Word: lifton
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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...
...LIFTON has hit on a very important concept here, yet he insists on finding the reason for the phenomenon of Protean man in the malaise caused by the atomic bomb. In fact, while the bomb may have disoriented members of Lifton's generation, it is implausible to suggest that it accounts for the Protean man. The contemporary adult or young adult does not have as vivid a memory or understanding of the bombing as did Lifton, or John Hersey, and can not relate to it in the terms Lifton suggests. While psychological disorientation and the Protean state are observable...
Although he fails to provide a convincing link between Hiroshima and the revolutionary movement, Lifton does formulate one very intriguing thesis from his analysis of the aftermath of the nuclear era. He postulates the existence of what he calls Protean man, a man who has lost the boundaries of his own self. Protean man is in a state of total confusion, and finds himself embracing a series of conflicting ideologies for no apparent reason. "Until relatively recently, no more than one major ideological shift was likely to occur in a lifetime, and that one would be long remembered...