Word: lifton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hierarchy of some established institution. On the contrary, the institution may have been compromised in his eyes. He does not feel so strongly the compulsion to outdo Daddy or the Joneses; he may pay them the supreme insult of ignoring their way of life altogether. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton speaks of a new kind of "Protean Man" who has been cut adrift from the traditions and expectations of the past. Without moorings, he moves from one activity or ideology to the next in the hope of ultimately finding himself. In a way, today's restless student fits that description...
...closely related to qualities which two modern psychological thinkers have identified as feminine. Erik Erikson, in "Womanhood and the Inner Space," organizes female identity around the concept of a productive inner space. He attributes to women and artistically gifted men an inner life, a sensitive indwelling and inwardness. Robert Lifton in "Women as Knower" attributes to women an insight which is related to their close identification with organic life and "whole experience," organic knowledge is essentially phenomenological, resolving an awareness of the selfprocess of the knower with rigorous cognitive standards...
...Lifton's account, a man confident of his cluded the warlords for ten years before...
...Lifton's account, a man confident of his own abilities and of his immortality, a man who transcended life while still alive, not by mystic experiences, but by facing death and overcoming it. Lifton speaks of a characteristic quality of tone and content that, more than any other, shaped the psychic contours of the Cultural Revolution. I refer to the kind of existential absolute, an insistence upon all or none confrontation with death...
...Lifton's account of Mao would be far more powerful if it were not for the "psychological idiom" in which he couches it. Indeed throughout the book, one has an annoying sense that jargon is making the obvious complicated. This problem, of course, is endemic to the psychological approach to social science, and would not be too great a price to pay for a comprehensive account of the Cultural Revolution. If Lifton's is not comprehensive, it probably comes as close as any unitary scheme can. Until China opens up to the West, and maybe for a long time thereafter...