group participant and his partner. In March, 2020, Lifton and Rosenblum left his apartment on the Upper West Side for her house in Truro, Massachusetts, near the very tip of Cape Cod, where Lifton, who is ninety-seven, continues to work every day. In September, days after “Surviving Our Catastrophes” was published, I visited him there. The transcript of our conversations has been edited for length and clarity.

I would like to go through some terms that seem key to your work. I thought I’d start with “totalism.”

O.K. Totalism is an all-or-none commitment to an ideology. It involves an impulse toward action. And it’s a closed state, because a totalist sees the world through his or her ideology. A totalist seeks to own reality.

And when you say “totalist,” do you mean a leader or aspiring leader, or anyone else committed to the ideology?

Can be either. It can be a guru of a cult, or a cult-like arrangement. The Trumpist movement, for instance, is cult-like in many ways. And it is overt in its efforts to own reality, overt in its solipsism.

How is it cult-like?

He forms a certain kind of relationship with followers. Especially his base, as they call it, his most fervent followers, who, in a way, experience high states at his rallies and in relation to what he says or does.

Your definition of totalism seems very similar to Hannah Arendt’s definition of totalitarian ideology. Is the difference that it’s applicable not just to states but also to smaller groups?

It’s like a psychological version of totalitarianism, yes, applicable to various groups. As we see now, there’s a kind of hunger for totalism. It stems mainly from dislocation. There’s something in us as human beings which seeks fixity and definiteness and absoluteness. We’re vulnerable to totalism. But it’s most pronounced during times of stress and dislocation. Certainly Trump and his allies are calling for a totalism. Trump himself doesn’t have the capacity to sustain an actual continuous ideology. But by simply declaring his falsehoods to be true and embracing that version of totalism, he can mesmerize his followers and they can depend upon him for every truth in the world.

You have another great term: “thought-terminating cliché.”

Thought-terminating cliché is being stuck in the language of totalism. So that any idea that one has that is separate from totalism is wrong and has to be terminated.

What would be an example from Trumpism?

The Big Lie. Trump’s promulgation of the Big Lie has surprised everyone with the extent to which it can be accepted and believed if constantly reiterated.

Did it surprise you?

It did. Like others, I was fooled in the sense of expecting him to be so absurd that, for instance, that he wouldn’t be nominated for the Presidency in the first place.

Next on my list is “atrocity-producing situation.”

That’s very important to me. When I looked at the Vietnam War, especially antiwar veterans, I felt they had been placed in an atrocity-producing situation. What I meant by that was a combination of military policies and individual psychology. There was a kind of angry grief. Really all of the My Lai massacre could be seen as a combination of military policy and angry grief. The men had just lost their beloved older sergeant, George Cox, who had been a kind of father figure. He had stepped on a booby trap. The company commander had a ceremony. He said, “There are no innocent civilians in this area.” He gave them carte blanche to kill everyone. The eulogy for Sergeant Cox combined with military policy to unleash the slaughter of My Lai, in which almost five hundred people were killed in one morning.

You’ve written that people who commit atrocities in an atrocity-producing situation would never do it under different circumstances.

People go into an atrocity-producing situation no more violent, or no more moral or immoral, than you or me. Ordinary people commit atrocities.

That brings us to “malignant normality.”

It describes a situation that is harmful and destructive but becomes routinized, becomes the norm, becomes accepted behavior. I came to that by looking at malignant nuclear normality. After the Second World War, the assumption was that we might have to use the weapon again. At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a group of faculty members wrote a book called “Living with Nuclear Weapons.” There was a book by Joseph Nye called “Nuclear Ethics.” His “nuclear ethics” included using the weapon. Later there was Star Wars, the anti-missile missiles which really encouraged first-strike use. These were examples of malignant nuclear normality. Other examples were the scenarios by people like [the physicists] Edward Teller and Herman Kahn in which we could use the weapons and recover readily from nuclear war. We could win nuclear wars.

And now, according to the Doomsday Clock, we’re closer to possible nuclear disaster than ever before. Yet there doesn’t seem to be the same sense of pervasive dread that there was in the seventies and eighties.

I think in our minds apocalyptic events merge. I see parallels between nuclear and climate threats. Charles Strozier and I did a study of nuclear fear. People spoke of nuclear fear and climate fear in the same sentence. It’s as if the mind has a certain area for apocalyptic events. I speak of “climate swerve,” of growing awareness of climate danger. And nuclear awareness was diminishing. But that doesn’t mean that nuclear fear was gone. It was still there in the Zeitgeist and it’s still very much with us, the combination of nuclear and climate change, and now COVID, of course.

How about “psychic numbing”?

Psychic numbing is a diminished capacity or inclination to feel. One point about psychic numbing, which could otherwise resemble other defense mechanisms, like de-realization or repression: it only is concerned with feeling and nonfeeling. Of course, psychic numbing can also be protective. People in Hiroshima had to numb themselves. People in Auschwitz had to numb themselves quite severely in order to get through that experience. People would say, “I was a different person in Auschwitz.” They would say, “I simply stopped feeling.” Much of life involves keeping the balance between numbing and feeling, given the catastrophes that confront us.

A related concept that you use, which comes from Martin Buber, is “imagining the real.”

It’s attributed to Martin Buber, but as far as I can tell, nobody knows exactly where he used it. It really means the difficulty in taking in what is actual. Imagining the real becomes necessary for imagining our catastrophes and confronting them and for that turn by which the helpless victim becomes the active survivor who promotes renewal and resilience.

How does that relate to another one of your concepts, nuclearism?

Nuclearism is the embrace of nuclear weapons to solve various human problems and the commitment to their use. I speak of a strange early expression of nuclearism between Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, who was a great mentor of Oppenheimer. Bohr came to Los Alamos. And they would have abstract conversations. They had this idea that nuclear weapons could be both a source of destruction and havoc and a source of good because their use would prevent any wars in the future. And that view has never left us. Oppenheimer never quite renounced it, though, at other times, he said he had blood on his hands—in his famous meeting with Truman.

Have you seen the movie “Oppenheimer”?

Yes. I thought it was a well-made film by a gifted filmmaker. But it missed this issue of nuclearism. It missed the Bohr-Oppenheimer interaction. And worst of all, it said nothing about what happened in Hiroshima. It had just a fleeting image of his thinking about Hiroshima. My view is that his success in making the weapon was the source of his personal catastrophe. He was deeply ambivalent about his legacy. I’m very sensitive to that because that was how I got to my preoccupation with Oppenheimer: through having studied Hiroshima, having lived there for six months, and then asking myself, What happened on the other side of the bomb—the people who made it, the people who used it? They underwent a kind of numbing. It’s also true that Oppenheimer, in relationship to the larger hydrogen bombs, became the most vociferous critic of nuclearism. That’s part of his story. The moral of Oppenheimer’s story is that we need abolition. That’s the only human solution.

