Word: lifton
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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...
...author, moreover, identifies them only with labels-the Marine sergeant, the My Lai survivor-and in most instances little is given of their backgrounds. Despite the sense of suffering that they convey, most of them simply become samples of documentary evidence in a thesis Lifton is pushing...
...wants Americans to acknowledge the war as "an image of ultimate transgression." Redemption, he feels, can come by adopting an attitude of "animating guilt"-a catalyst for transforming destructive old instincts and concepts into constructive new ones. Is such psychic alchemy possible on a national scale? Lifton confesses that he does not know. But he urges that the na tion take his veterans as models...
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