Word: lifton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Patty said that she felt totally controlled by her captors. She claimed that she was isolated for long periods of time, threatened with death, and made to feel that she had been abandoned by her family. These are all classic techniques of brainwashing, according to Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who closely analyzed the mind-bending methods used on American prisoners of war in Korea and by Chinese Communists on their countrymen...
...Though Lifton refuses to comment specifically on Patty, he notes that people who are particularly susceptible to brainwashing very often exhibit "an enormous aspiration toward social change and toward human brotherhood, which might be connected, under pressure, with various forms of individual guilt over the way one had lived one's life...
Psychohistory is the attempt to fuse the insights of psychology and psychoanalysis with those of history, and the big league of the burgeoning academic movement is the annual Wellfleet seminar on Cape Cod. At this year's closed meeting, such luminaries as Kenneth Keniston and Robert Jay Lifton were there. So was Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther, Gandhi's Truth), the founding spirit of the movement and the group. But the center of attention this year was Doris Kearns, probably the first aspiring psychohistorian to be prodded into print by her subject...
ROBERT JAY LIFTON, U.S. psychohistorian (Yale): Mao was able to articulate, live out and connect with the aspirations of the Chinese people at a time of crisis. Like most great religious and political leaders, he had some relation to a holocaust (the disintegration of Chinese culture, the warlords, Japanese invasion...
Many members of the group found that talking about their guilt helped channel their emotions into constructive (that is, antiwar) channels. These young men, Lifton suggests, may per form a "prophetic function" among the general population of benumbed sinners. Perhaps so. As far as this book goes, though, what could have been a strong account of men groping for survival amidst the wreckage that Viet Nam left in their lives becomes instead a polemic in which moralizing smothers analysis. *Laurence I. Barrett