By abolition, you mean destruction of all existing weapons?

Yes, and not building any new ones.

Have you been following the war in Ukraine? Do you see Putin as engaging in nuclearism?

I do. He has a constant threat of using nuclear weapons. Some feel that his very threat is all that he can do. But we can’t always be certain. I think he is aware of the danger of nuclear weapons to the human race. He has shown that awareness, and it has been expressed at times by his spokesman. But we can’t ever fully know. His emotions are so otherwise extreme.

There’s a messianic ideology in Russia. And the line used on Russian television is, “If we blow up the world, at least we will go straight to Heaven. And they will just croak.”

There’s always been that idea with nuclearism. One somehow feels that one’s own group will survive and others will die. It’s an illusion, of course, but it’s one of the many that we call forth in relation to nuclear danger.

Are you in touch with any of your former Russian counterparts in the anti-nuclear movement?

I’ve never entirely left the anti-nuclear movements. I’ve been particularly active in Physicians for Social Responsibility. We had meetings—or bombings, as we used to call it—in different cities in the country, describing what would happen if a nuclear war occurred. We had a very simple message: we’re physicians and we’d like to be able to patch you up after this war, but it won’t really be possible because all medical facilities will be destroyed, and probably you’ll be dead, and we’ll be dead. We did the same internationally with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. There’s a part of the movement that’s not appreciated sufficiently. [Yevgeny] Chazov, who was the main Soviet representative, was a friend of Gorbachev’s, and he was feeding Gorbachev this view of common security. And Gorbachev quickly took on the view of nuclear weapons that we had. There used to be a toast: either an American or a Soviet would get up and say, “I toast you and your leaders and your people. And your survival, because if you survive, we survive. And if you die, we die.”

Let’s talk about proteanism.

Proteanism is, of course, named after the notorious shape-shifter Proteus. It suggests a self that is in motion, that is multiple rather than made up of fixed ideas, and changeable and can be transformed. There is an ongoing struggle between proteanism and fixity. Proteanism is no guarantee of achievement or of ridding ourselves of danger. But proteanism has more possibility of taking us toward a species mentality. A species mentality means that we are concerned with the fate of the human species. Whenever we take action for opposing climate change, or COVID, or even the threat to our democratic procedure, we’re expressing ourselves on behalf of the human species. And that species-self and species commitment is crucial to our emergence from these dilemmas.

Next term: “witnessing professional.”

I went to Hiroshima because I was already anti-nuclear. When I got there, I discovered that, seventeen years after the bomb was dropped, there had been no over-all, inclusive study of what happened to that city and to groups of people in it. I wanted to conduct a scientific study, having a protocol and asking everyone similar questions—although I altered my method by encouraging them to associate. But I also realized that I wanted to bear witness to what happened to that city. I wanted to tell the world. I wanted to give a retelling, from my standpoint, as a psychological professional, of what happened to that city. That was how I came to see myself as a witnessing professional. It was to be a form of active witness. There were people in Hiroshima who embodied the struggle to bear witness. One of them was a historian who was at the edge of the city who said, “I looked down and saw that Hiroshima had disappeared.” That image of the city disappearing took hold in my head and became central to my life afterward. And the image that kept reverberating in my mind was, one plane, one bomb, one city. I was making clear—at least to myself at first and then, perhaps, to others,—that bearing witness and taking action was something that we needed from professionals and others.

I have two terms left on my list. One is “survivor.”

There is a distinction I make between the helpless victim and the survivor as agent of change. At the end of my Hiroshima book, I had a very long section describing the survivor. Survivors of large catastrophes are quite special. Because they have doubts about the continuation of the human race. Survivors of painful family loss or the loss of people close to them share the need to give meaning to that survival. People can claim to be survivors if they’re not; survivors themselves may sometimes take out their frustration on people immediately around them. There are all kinds of problems about survivors. Still, survivors have a certain knowledge through what they have experienced that no one else has. Survivors have surprised me by saying such things as “Auschwitz was terrible, but I’m glad that I could have such an experience.” I was amazed to hear such things. Of course, they didn’t really mean that they enjoyed it. But they were trying to say that they realized they had some value and some importance through what they had been through. And that’s what I came to think of as survivor power or survivor wisdom.

Do you have views on contemporary American usage of the words “survivor” and “victim”?

We still struggle with those two terms. The Trumpists come to see themselves as victims rather than survivors. They are victims of what they call “the steal.” In seeing themselves as victims, they take on a kind of righteousness. They can even develop a false survivor mission, of sustaining the Big Lie.

The last term I have on my list is “continuity of life.”

When I finished my first study, I wanted a theory for what I had done, so to speak. [The psychoanalyst] Erik Erikson spoke of identity. I could speak of Chinese Communism as turning the identity of the Chinese filial son into the filial Communist. But when it came to Hiroshima, Erikson didn’t have much to say in his work about the issue of death. I realized I had to come to a different idea set, and it was death and the continuity of life. In Hiroshima, I really was confronted with large-scale death—but also the question of the continuity of life, as victims could transform themselves into survivors.

Like some of your other ideas, this makes me think of Arendt’s writing. Something that was important to her was the idea that every birth is a new beginning, a new political possibility. And, relatedly, what stands between us and the triumph of totalitarianism is “the supreme capacity of man” to invent something new.

I think she’s saying there that it’s the human mind that does all this. The human mind is so many-sided and so surprising. And at times contradictory. It can be open to the wildest claims that it itself can create. That has been a staggering recognition. The human self can take us anywhere and everywhere.

Let me ask you one more Arendt question. Is there a parallel between your concept of “malignant normality” and her “banality of evil”?

There is. When Arendt speaks of the “banality of evil,” I agree—in the sense that evil can be a response to an atrocity-producing situation, it can be performed by ordinary people. But I would modify it a little bit and say that after one has been involved in committing evil, one changes. The person is no longer so banal. Nor is the evil, of course.

Your late wife, B.J., was a member of the Wellfleet Group. Your new partner, Nancy Rosenblum, makes appearances in your new book. Can I ask you to talk about combining your romantic, domestic, and intellectual relationships?

In the case of B.J., she was a kind of co-host with me to the meetings for all those fifty years and she had lots of intellectual ideas of her own, as a reformer in adoption and an authority on the psychology of adoption. And in the case of Nancy Rosenblum, as you know, she’s a very accomplished political theorist. She came to speak at Wellfleet. She gave a very humorous talk called “Activist Envy.” She had always been a very progressive theorist and has taken stands but never considered herself an activist, whereas just about everybody at the Wellfleet meeting combined scholarship and activism.

