Robert Jay Lifton
Wayne Johnson
cadaobh2@brgnet.com
Fri, 21 Dec 2001 09:11:59 -0500
Met Ericson in LA in the early Seventies. Very nice person.
WJ
-----Original Message-----
From: austin-ghetto-list-admin@pairlist.net
[mailto:austin-ghetto-list-admin@pairlist.net]On Behalf Of Jon Ford
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 12:49 AM
To: austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net
Subject: Robert Jay Lifton
Mike sent us a note on Robert Jay Lifton's radio interview; following is a
report on his comments about our national response to terrorism and Sep. 11.
I's like to see the entire lecture series he is currently delivering:
Interpreter of Organized Evil
Lifton offers views into minds of atrocities' perpetrators
and victims.
By PAUL LIEBERMAN, Times Staff Writer
NEW YORK -- "When I'm very much in
demand," Robert Jay Lifton said, "you know
that the world is in trouble."
It was a joke, of course, but not a joke, for he
was standing before an audience of fellow
psychiatrists and other therapists who had
sought him out as the logical person, indeed, to
help them understand what they were now
living through.
"He has
spent most
of his life
trying to
fathom the
unfathomable,"
explained
Dr. Michael
Singer,
director of
the NYU
Psychoanalytic
Institute,
introducing
the 75-year-old Lifton as the man to launch its
lecture series Terror and Aftermath: Perspectives on the World
Trade Center Tragedy.
Most everyone there knew the details of Lifton's long interest
in
atrocities and their survivors: how as a young psychiatrist,
in the
1950s, he studied Chinese "Thought Reform," brainwashing to
produce a "psychology of totalism." He went on to study
survivors
of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, and Vietnam veterans, and
Nazi doctors, and then the Japanese terrorist cult of Aum
Shinrikyo, which in 1995 released deadly sarin gas in the
Tokyo
subway system with the apocalyptic goal of "destroying the
world
to save it."
Now the New York therapists were hoping he could explain, "How
could this have happened again?" And they were asking not as
observers, Singer said, but "now unfortunately, as victims
ourselves."
The group gathered Tuesday night in the auditorium of NYU
medical Center, virtually next door to Bellevue Hospital and
its
chilling "Wall of Prayers," with the faces of hundreds of
people
first listed as merely "missing" from the twin towers. Many
had
been trying to help families of such people, or others who
escaped. They were coping, as well, with the new fears of
their
old patients--and of their own families.
Lifton would, in the course of the evening, offer them
insights on
the apocalyptic dimension of Osama bin Laden's movement, and
the death anxiety that he sees as he surveys the country, a
view
into the minds of both perpetrators and targets.
Decades ago, Lipton became part of a group that believed
psychological insights could help them better understand
historical
figures and events. Their leader was Erik Erikson, the Danish
painter-turned-analyst who wrote about the stages of life and
helped popularize the concept of identity. Erikson also
produced
books on Martin Luther and Gandhi suggesting how their
individual conflicts helped them come up with new ways of
thinking, or acting, for millions of others.
While such "psychohistory" could become reductionist in lesser
hands, or even invite parody--Did Hitler become Hitler because
he had only one testicle?--Erikson spawned such followers as
Robert Coles, with his studies of "Children in Crisis," and
Lifton,
who was interested in psychological makeup of entire groups.
Teaching at institutions such as Yale and Harvard, the
"Wellfleet
Group" would meet to hash out their theories at Lifton's home
on
Cape Cod. "We have a long tradition of reflecting on dreadful
events," he says, "in a utopian setting."
It was there, as well, that he wrote much of his 1999 book on
the
Japanese cult that killed 11 people in its subway attack,
injured
several thousand more, and had even bigger plans: to make tons
of nerve gas and use crop-dusting helicopters to release it in
the
major cities of Japan, and perhaps the U.S., setting off world
war.
In "Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo,
Apocalyptic
Violence, and the New Global Terrorism," Lifton warned that
the
events in Japan might signal worse to come.
"Its members can claim the distinction of being the first
group in
history to combine ultimate fanaticism with ultimate weapons
in a
project to destroy the world," he wrote. "The next group of
disciples to try might not be quite as small as Aum, or as
inept, or
as encumbered by its own madness."
That book did not sell well, however--and Lifton was not
delighted
with some reviews. It was almost as if he had cried out into a
void.
Then came Sept. 11. "I had to go to New York one way or
another."
There were a couple of reasons he had to go. One was that he
had written mostly about history. Even his interviews with the
Japanese cult members were after the fact, their leader
already
in prison. What was happening in New York wasn't history--it
was
ongoing, and far from finished.
The second reason: He was a New Yorker himself. Lifton grew up
in Brooklyn and attended one of the city's huge high schools,
Erasmus Hall, before attending Cornell and New York Medical
College. But any New York insularity had ended with his
service
as an Air Force psychiatrist, stationed in Korea and Japan.
"I really discovered the world from that," says Lifton, who
sometimes made a joke of it after he became a leading
protester
of the Vietnam War, suggesting in 1974 that the Nobel Prize be
awarded to those who resisted serving. He also combined his
humor and political views in doodled cartoons, creating
conversations between two stick-figure birds, one young, small
and naive, the other older, larger and pompous.
Though Lifton first came to public attention while teaching at
Harvard, then Yale, from 1956 to 1967, for the past 15 years
he
had been back in New York, teaching at the City University's
graduate center and at John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
where he headed a Center on Violence and Human Survival.
This summer, however, he sold his apartment on Central Park
West and bought a home in Cambridge, Mass., where he will
return to Harvard as a senior fellow in the Kennedy School and
psychiatry chairman at the medical school.
