Robert Jay Lifton obituary: psychiatrist who studied brainwashing
Published By admin
In August 1953, in the aftermath of the Korean War, Robert Jay Lifton’s wife called to tell him about the repatriation of some US soldiers from a Chinese prison. There were reports that the freed soldiers were returning muted and confused, and that some were espousing the beliefs of their communist captors. Lifton, then a US air force psychiatrist stationed in Hong Kong, requested to be assigned to their medical team. “The average repatriate was dazed, lacked spontaneity, spoke in a dull, monotonous tone,” he later reported. They were “tense, restless, clearly suspicious” of their new surroundings and showed little enthusiasm on being reunited with friends and family.
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.
Read more https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/robert-jay-lifton-obituary-psychiatrist-who-studied-brainwashing-6qcjjgz2z
Content retrieved from: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/robert-jay-lifton-obituary-psychiatrist-who-studied-brainwashing-6qcjjgz2z.