People have been talking more about love in later life. It’s very real, and it’s a different form of love, because, you know, one is quite formed at that stage of life. And perhaps has a better knowledge of who one is. And what a relationship is and what it can be. But there’s still something called love that has an intensity and a special quality that is beyond the everyday, and it actually has been crucial to me and my work in the last decade or so. And actually, I’ve been helpful to Nancy, too, because we have similar interests, although we come to them from different intellectual perspectives. We talk a lot about things. That’s been a really special part of my life for the last decade. On the other hand, she’s also quite aware of my age and situation. The threat of death—or at least the loss of capacity to function well—hovers over me. You asked me whether I have a fear of death. I’m sure I do. I’m not a religious figure who has transcended all this. For me, part of the longevity is a will to live and a desire to live. To continue working and continue what is a happy situation for me.

You’re about twenty years older than Nancy, right?

Twenty-one years older.

So you are at different stages in your lives.

Very much. It means that she does a lot of things, with me and for me, that enable me to function. It has to do with a lot of details and personal help. I sometimes get concerned about that because it becomes very demanding for her. She’s now working on a book on ungoverning. She needs time and space for that work.

What is your work routine? Are you still seeing patients?

I don’t. Very early on, I found that even having one patient, one has to be interested in that patient and available for that patient. It somehow interrupted my sense of being an intense researcher. So I stopped seeing patients quite a long time ago. I get up in the morning and have breakfast. Not necessarily all that early. I do a lot of good sleeping. Check my e-mails after breakfast. And then pretty much go to work at my desk at nine-thirty or ten. And stay there for a couple of hours or more. Have a late lunch. Nap, at some point. A little bit before lunch and then late in the day as well. I can close my eyes for five minutes and feel restored. I learned that trick from my father, from whom I learned many things. I’m likely to go back to my desk after lunch and to work with an assistant. My method is sort of laborious, but it works for me. I dictate the first few drafts. And then look at it on the computer and correct it, and finally turn it into written work.

I can’t drink anymore, unfortunately. I never drank much, but I used to love a Scotch before dinner or sometimes a vodka tonic. Now I drink mostly water or Pellegrino. We will have that kind of drink at maybe six o’clock and maybe listen to some news. These days, we get tired of the news. But a big part of my routine is to find an alternate universe. And that’s sports. I’m a lover of baseball. I’m still an avid fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, even though they moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. You’d think that my protean self would let them go. Norman Mailer, who also is from Brooklyn, said, “They moved away. I say, ‘Fuck them.’ ” But there’s a deep sense of loyalty in me. I also like to watch football, which is interesting, because I disapprove of much football. It’s so harmful to its participants. So, it’s a clear-cut, conscious contradiction. It’s also a very interesting game, which has almost a military-like arrangement and shows very special skills and sudden intensity.

Is religion important to you?

I don’t have any formal religion. And I really dislike most religious groups. When I tried to arrange a bar mitzvah for my son, all my progressive friends, rabbis or not, somehow insisted you had to join a temple and participate. I didn’t. I couldn’t do any of those things. He never was bar mitzvah. But in any case, I see religion as a great force in human experience. Like many people, I make a distinction between a certain amount of spirituality and formal religion. One rabbi friend once said to me, “You’re more religious than I am.” That had to do with intense commitments to others. I have a certain respect for what religion can do. We once had a distinguished religious figure come to our study to organize a conference on why religion can be so contradictory. It can serve humankind and their spirit and freedom and it can suppress their freedom. Every religion has both of those possibilities. So, when there is an atheist movement, I don’t join it because it seems to be as intensely anti-religious as the religious people are committed to religion. I’ve been friendly with [the theologian] Harvey Cox, who was brought up as a fundamentalist and always tried to be a progressive fundamentalist, which is a hard thing to do. He would promise me every year that the evangelicals are becoming more progressive, but they never have.

Can you tell me about the Wellfleet Group? How did it function?

The Wellfleet Group has been very central to my life. It lasted for fifty years. It began as an arena for disseminating Erik Erikson’s ideas. When the building of my Wellfleet home was completed, in the mid-sixties, it included a little shack. We put two very large oak tables at the center of it. Erik and I had talked about having meetings, and that was immediately a place to do it. So the next year, in ’66, we began the meetings. I was always the organizer, but Erik always had a kind of veto power. You didn’t want anybody who criticized him in any case. And then it became increasingly an expression of my interests. I presented my Hiroshima work there and my work with veterans and all kinds of studies. Over time, the meetings became more activist. For instance, in 1968, right after the terrible uprising [at the Democratic National Convention] that was so suppressed, Richard Goodwin came and described what happened.

Under my control, the meeting increasingly took up issues of war and peace. And nuclear weapons. I never believed that people with active antipathies should get together until they recognize what they have in common. I don’t think that’s necessarily productive or indicative. I think one does better to surround oneself with people of a general similarity in world view who sustain one another in their originality. The Wellfleet meetings became a mixture of the academic and non-academic in the usual sense of that word. But also a sort of soirée, where all kinds of interesting minds could exchange thoughts. We would meet once a year, at first for a week or so and then for a few days, and they were very intense. And then there was a Wellfleet meeting underground, where, when everybody left the meeting, whatever it was—nine or ten at night—they would drink at local motels, where they stayed, and have further thoughts, though I wasn’t privy to that.

How many people participated?

This shack could hold as many as forty people. We ended them after the fiftieth year. We were all getting older, especially me. But then, even after the meetings ended, we had luncheons in New York, which we called Wellfleet in New York, or luncheons in Wellfleet, which we called Wellfleet in Wellfleet. You asked whether I miss them. I do, in a way. But it’s one of what I call renunciations, not because I want to get rid of them but because a moment in life comes when you must get rid of them, just as I had to stop playing tennis eventually. I played tennis from my twenties through my sixties. Certainly, the memories of them are very important to me. I remember moments from different meetings, but also just the meetings themselves, because, perhaps, the communal idea was as important as any.

Do you find it easy to adjust to your physical environment? This was Nancy’s place?

Yes, this is Nancy’s place. Much more equipped for the Cape winters and just a more solid house. For us to do all the things, including medical things she helps me with, this house was much more suitable. Even the walk between the main house and my study [in Wellfleet] required effort. So we’ve been living here now for about four years. And we’ve enjoyed it. Of course, the view helps. I wake up every morning and look out to kind of take stock. What’s happening? Is it sunny or cloudy? What boats are visible? And then we go on with the day.