In New York the media kept calling him, needing a quote or
talking head on terrorism, violence or the plight of
survivors. But
Lifton also wanted to visit ground zero and, he hoped, start
speaking to the people whose lives were upended.
He also knew he'd be asked to share what he'd learned over 50
years--and Tuesday's talk was his first chance to do that in
any
formal setting, though he quickly cautioned his audience "what
I
say is really preliminary." He was still trying to figure it
out too.
He went through each of his studies, often not needing to
elaborate on its relevance to ongoing events.
The "thought reform" practiced by the Communist Chinese was an
illustration of how individuals could be taken over by a
cause,
pulled into an "all-or-nothing commitment, a polarization of
good
and evil." His theories in this area were an extension of
Erikson's
observations of how adolescents, in particular, were prone to
fanaticism. Finding it hard to form an identity, they opted
for one
that was rigid, with no fluidity, handed them by a strong
leader.
That was Lifton's "psychology of totalism."
His subsequent studies showed how such a phenomenon could
serve the causes of violence--not always committed by
strangers.
From Vietnam veterans, especially antiwar veterans, he
observed
"destroying to save ... you had to destroy a village to save
it." He
also saw, as others have before, how ordinary people could
find
themselves committing atrocities.
From the Nazi doctors, he "came upon the idea of 'killing to
heal,'"
the notion that certain people have to be killed in order to
heal
the dominant group.
In the Japanese cult, he saw both apocalyptic motivation and
desire to take "ownership of death." The group also engaged in
"altruistic murder, in which members felt they bestowed
benefits
... a higher form of immortality" on those who killed, that
"because the world was so defiled, other than themselves, that
this all had to be done."
Lifton worries that Americans do not understand this
apocalyptic
dimension of such destructive movements--and that of Osama bin
Laden, whom he sees operating on two levels: with easily
graspable political grievances, such as about America's
support of
Israel or its presence in Saudi Arabia; yet also speaking of
cleansing the world of the Great Satan, America, and of
Muslims
who do not fit in his ideal.
"He talks about those who are defiled, who are nonbelievers
...
and they must all be destroyed on behalf of creating a perfect
Islamic vision of the world, that is the destruction in the
service of
spiritual renewal.
"I think people misunderstand Bin Laden when they leave out
that
dimension, which is amorphous, and without boundaries ... and
cannot be encapsulated by specific political goals," Lifton
continued. "There is a mystical dimension of Bin Laden, who
envisions Saladin"--the Islamic hero of the Crusades--"coming
out
of the clouds ... So Bin Laden then has told us about the
apocalyptic projects and sometimes we haven't wanted to hear
it."
He noted that Americans may be skeptical of such pious
pronunciations when they learn that the hijackers went to
strip
clubs or malls. "I'm not certain, but it sounds to me like a
form of
what I call 'Doubling,'" he said, "the formation of a
functionally
second self, so it is true that some of them could drink and
make
merry and go bowling, and do things that ordinary Americans
did
... so removed from the suicidal martyr's mission ... It's the
kind
of double life that spies can often live."
In understanding the impact on Americans, he turns to the
survivors of Hiroshima. Though the devastation there was far
greater, "we heard people [in New York] describe the feeling
that
it seemed like a nuclear attack, like a nuclear bomb had gone
off.
It struck him that the term used, "ground zero," was "a
nuclear
weapons term."
"In my experience, survivors immediately experience a sense of
anxiety, or a death-haunted image [stemming from] the death
immersion or the death encounter ... which can last for a very
long time. And the country is now infused with death anxiety
...
most visceral in those at the heart of the disaster but
extending
out to the whole country and bound up in fear of repetition of
disaster ... fear of new terrorism."
He's been made aware of such fears in a personal way. His two
children both have shared their fears for the future of their
own
young daughters.
So he is worried, first about them, and the knowledge that
this
fear is a real one, given "the realistic possibly of further
terrorism." But he fears the American response, too. For while
"survivor anger is understandable, quite human," he does not
believe that anger should drive policy. Though speculating
that it
will be impossible to ever satisfy the apocalyptic groups, he
still
hopes for some "minimally violent means of achieving some form
of justice ... and not accelerate the world's violence."
While agreeing that "we should do everything we can to bring
the
perpetrators to justice," he cautions that such groups can
spur a
response that accepts their "totalistic" vision of the
struggle--as
with the initial naming of the American counter-effort as
"Operation Infinite Justice."
When it was time for questions, the shrinks asked briefly
about
helping patients in therapy. But mostly they spoke like any
Americans, passionately debating the politics of the moment.
One questioner wanted to point out the legitimate complaints
about America that might have spurred the attack. "Is the U.S.
taking more than its share of the world?" he asked.
"A man like Bin Laden can have very real grievances as well as
an
apocalyptic vision," Lifton responded. "If you dropped a
cruise
missile [on him], you wouldn't stop Islamic terrorism."
Another question: After half a century of studying such
phenomena, what about the past month took him by surprise?
"I insisted in [the 1999] book that this could exist here,"
Lifton
said. "Nevertheless, I was shocked. I wasn't free from this
invulnerability ... and of course I was totally surprised by
the
method," the use of planes as battering rams.
"We're all in the middle of something that we can't fully
grasp or
evaluate. We're unable to extricate ourselves sufficiently to
take
much distance from it. I have been trying to connect it with
other
extreme events I've studied. But having said that, we realize
we're not free of this. It contains us, it threatens us. And
we're all
making inner decisions about what we do with it. I'm thinking
constantly about it--and making notes."
He and a colleague at the Center on Human Violence, Charles B.
Strozier, have already begun the $130,000 research project to
interview in depth, and over time, people who directly
observed
the unfolding drama.
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