Word: lifton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Neither Victims Nor Executioners by ROBERT JAY LIFTON 478 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...warnings sounded by psychiatrists before release of the prisoners. They had predicted that many men might return emotionally scarred for life (TIME, Feb. 19). Los Angeles Psychoanalyst Helen Tausend had said that captivity may leave a P.O.W. "only the shell of a man," and Yale Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton had suggested that the war's unpopularity would lead many prisoners to conclude that their suffering had been in vain. Something like this may have happened to Brudno. Like all suicides, Brudno's act must have had many causes, some predating the war. "There was no specific thing that...
...shoe, my jacket and glasses gone, and an engine lying not far from my head." To cope with their helplessness in this sudden shift from calm to catastrophe, people begin almost at once to experience a kind of "psychological closure" or "psychic numbing"-they "simply cease to feel," Lifton explains...
More often, according to Lifton, a brush with death has long-lasting effects because it brings the survivor face to face with his own mortality, especially with the possibility of "premature death and unfulfilled life." Many survivors remain forever "in thrall to their death encounter." For some, the "death spell" takes the form of "fascination with scenes of death and devastation." Others grieve because they have lost their "innocence of death...
...Lifton sees it, every survivor faces a major task: to overcome his psychic numbness, to open himself to his real feelings and to find meaning and value in his encounter with death. "The result," Lifton told TIME last week, "can be an increased capacity to feel, or even the kind of expanded consciousness that many seek in drugs or meditation." It can lead also to a sense of rebirth. Ojakangas finds that "things are different for me now. I appreciate everything more, my children, my family, everything." But he is concerned: "I wonder how long these feelings will last. Will...