Lifton had been planning to return to the US for “the serious business of psychoanalytic training” but now he was reluctant to leave Asia. He was struck by the intensity of the subjects’ accounts, one of whom insisted that the sheer psychological power of the communists could only be the result of “an alliance with demons”, and wanted to learn more. He decided to stay and study the phenomenon, ultimately conducting over a thousand hours of interviews with western and Chinese subjects, and publishing his first major work, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing”.
This expertise would be called on again years later during the trial of the abductee-turned-bank robber Patty Hearst. Lifton, acting as an expert witness for the defence, found that Hearst exhibited behaviour typical of “thought reform” subjects, explaining in an article on the trial that almost anyone can be psychologically broken down “without too much difficulty” by a motivated captor: “It is quite disturbing to consider how fragile an instrument the mind can be.”
The disturbing quarters of psychology were Lifton’s chief concern over a psychiatric career in which he confronted the greatest atrocities of the 20th century and sought to decipher the human behaviours that facilitated them. Through his “psychohistorical” approach to events including the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the Vietnam War, Lifton attempted to extricate the principles of psychoanalysis from the insular worlds of self and family, applying them to whole societies and the flow of history itself.
Robert Jay Lifton was born in Brooklyn in 1926. His parents, Harold, a businessman, and Ciel (née Roth), were from Jewish families that left Belarusian shtetls in the late 19th century to escape pogroms and tsarist conscription. They held big ambitions for their son, who skipped several grades in primary school and enrolled at Cornell University in 1942 at the age of 16, continuing on to New York Medical College two years later.
Lifton had doubts about practising medicine — indeed he had once fainted in a cinema watching a gory medical scene in a film — so when he was conscripted into the Korean War in a 1951 “doctor draft” he requested a position in the air force, where he was most likely to be allowed to focus on psychiatry. A few months before his assignment, he met the author Betty Jean Kirschner on a double date. The two married quickly in 1952, a few days before Lifton was sent to Korea, and once he was discharged in 1953 they travelled together to Hong Kong. They had two children, Natasha and Kenneth, both of whom survive them.
In 1954 Lifton joined the Washington School of Psychiatry, and two years later he became a research associate at Harvard, where he met Erik Erikson, the influential psychoanalyst, with whom he established the Wellfleet Group. The group met regularly to discuss Erikson’s theories, but under Lifton’s direction it became gradually more activist, taking up the issues of war and nuclear proliferation that were increasingly concerning him.
During a trip to Hiroshima in the mid-1960s, Lifton interviewed survivors of the nuclear bomb, one of whom described the experience of believing his city had “disappeared”. The description left an indelible impression on Lifton, who published his second seminal work, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, in 1968, and became a lifelong advocate against nuclear weapons. He also grew increasingly antipathetic towards the psychoanalytical profession, whose stubbornly conceptual approach now appeared at odds with his more involved, interview-based research.
Lifton’s later investigations into war crimes and the experiences of Vietnam veterans in the early 1970s led him to formulate his theory of the “atrocity-producing situation” in which he believed ordinary people could commit acts of such extraordinary cruelty as the My Lai massacre. It was after pursuing this concept that he turned his academic attention towards the Holocaust.
It would take Lifton seven years to complete his most difficult and highly praised study, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. To him, it felt like “two lifetimes”. Based on interviews Lifton conducted with both perpetrators and victims, the book explored the role of Nazi doctors before and during the Holocaust, arguing that they committed their crimes using a process of personality “doubling”, whereby the moral medical practitioner was psychologically divided from the immoral “killing self”.
The book drew criticism from readers who felt Lifton’s approach was too forgiving. In his review in The New York Times, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued that the actions of Lifton’s subjects were “so vile that our task is to reject and prevent them, not to try to understand them empathetically”. In his response, Lifton contended that humanity best serves the future when it confronts its own potential for evil rather than dismissing it as “unexaminable”.
Lifton had several strategies for protecting his own wellbeing from distressing subjects, relying on his wife’s support and always avoiding work after 9pm. Nonetheless, the research for Nazi Doctors took an emotional toll, and he had frequent nightmares in which he or his family were imprisoned in camps. On hearing this, a friend and Auschwitz survivor remarked: “Good, now you can do the study.” It remained an important lesson for Lifton. “One has to offer the self to the suffering in some degree,” he said.
While he continued to examine the darker elements of humanity in his later work, including studies on cults and terrorist organisations, Lifton was able to maintain a fundamentally hopeful world view, and continued to remain politically active and engaged. In Trumpism, he was disappointed to discover new examples of totalist methods he first identified being used by Chinese communists in the 1950s, but he remained optimistic that on issues such as climate change the US president was fighting a “losing battle”. “It’s sometimes assumed that when one reaches the last stages of life, one shouldn’t have to care about the human future,” he said in a 2017 interview. “But it can be the reverse for many of us.”
Lifton’s wife died of complications from pneumonia in 2010. Two years later he met his partner, the political theorist Nancy Rosenblum, with whom he lived on Cape Cod from 2020 until his death.
The move from New York offered Lifton some quiet and an ocean view, but he remained dedicated to his work, publishing new books into his late nineties. “The view helps,” he said in a 2023 interview. “I wake up every morning and look out to take stock. ‘What’s happening? Is it sunny or cloudy? What boats are visible?’ And then we go on with the day.”
