Words matter. These are the best Robert Jay Lifton Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.
Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.
As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.
Yes, I’ve been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.
I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological dimension rather early on.
I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting – this thought reform process – in the military.
I don’t have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.
And I managed to arrange to get some research support and to stay in Hong Kong for another year and a half, interviewing people coming out of China, both Westerners and Chinese. And that was my first real research study on thought reform or so-called brainwashing.
The other thing that happened was my last military assignment – this was in the air force; I had enlisted in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the air force so I was never in any kind of violent combat.
Sometimes it’s said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.
It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.
But when I went to Hiroshima and began to study or just listen to people’s descriptions of their work, it was quite clear they were talking about death all the time, about people dying all around them, about their own fear of death.
It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I’ve never really thanked them for it, because I haven’t exactly been pro-military in my work.
I struggled with each of these studies and I was uncertain about what they meant, and often confused, and then I tried to put together what I was seeing.