In the new book, you praise President Biden and Vice-President Harris for their early efforts to commemorate people who had died of COVID. Do you feel that is an example of the sort of sustained narrative that you say is necessary?

It’s hard to create the collective mourning that COVID requires. Certainly, the Biden Administration, right at its beginning, made a worthwhile attempt to do that, when they lit those lights around the pool near the Lincoln Memorial, four hundred of them, for the four hundred thousand Americans who had died. And then there was another ceremony. And they encouraged people to put candles in their windows or ring bells, to make it participatory. But it’s hard to sustain that. There are proposals for a memorial for COVID. It’s hard to do and yet worth trying.

You observe that the 1918 pandemic is virtually gone from memory.

That’s an amazing thing. Fifty million people. The biggest pandemic anywhere ever. And almost no public commemoration of it. When COVID came along, there wasn’t a model which could have perhaps served as some way of understanding. They used similar forms of masks and distancing. But there was no public remembrance of it.

Some scholars have suggested that it’s because there are no heroes and no villains, no military-style imagery to rely on to create a commemoration.

Well, that’s true. It’s also in a way true of climate. And yet there are survivors of it. And they have been speaking out. They form groups. Groups called Long COVID SOS or Widows of COVID-19 or COVID Survivors for Change. They have names that suggest that they are committed to telling the society about it and improving the society’s treatment of it.

Your book “The Climate Swerve,” published in 2017, seemed very hopeful. You wrote about the beginning of a species-wide agreement. Has this hope been tempered?

I don’t think I’m any less hopeful than I was when I wrote “The Climate Swerve.” In my new book [“Surviving Our Catastrophes”], the hope is still there, but the focus is much more on survivor wisdom and survivor power. In either case, I was never completely optimistic—but hopeful that there are these possibilities.

There’s something else I’d like to mention that’s happened in my old age. I’ve had a long interaction with psychoanalysis. Erik Erikson taught me how to be ambivalent about psychoanalysis. It was a bigger problem for him, in a way, because he came from it completely and yet turned against its fixity when it was overly traditionalized. In my case, I knew it was important, but I also knew it could be harmful because it was so traditionalized. I feared that my eccentric way of life might be seen as neurotic. But now, in my older age, the analysts want me. A couple of them approached me a few years ago to give the keynote talk at a meeting on my work. I was surprised but very happy to do it. They were extremely warm as though they were itching to, in need of, bringing psychoanalysis into society, and recognizing more of the issues that I was concerned with, having to do with totalism and fixity. Since then, they’ve invited me to publish in their journal. It’s satisfying, because psychoanalysis has been so important for my formation.

What was it about your life style that you thought your analyst would be critical of?

I feared that they would see that somebody who went out into the world and interviewed Chinese students and intellectuals or Western European teachers and diplomats and scholars was a little bit eccentric, or even neurotic.

The fact that you were interviewing people instead of doing pure academic research?

Yes, that’s right. A more “normal” life might have been to open up an office on the Upper West Side to see psychoanalytical, psychotherapeutic patients. And to work regularly with the psychoanalytic movement. I found myself seeking a different kind of life.

Tell me about the moment when you decided to seek a different kind of life.

In 1954, my wife and I had been living in Hong Kong for just three months, and I’d been interviewing Chinese students and intellectuals, and Western scholars and diplomats, and China-watchers and Westerners who had been in China and imprisoned. I was fascinated by thought reform because it was a coercive effort at change based on self-criticism and confession. I wanted to stay there, but at that time, I had done nothing. I hadn’t had my psychiatric residency and I hadn’t entered psychoanalytic training. Also, my money was running out. My wife, B.J., was O.K. either way. I walked through the streets thinking about it and wondering, and I came back after a long walk through Hong Kong and said, “Look, we just can’t stay. I don’t see any way we can.” But the next day, I was asking her to help type up an application for a local research grant that would enable me to stay. It was a crucial decision because it was the beginning of my identity as a psychiatrist in the world.

You have been professionally active for seventy-five years. This allows you to do something almost no one else on the planet can do: connect and compare events such as the Second World War, the Korean War, the nuclear race, the climate crisis, and the COVID pandemic. It’s a particularly remarkable feat during this ahistorical moment.

Absolutely. But in a certain sense, there’s no such thing as an ahistorical time. Americans can seem ahistorical, but history is always in us. It helps create us. That’s what the psychohistorical approach is all about. For me to have that long flow of history, yes, I felt, gave me a perspective.

You called the twentieth century “an extreme century.” What are your thoughts on the twenty-first?

The twentieth century brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The twenty-first, I guess, brought us Trump. And a whole newly intensified right wing. Some call it populism. But it’s right-wing fanaticism and violence. We still have the catastrophic threats. And they are now sustained threats. There have been some writers who speak of all that we achieved over the course of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. And that’s true. There are achievements in the way of having overcome slavery and torture—for the most part, by no means entirely, but seeing it as bad. Having created institutions that serve individuals. But our so-called better angels are in many ways defeated by right-wing fanaticism.

If you could still go out and conduct interviews, what would you want to study?

I might want to study people who are combating fanaticism and their role in institutions. And I might also want to study people who are attracted to potential violence—not with the hope of winning them over but of further grasping their views. That was the kind of perspective from which I studied Nazi doctors. I’ve interviewed people both of a kind I was deeply sympathetic to and of a kind I was deeply antagonistic toward.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you about?

I would say something on this idea of hope and possibility. My temperament is in the direction of hopefulness. Sometimes, when Nancy and I have discussions, she’s more pessimistic and I more hopeful with the same material at hand. I have a temperament toward hopefulness. But for me to sustain that hopefulness, I require evidence. And I seek that evidence in my work.

#I think there's a lot of really interesting and thought-provoking moments in this interview

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azspot · 10 months ago

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I will speak to you today about homeschooling, specifically evangelical homeschooling. I will speak about homeschooling because homeschooled children and alumni are intimately familiar with religious trauma. This is because the vast majority of homeschoolers are evangelical Christians. Consequently, many homeschooled children have experienced corporal punishment, threats of eternal hellfire, educational neglect, molestation and rape, and other human rights abuses—all in the name of glorifying the evangelical god. In fact, due to the intentionally deregulated state of homeschool laws in the United States, homeschool parents have nearly absolute power over what they can do to and teach their children. Homeschooling has thus become a tool for what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called “totalism.” Totalism is the end goal of authoritarian and totalitarian movements and organizations: it is the total control of human action and belief. By enabling homeschoolers to use homeschooling totalistically, deregulated homeschooling has created the perfect storm for abuse and neglect to thrive in homeschooling communities.

