Word: lifton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...survive after near annihilation is to acquire a special knowledge of death that transforms life forever after. So believes Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale psychiatrist who titled his famed 1967 study of the Hiroshima survivors Death in Life. Few behavioral scientists have studied plane-crash survivors; after all, there have not been very many. But Lifton and some of his colleagues believe that the men and women who have lived through air disasters have something in common with those who emerged alive from the atomic holocaust...
Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton believes it may amount only to a kind of "psychic numbing," an emotional state encouraged by the Administration. The President still uses the high rhetoric of "peace with honor." Says Lifton: "Nixon has made it very clear that he wants to end the war without coming to terms with it. To learn from Viet Nam the country would have to accept some very painful truths?most notably that it was wrong. The impossible truth for Americans is that we are capable of evil and have committed it on a large scale...
Sometimes the frustration that fires aggression is highly impersonal. Yale Psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton links at least some violence to general frustration, anger and anxiety over countless "little deaths"-the failure of national morality, the breakdown of family life and feelings of alienation in a mobile population. Boredom, too, drives people to look for meaning in nihilistic violence, to accept the philosophy "I kill, therefore...
Some behavioral scientists, philosophers and aestheticists believe that violence in the arts is not bad per se and that it may, in fact, be the best means of inspiring a horror of violence. Brutality in films, asserts Robert Lifton, "can illuminate and teach us about our relationship to violence." The Godfather, he believes, provides that kind of illumination by brilliantly contrasting the Corleone family's sunny private life and its brutally dark professional life. Critic Robert Hatch rejects that view, calling the movie a "chronicle of corruption, savage death and malignant sentimentality" that wreaks harm by forcing the viewer...
Robert J. Lifton, Sc.D., author and professor of psychiatry at Yale University...