Word: lifton
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Neither Victims Nor Executioners by ROBERT JAY LIFTON 478 pages. Simon & Schuster...
Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale psychiatry professor who calls himself a "psychohistorian," is a student of holocaust...
...Lifton was one of a number of psychiatrists who participated in rap groups organized by Viet Nam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). For more than two years he met with a total of three dozen young men. They were not mentally ill but were for the most part in anguish over the roles they had played in a war they despised...
Around such recitals Lifton weaves his own insights. He discusses the myths of war and warriors, the guilt that men feel when they survive their buddies, the absolute necessity to view the enemy as something less than human. But he relentlessly uses his subjects as instruments in an elaborate post-mortem of slaughtered American values and conceits. The veterans speak in salty, evocative American. Lifton, straining for cosmic assertions, clutters his accompanying argument with dense jargon: "creative transmutation of rage," "moral inversion," "general psychohistorical dislocation." His decision to discuss in detail only members of VVAW is a more serious flaw...
...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...