Traumatic Homeschooling: How Evangelicals Use Education to Totalize

#homeschooling #education #evangelicals

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 9 months ago

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By: Logan Lancing

Published: Feb 28, 2024

People who have escaped cults all tell a similar story. That story starts with a desire to belong, coupled with a desire for purpose. Strong familial and social bonds are generally preferable to shaky relationships, isolation, and the feeling of being an outcast. Likewise, feeling like one’s life lacks any meaning or purpose is a recipe for anxiety, depression, or even madness. If you talk to people who have escaped cults, they all tell you that they didn’t set out to join a cult—the cult set out to prey on them, offering to fill the voids that we must all grapple with, to varying degrees, throughout our lives. The cult offers inclusion, affirmation, and a secret cult knowledge of life’s purpose. All one must do is take the leap of faith.

Cults are incredibly effective for a variety of reasons, most of which is their ability to lead initiates deeper into the cult, even when those initiates start to sense that the “inclusion,” “affirmation,” and “purpose” offered to them comes with some very nasty conditions and ultimatums. Cult survivors describe how difficult it is to stop placing one foot in front of the other when the cult has total control of one’s physical, social, and emotional environments. Cults work tirelessly to control all information entering an initiate’s eyes and ears. Cults control the books you can read, the news you can watch, the organizations you can trust, the experts you must listen to, and the people you confide in. The cult environment is one of endless propaganda designed to be so effective that one loses control of their own thoughts; loses control over the voice in their head.

Once an initiate finds themselves in the cult’s totalizing environment (see Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton) the cult lifts the veil of love, affirmation, and inclusion and reveals a cycle of psychological abuse designed to drag the initiate deeper into the cult’s doctrine. This abuse is justified through a language of purity—initiates must let go of all the bad influences and contamination of their former lives, revealing their deepest secrets through ritual confessions. The point is to strip the initiate down, leaving them totally vulnerable and exposed. Only then can the cult rebuild the initiate in the cult’s image.

Cult survivors will tell you that they often didn’t know they were in a cult until someone pierced the cult’s totalizing environment with a message from the outside; a tether to a long-lost reality; an invitation to step back into the real world. The Queering of the American Child is one such tether, and I hope parents nationwide will receive the message loud and clear: Education is in the grip of a religious cult—the Queer Cult.

Now, I don’t mean “queer” as in “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual.” I mean “queer” as it is defined in the academic literature of the Queer Cult’s doctrine: Queer Theory.

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.[1] (Halperin, 1995, p. 62, italics in original)

Our children are “experiencing the queer,” as Queer Educational Activist Kevin Kumashiro explains in his 2009 book, Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice (2nd edition). Specifically, our children are experiencing the “queer” because they have been purposefully placed in a state of psychological crisis. “Crisis,” Kumashiro says, “should be expected in the process of learning, by both the student and the teacher. Like queer activism, queer teaching always works through crisis…the goal is to continue teaching and learning through crisis—to continue experiencing the queer.”[2] (Kumashiro, 2009, p. 55)

The Queer Cult has total control of our national discourse as it relates to sex, “gender,” and sexuality. Our children are fed a steady diet of cult doctrine through mainstream media, social media, popular culture, the psychiatrists they consult, and the doctors their parents trust. Not least of which, our children attend schools that universally push the idea that children can be “born in the wrong body.” America’s children learn that they have “gender identities” that might not match their “sex assigned at birth.” A Medical Industrial Complex waits in the wings with irreversible puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and “gender affirming” surgeries.

The social and emotional pressures to conform to the Queer Cult’s corrupted understanding of reality are hard to bear. Most people know that “radical gender ideology” is insane, but they go along with it because they don’t want to be considered a “bad person,” “on the wrong side of history,” or worst of all, a “conservative.” The cult’s moral extortion racket is designed to drag us deeper into their agenda; deeper into what Queer Activist Michael Warner calls a “queer planet.”[3] However strong the pressure may be, we must remain tethered to reality—not only for ourselves, but especially for our children. As we say in the book,

[Queer Activists] believe they can arrest the steering wheel of History and drive us all off the ledge. Under normal circumstances, all of this nonsense would be cause for endless mockery and laughter. Unfortunately, Queer Activists have proved to be remarkably effective. Today, they already have one hand on the wheel, and our kids are in the car.[4]

In The Queering of the American Child you will learn what Queer Theory is, where it comes from, how it got into schools, and what it’s attempting to do with your children. You will learn that Queer Theory has nothing to do with helping gay kids, and nothing to do with helping troubled children feel “included” in a healthy set of societal norms. Letting the cultists speak for themselves, Dr. James Lindsay and I bring in hundreds of citations to lay bare the Queer Cult’s agenda. Our schools are initiating children into the Queer Cult through psychological manipulation and child abuse. What you read will shock you, and that’s a good thing. Welcome back to reality.

youtube

References

[1] Halperin, D. M. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. Oxford University Press. (p. 61) [2] Kumashiro, K. K. (2009). Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice (2nd ed.). Routledge. (p. 55) [3] Warner, M. (1991). Introduction: Fear of a queer planet. Social Text, (29), 3–17. [4] Lancing, L. and Lindsay, J (2024) The Queering of the American Child: How A New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids. New Discourses. (p. 65)

#Logan Lancing #James Lindsay #The Queering of the American Mind #queer theory #gender identity ideology #gender ideology #gender cult #queer gnosticism #liberation #queer liberation #cult survivor #religion is a mental illness #Youtube

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 2 years ago

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Presented by the Institute of International Studies The University of California at Berkeley

Series host: Harry Kreisler

Noted psychiatrist and author Robert J. Lifton has researched Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and now terrorist cults. Through these explorations he probes the profound questions of death and its meaning for life. [10/2001] [Show ID: 6081]

Partial transcript (more may be done later):

November 2, 1999

00:31 Harry Kreisler: Welcome to a Conversation with History. I am Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest is Robert Jay Lifton who is distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry at John Jay College in the graduate center of the City University of New York. For more than forty years as a writer, investigator and psychiatrist he has used the skills of a researcher and the imagination of a healer of the mind to confront some of the most disturbing events of our times. As a witness he analyses how men and women lose and recreate their humanity in extreme situations; Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and now terrorist cults. These are the territory of Robert Jay Lifton’s explorations as he probes the profound questions of death and its meaning for life. Robert Jay Lifton is the author of many important works, including The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, winner of The Los Angeles Times book prize, and Death and Life, winner of a national book award. He also wrote Home from the War, Neither Executioners nor Victims. His latest book is Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. Professor Lifton, welcome to Berkeley.

