Word: lifton
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...often the case in tragedy, the most affecting lines come from less tutored lips. A hospital worker, hideously disfigured at the age of 13, told Lifton: "I could not help believing that for a woman to lose her beauty is equivalent to death. All I could do was live in a corner of my house...
Shame of the Living. Many of the 75 hibakusha whom Lifton interviewed told of being torn between the gladness of survival and the pain of being alive because someone else was dead. In many cases, hibakusha survived because they ignored those in need...
...Lifton sees this "shame of the living," as Yōkō Ōta called it, as perhaps the most fundamental human guilt. "The survivor," he writes, "can never, inwardly, simply conclude that it was logical and right for him, and not others, to survive."If [others] had not died, he would have had to; if he had not survived, someone else would have." In discussing this phenomenon, Lifton makes the argument that all men are survivors of Hiroshima...
Encounters with mass death are not new to mankind, and, indeed, Lifton draws comparisons between hibakusha and the survivors of the plagues of the Middle Ages. But, he says, the man-made holocausts of the 20th century have imposed a series of real and symbolic encounters with death on a scale so huge as to envelop people with a generalized psychic numbness...
Work of Mourning. Lifton recalls that he once gave a lecture on Hiroshima to a group of psychiatrists; some of them later told him that they resented subsequent speakers who dealt with ordinary concerns. He notes that a similar reaction occurred after President Kennedy's assassination. To accomplish what Freud called "the work of mourning"-the process of coming to terms with loss-Americans remained glued to their TV sets, absorbing every detail of the killing and the funeral. When the stations returned to routine programming, many viewers felt annoyed and let down. The work of mourning had "opened...