Word: lifton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Robert Jay Lifton is not a Jungian. Often, in fact, his psychological work tends to border on descriptive sociology. (His works on the psychological effects of nuclear holocaust on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become classics in the field.) In his latest book, Dr. Lifton has also raised some challenging questions about attempt a general philosophical statement about the boundaries which define life in an age of revolution. The very boldness of the idea-a Yale psychology professor is attempting to define the nature of man's existence-is enough to make the book noteworthy...
...LIFTON uses his work with atom-bomb survivors as the jumping-off point for this study. The survivors of the bombings, he says, found themselves confronted with a set of boundaries with which they had never had to deal. Those were the boundaries of destruction, which had previously seemed obvious and somewhat controllable. In a normal war, Lifton says, men are killed by bullets or arrows, and the community suffers a loss, but there is a clear set of limits to the destruction. The atomic bomb for the first time has confronted man with a "permanent encounter" with death...
Once he has established the reality of this limitless destructive force, Lifton examines men's reaction to it, which comes mostly in terms of an abandonment of the sense of immortality-of the ability to extend the parameters of life and death. Man conceives of immortality in five ways: the biological, in which man lives on through his offspring; the theological, in which he attempts to create a life after death; the creative, in which he attempts to build monuments to himself through his works; the sense developed by some, like the Shintoists, who see themselves as a part...
...Lifton sees the nuclear age as a direct threat to the possibility of the first three forms of immortality, for a nuclear holocaust will destroy man and his works, and theological immortality, already severely questioned before Hiroshima, becomes even less plausible in the face of man-made total destruction...
...Lifton was Research Associate in psychology at Harvard from 1956 to 1961, and was, at that time, also affiliated with the Center for East Asian Studies here...