Robert Jay Lifton: Thank you

HK: You wrote several years back, “We may say that every insight expressed by a healer or an investigator, every use of the eyes of the understanding is a function of his own formative place, of all that goes into his special relationship to history”. Where were you born and raised, to follow up on that?

RJL: I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised there and spent most of my childhood there.

HK: And how did your parents shape your character do you think?

RJL: Well, very importantly my parents were second generation. They were born in America, but barely. Their parents had been born in shtetls [small villages] in Russia and my father in particular was a progressive person; a person who made this way in society by attending the City College of New York. It's kind of interesting I've somehow made my way back to City University which is an outgrowth of the City College. He stood for progressive principles that I think affected me and the people around me and my family were concerned with these issues.

HK: And what books did you read as a young person, that you recall today?

RJL: ... Later, maybe when I got into my early teens, I did become interested very much in history. I read [William] Shirer about the Third Reich and various books about contemporary history. And now in retrospect, you know Freud once said that he spent all of his professional life making his way back to his original interest, which was ancient cultures. Well, I could say that I have spent a good deal of my professional life making my way back to what was at least a very early interest, that of history and the historical process.

HK: And that is something that becomes an important component in your work, as do studies of the mind and of the healing process.

RJL: That’s right. My work, though I didn’t call it this at the very beginning, fits into something we call psycho-history. That can be very mystifying, but what it really means is simply the application of psychological methods to historical questions. And just about all of my studies fit into that category.

...

HK: Were you shocked when you learned of the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II?

RJL: I was enormously shocked, and I think that families like my own who were middle-class had complicated feelings, almost guilty feelings, that we were so privileged in not having undergone any of that ordeal. At the same time, terrified and outraged because it was directed at Jews like ourselves. And the Holocaust was there, it wasn’t talked about a lot in my family as it was happening. Maybe we didn’t want to know it was happening. Later on, soon after the war, I remember seeing pictures that were shocking, and doubly so that people were murdered this way because they were Jewish, as I was.

HK: After your undergraduate work, you chose to go to medical school and you became a psychiatrist.

RJL: That’s right. When I was young I was very unclear about what I wanted to do. I was interested in history; I didn’t know where that would take me. I had a kind of interest in medicine and had read, early on, some books about “healers of the mind,” as they were called. And so I had an early but somewhat vague interest in both medicine and in what was to become, in my mind and in my work, psychiatry. I was rushed through my early education because a lot of it was during the war, and yet I was always a very intense student, interested in my work, and very committed to it. But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school. Sometimes it’s said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category. I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological dimension rather early on.

10:26 HK: And to follow through on your career, before we talk about the actual work you wound up doing, you went into the army and that sort of changed the course of your life in a way. Tell us about that.

RJL: Very much so. When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time during the early 1950s at the time of the Korean War. And I was called up by my draft board and I was sent first to Westover Field in Massachusetts, but then are there was a request somebody be sent overseas and I was the one was selected to be sent overseas, and of course like a red blooded young American lad, I asked to be sent to Paris. They sent me to Japan, then quickly to Korea. It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States, and I've never really thanked them for it because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work. But I did make wonderful discoveries when living in Japan for almost a year and a half, with my wife, in immersing myself in Japanese life. We never lived on the base. We lived in, among Japanese groups and families; formed groups with them, especially a discussion group where we met a lot of young Japanese students later became ambassadors and leading figures in Japanese life. And [we were] really drawn to Japan into the world.

And the other thing that happened was that my last military assignment, this was the Air Force I had enlisted in, in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the Air Force, so I was never in any kind of violent combat. My last assignment I was sent back to Korea to interview, along with other Air Force and Army psychiatrists, GIs returning from North Korea where they had been in Chinese Communist custody and put through a process that we later came to call thought reform, which is a direct translation of what they call the process, and that interested me in this process. It was also called brainwashing in more casual way. And so my wife and I had decided to take a trip around the world after I was discharged from the military. We only reached our second stop, which was Hong Kong where I began to hear stories of people subjected to a more intense version of this process. I managed to arrange to get some research support and stay in Hong Kong for another year and a half interviewing people coming out of China, both Westerners and Chinese and that was my first real research study on thought reform or so called brainwashing.

HK: Now to talk about your research, we can actually work on several planes here, but throughout your work you're looking at the psychological tendencies common to all mankind. You give special emphasis to those within a particular cultural tradition, and then finally those stimulated by contemporary historical forces. So it is an interesting mixture of culture, of history and the psychology of the individual.

RJL: Well, what I found was when I started my first study, and then my subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of the duress where I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event as it impact on them, or as they helped to create it, say survivors of Hiroshima were in a sense caught up in a historical process. As you study them, who were they? How did you get your sense of who they were? And I began to think through, influenced by various anthropologists, some of whom I got to know like Margaret Mead [1901-1978] who was very supportive of my work, her work and Ruth Benedict's [1887-1948] work and then later on Eric Erikson's [1902-1994] work in psychoanalysis. And so I came to what was obvious to me a tripartite idea: they were creatures of the immediate historical process that had brought me to them, and at the same time a cultural tradition and long cultural history which made them the kind of people they were in many ways, they were human beings. In that sense had universal psycho-biological struggles. And that's been a rough kind of model for ways of looking at people in different cultures that I have studied because I've looked people in Japan, from China and the Chinese experience, in Germany, in the United States and this kind of approach applies in all cases.

HK: And in these cases that you have looked at, whether Vietnam veterans Hiroshima survivors, Nazi doctors and now terrorist cults, it’s really individuals in extreme circumstances.

RJL: That’s right.

HK: And why that focus, do you think?

RJL: You know it's hard to… It will be easier to say, well that's very important for us to know and that's why did it, but that's not the way it happens. It happens in a much more erratic way, and you find yourself doing certain things. I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting, this thought reform process in the military and I saw chance to study it unencumbered by any military limitations, and I did that, and I thought that work was interesting from me and useful to the world. And then my second main study came after I had spent quite a lot of time in Japan studying Japanese youth, and I just decided to make a trip to Hiroshima, with my wife was with me, to look into what happened in that city.

HK: And this would be about what year?

RJL: It was 1962. And I did that. It isn’t that I became say anti-nuclear because I learned what had happened in Hiroshima. It was kind of the reverse. I had been at Harvard for a number of years, and I became a close friend of David Riesman [1909-2002], the great sociologist, who was the first American faculty person to be an advisor to an anti-nuclear group and we formed a little newsletter, that he mostly did, talking about the American shelter building craze and some of the absurdities of strategic declarations about fighting and winning a nuclear war.

HK: Better red that dead [Wikipedia: “Better red than dead” and “better dead than red” were dueling Cold War slogans which first gained currency in the United States during the late 1950s, amid debates about anti-communism and nuclear disarmament.]

RJL: All that. Well one of the favorite moral questions of that time was, if you saw your neighbor coming to your shelter where he might use up some of the valuable oxygen there, should you shoot him. And I thought that there is something wrong with that society if that is one of the main moral questions. Anyhow, it was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went in Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody really studied it. That was a real insight of its own. People resisted it, and also the Japanese were so overwhelmed by it they… Some came to help, but was hard to study it in that kind of atmosphere.

Just then I had received an appointment to Yale and I was able, I'm eternally grateful to Dr. Fritz Redlich [1910-2004] who was the chair of the department then, when I wrote to him saying, look I was to come to Yale now but I've discovered this situation at Hiroshima that nobody had studied and I really want to stay here and study it. And almost by return mail he wrote back saying, okay I’ve arranged for a modest research grant and you can stay there. And I stayed there for six months did the work. That was my second study and I had the sense that I had done one which had been especially intense, in that sense of extreme historical situation, and I could do this as well. I knew something about Japan. I was concerned about these questions, I had a little experience and so I felt I could do it. I wasn’t without doubt. But I thought I could do it, so one builds a sense of self that one is the kind of person who just might be able to do this kind of work and that's how happened, with a lot of anxiety along the way about whether I could carry it through, or sometimes in response to others who thought it seemed a little crazy for a psychiatrist to be out there doing such things, but nonetheless one develops a sense of oneself, or one’s own identity, as one who can and wants to do that kind of work.

19:31

...

HK: In the book on the Vietnam veterans you talk about confronting these realities, reordering the images within your own mind, and then seeking a renewal of both the self and the institutions around you.

RJL: Yes. I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war. And I found that a lot of these young men, they were all men in the groups that I worked with, and some other professionals, they had been used to the idea that when your country calls you to the colors you go. They were patriotic. And they had a kind of macho feeling that war was a kind of testing ground for manhood. And also, the idea that in many cases they’d literally sat on their father’s knee, he’d been a veteran of World War II and told them about the glorious victory, and they wanted their moment, with war glorified sometimes in that way. But when they experienced their first deads, sometimes that they had brought about in the Vietcong or the enemy, or else saw a buddy shot up next to them, but were in some way involved in a death encounter, their comfort in all of this was shattered. And in many cases they simply could no longer justify their being there. And they felt everything there seemed strange and bizarre and, for many of them, wrong.

30:00 There was something wrong or dirty about that war. And there were many atrocities that they witnessed or participated in. So an encounter with death could threaten one’s entire belief system and then one had to struggle with what one learned, what images came from that encounter, reorder them, put them back into some kind of structure that one could use, which is a whole restructuring process of the self. And then there could be a process of renewal. And that’s what a number of the Vietnam veterans whom I and others worked with in so-called rap groups and individual exchanges were struggling to do.

HK: You write somewhere, “any experience of survival, whether of large disaster, intimate personal loss, or more indirectly, severe mental illness, involves a psychic journey to the edge of the world of being. The formulative effort is the survivor’s means of return.”

RJL: Yes, I’ve been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work. And, you know, when we talk about all of this in retrospect it all sounds very logical as though one just wafted through it. It’s not that way at all in the way that it happened. I struggled with each of these studies and I was uncertain about what they meant, and often confused, and then I tried to put together what I was seeing. And the survivor has been a very important leitmotif all through them. The survivor is really double-edged, and that’s what I was saying that you just quoted. Survivors can go one of two ways, or usually both ways: one is, having touched death, they can close down and remain numbed and really be incapacitated by what they’ve been through. Or they can confront, in some degree, what they have experienced and derive a certain amount of insight and even wisdom from it that informs their lives. I think that great achievements have occurred in relation to survival, including spiritual and religious moments. And so there’s another dimension of the survivor. In work that’s both very early and very recent on the Protean self, I try to evolve a kind of concept of the self that can move from survival or from a death encounter into various kinds of imagery, absorbing many different images and forms, and taking in even seemingly contrary dimensions. But the general idea is that one can use a death encounter and re-create oneself in relation to it. I’ve seen this happen in various people whom I’ve interviewed. The Vietnam veterans were very striking in this way because, as we ran these rap groups, we could see them undergoing changes, and they were changes about their views of the war and war-making and about macho and maleness, and about their ideas about life itself. It doesn’t mean they were changing entirely, some things of course remained the same. But very important aspects of themselves were changing within months, or even weeks, not years. Some over years as well. So this was very important for me to grasp and it influenced everything I did subsequently.

34:00 HK: Now your next major book, which we have here, was on the Nazi doctors and medical killing and the psychology of genocide. In the introduction to that book you tell of a rabbi who came up to you at a lecture and said, “Hiroshima is your path as a Jew to the Holocaust.” In retrospect, was he right?

RJL: Well he was a friend as well as a rabbi, and it wasn’t at a lecture. He actually visited me in my home. And in a way, I think if it happened at a lecture it might not have made the impact on me that it would as a friend sitting next to me at a table just as we are sitting here. I had a very complicated feeling. I was annoyed by it because, as I wrote, it seemed pontifical – even for a rabbi, who is supposed to, I guess, pontificate. But I didn’t entirely disbelieve it either, and actually I came to see that the combination of my being a Jew and the Holocaust and its influence on my life very early on affected my way of responding to nuclear weapons and the Hiroshima experience. These are very different events, but they’re both massively destructive and deeply dangerous to humankind, and really to the continuity of all human life. So in that sense they blend. And I came to think he was more than a little correct in what he said, and the fact is that after I did the Hiroshima work, and especially after the work on Vietnam, where the men I interviewed or worked with in the rap groups were both perpetrators and victims. That was the idea. They were really responsible, or some other GIs, for atrocities in Vietnam in a war that should never have happened, as they felt and I felt. But at the same time they were victims in that they were sent there ignorantly and they suffered, and had all kinds of psychological aftereffects from it. And they taught me a lot about the capacity for change. From that process one could see really new kinds of self taking shape. So later on I wrote about the Protean self, even though I’d written my first essay on the Protean self way back in the late sixties, maybe published in the early seventies, which I derived from my early work on Japan. But I wasn’t ready to write the whole book until I’d thought it through much more. And that I published in, I think it was 1993. A long time later.

...

43:55 HK: And your newest book is about Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese terrorist cult that set about to gather an infrastructure that in the end was ready to call for destroying the world in order to save it. You say, "No individual self is inherently evil, in the Nazi book [The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide] under certain conditions virtually any self is capable of becoming all these things.” Is it fair to say that what you find particularly disturbing in looking at this terrorist group, is you see a lot of the same themes about purification, destruction and apocalypse in order to save the world, but in this case it is no longer the state that is behind the scenes, as was the case behind the Nazi doctors, as was the case with the atomic weapons establishment, but rather cult groups that acquire access to biological and nuclear weapons.

RJL: Yes, in the case of Aum Shinrikyo they weren’t at the beginning by any means clearly a terrorist group. They were one of the Japanese so-called religions, and there are an extraordinary number of new religions ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially with a new rush, what they call the rush hour of the gods, after World War 2 and then again intensely after 1970. So young people, and not so young people, were drawn to Aum Shinrikyo because it gave them strong religious satisfactions and Asahara Shoko, the guru of Aum Shinrikyo was a very talented religious teacher and a very gifted teacher of yoga as well as a self-promoting con man. One can be all these things in the same sense of self. To some extent some of these disciples who underwent these mystical experiences, with the help of all sorts of meditation practices including sustained rapid breathing which brings about a sort of de-oxygenation and lends one really vulnerable to high states and mystical experiences, they became very attached to the guru and to this kind of religious practice and they could in a sense turn the other cheek or numb themselves to evidence of violence within the cult that they didn’t want to see because they were so drawn to the cultic experience. And it that sense they could form both an ‘Aum self’ which was thriving in Aum and a ‘non-Aum self’ or ‘anti-Aum self’ which had doubts and even antagonisms but which had to be suppressed because such doubts within that guru dominated cult were taboo. But certainly these young people were not inherently evil any more than the Nazi doctors were inherently evil. They were socialized in one way or another into a group that became evil. And the young people in Aum didn’t even know that Asahara was stockpiling these chemical, and with the help of his trusted high disciples, biological and chemical weapons – and attempting to obtain nuclear weapons.

47:40 HK: In all of these works you do extensive interviewing – with the Hiroshima survivors, with the Nazi doctors, with the cult members. Tell us a little about the complexity of that process. On the one hand you have to imagine yourself in their situation, and on the other hand you have to distance yourself from it to understand it.

RJL: Well the first thing that I would say that I found, I mean I was trained in interviewing in my psychiatric residency and it's a kind of modified psychoanalytic interviewing in which you evoke the life experiences of the person you are talking to. So for me early on in my work, the interview was a very central kind of instrument, if that's the word. But as I've used it over the years I think it's a beautiful instrument, and I think that it is underused. It can be used by almost any kind of researcher. That can be in the humanities as well as in social science or in any kind of investigation. And I found that I wanted to modify it very much, because after all these weren’t people who came to me for help, in my sense of having been trained as a clinician, rather I went to them seeking some knowledge of their experience really.

So I try to make it more of a dialogue, of a give-and-take in which they can ask me questions about my life, and at the same time I was probing what they were telling me. And I think it requires a kind of a double level in which one is constantly a human being in a dialogue and is not immune from very human questions as you might if you're distancing yourself as a doctor who's on a level above the patient you're talking to. But at the same time you are bringing to bear, I try to bring to bear, my professional knowledge, my psychological knowledge in order to grasp what they’re telling me. I describe in my book on Hiroshima how in the first days of those interviews I was stunned and overwhelmed by the stories they were telling me. And I thought, yes, this is a worthwhile study but can I really do it? And then I noticed that after a few days, or a week of doing this study, I found myself less affected and more able to think about the categories of response that I was hearing.

50:22 And that I came to call selective professional numbing, and I needed at least that to be able to do the work at all. But I realized it was kind of a danger because it's usually overweighted, in a lot of professional practice, on the numbing side rather than the exaggerated feeling [side], but either one can prevent one from undertaking these studies. But the interview has to be above all a kind of human exchange, and I think I learned more over time from practice and found that people derive a great deal of value and take to interviews when they're on this level of give and take. Because it is a chance for them to examine their own lives. And that was even true of former Aum Shinrikyo members who had the first have my trust as they were working their way out of this cult, in a way, psychologically. But they told me, in most cases, they derived a certain kind of value from it because they could explore what they had been through in ways they hadn’t otherwise been able to do.

HK: We have time, unfortunately, for only one more question. I want to ask you about what lessons we might draw from your extraordinary body of work, about on the one hand man’s capacity to survive, and on the other man and woman’s capacity to survive, but also man and woman’s capacity to do evil.

51.55 RJL: Well, you know, my work is full of the study or recording of evil. It seems to be all too frequent, all too readily called forth, and people all too readily socialize to it, or are able to adapt to evil. At the same time I have also seen the other side of it – survivors able to bring knowledge from their ordeal; recreate themselves, with the help of others and with the help of love around them. So I am careful not to insist upon a single kind of lesson from all this. I would say, for me, and I consider myself neither an optimist nor pessimist, but to simply confront and make my way through these dreadful events is an act of hope. And in recording some of what people were able to do, in spite of their exposure to them, also an act of hope. So I consider myself still a hopeful person. And I think all of us have to work to combat these events and take steps to prevent their recurrence in some kind of spirit of hope. That is what I try to convey to my students and others who might share these matters.

HK: And I would throw at you a quote from your own writings, “one looks into the abyss in order to see beyond it.”

RJL: Yes, that's very much the spirit of my work. You look into the abyss but you don't want to be stuck there otherwise your imagination is deadened and defeated by the very event you are studying. So you want to look into it in order to see beyond it. If you don't look into it you're your ostrich like, if you get stuck there you're incapacitated, so you want to look beyond it to other human possibilities.

HK: Dr. Lifton, thank you very much. I’ve never had the feeling in one of these interviews that I would like to go on for another hour or two, but in this particular case, as in others, I can’t do anything about it, but thank you very much for sharing with us this story of your intellectual journey.

RJL: Thank you very much.

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Robert Jay Lifton’s 8 Criteria against which any environment may be judged:  1. Milieu Control – The control of information and communication.  2. Mystical Manipulation – The manipulation of experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated.  3. The Demand for Purity – The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection.  4. The Cult of Confession – Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group.  5. The Sacred Science – The group’s doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute.  6. Loading the Language – The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand.  7. Doctrine over person – The member’s personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group.  8. The Dispensing of existence – The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not.

_____________________________________ Ex-Moonie Says Cults Make “1984” a Reality

#Robert Jay Lifton #Hiroshima #Aum Shinrikyo #shoko asahara #Harry Kreisler #University of California at Berkeley #Nazi doctors

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