Robert Jay Lifton, Psychiatrist Drawn to Humanity’s Horrors, Dies at 99
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Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who peered into some of the darkest corners of contemporary history, including Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, in search of lessons about individual and collective consciousness, died on Thursday at his home in Truro, Mass. He was 99.
His death was by confirmed by his daughter, Natasha Lifton.
Dr. Lifton was fascinated by “the reaction of human beings to extreme situations,” as the psychiatrist Anthony Storr wrote in The Washington Post in 1979, an interest that began with his study of brainwashing by the Chinese Communists in the 1950s and continued through his analysis of the American fight against terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001. He wrote, helped write or edited some two dozen books and hundreds of articles about the meanings of what The Times Literary Supplement of London called “the seemingly incomprehensible.”
Dr. Lifton’s often somber quest was inspired and guided by mentors and friends like the psychologist Erik Erikson, the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the sociologist David Riesman.
It led him from troubled Vietnam veterans to the trial of Patricia Hearst, at which he was an expert witness on thought control — testifying, as he wrote in The New York Times in 1976, on “the crucial question of her voluntary or involuntary participation” in an armed bank robbery by a politically radical group that had abducted her. He examined the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995 and the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American troops at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war.
Perhaps his most vivid work concerned the role of medical doctors in the Nazi genocide. Reviewing Dr. Lifton’s book “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” (1986), Bruno Bettelheim, the psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, worried that the empathy Dr. Lifton displayed in illuminating the psyches of the killers might seem tantamount to forgiveness.
“I believe there are acts so vile that our task is to reject and prevent them,” Dr. Bettelheim wrote in The Times Book Review, “not to try to understand them empathetically as Dr. Lifton did.”
Dr. Lifton countered in a letter to The Book Review that his purpose in writing the book was to reveal the broader potential for human evil. “We better serve the future by confronting this potential than by viewing it as unexaminable,” he wrote.
Other critics questioned the usefulness of the approach he called psychohistory, the study of historical influences on the individual — not least because of the fuzziness of the term. Some, including both supporters and critics, suggested that psychohistory amounted to mass psychoanalysis.
Perhaps his sharpest critics were those who found his scholarship inextricably entwined with his passionate leftist, antiwar views. Reviewers used phrases like “transparently polemical” to describe his work.
Dr. Lifton responded that he could not be the sort of godlike figure that he believed people expected a psychiatrist to be. “I believe one’s advocacy should be out front,” he said in an interview with Psychology Today in 1988.
“What we choose to study as scholars is a reflection of our advocacies, our passions, spoken or otherwise,” he wrote in his 2011 memoir, “Witness to an Extreme Century.”
Dr. Lifton early on focused on nuclear war as the ultimate catastrophe, suggesting that the new possibility of humankind’s sudden, perhaps total annihilation fundamentally changed the way people thought about death. His book “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima” (1968) won the National Book Award for its penetrating study of 90,000 people who survived the explosion of the first atomic bomb dropped on a population.
That the bomb could be used again at any time amounted to an “ill-begotten imagery of extinction” pervading man’s consciousness, he wrote in “The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life” (1979).
Dr. Lifton suggested that a new kind of person was emerging, with new tools for adaptation, a product of the breakdown of traditional institutions and the threat of human extinction. He christened this new being Protean Man, named for Proteus, the Greek god who constantly changed forms.
Dr. Lifton hated heavy-handed prose, and one of his delights were the cartoons of long-necked birds he doodled to express his sense of the absurd. In 1969, he published a book of them, titled simply “Birds.”
In one cartoon, a bird says: “All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling: ‘I am me!’”
“You were wrong,” says the other.
Robert Jay Lifton was born in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn on May 16, 1926, to Harold and Ciel (Roth) Lifton. His grandparents on both sides were born in shtetls in today’s Belarus, and soon after they emigrated to the United States, his parents were born. Dr. Lifton said in a 1999 interview that he had been greatly influenced by the liberal views of his father, a businessman who sold household appliances.
At 16, Robert won a scholarship to Cornell University to study biology in its premedical program. He continued his studies at New York Medical College, received his M.D. in 1948 and interned at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn.
During that time he was drawn into a social circle revolving around the lyricist Yip Harburg (“Brother Can You Spare a Dime”), a friend of his father’s. He was soon mingling in Harburg’s Central Park West apartment with the iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone, the actor and singer Paul Robeson and Henry A. Wallace, the former vice president and progressive presidential candidate.
From 1949 to 1951, he studied psychiatry at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. (He said he chose to specialize in psychiatry in part because he was afraid of blood.) He also met Betty Jean Kirschner, a Barnard graduate who was working in the nascent television industry. They married in 1952. By then, Dr. Lifton had enlisted in the Air Force, which sent him to Japan, where he and his new wife learned Japanese. She went on to write and lecture widely on adoption reform before her death at 84 in 2010.
Dr. Lifton spent six months in Korea, where he studied the effects of what the Chinese called thought reform — and what others characterized as brainwashing — on American prisoners of war. He was discharged from the military in 1953, and he and his wife embarked on a trip around the world.
They got only as far as Hong Kong, where he began to hear stories about more intense versions of brainwashing. Through interviews, he ascertained that this technique involved a combination of external force and evangelical exhortation. His research led to his first major publication, “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’” (1961).
Content retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/obituaries/robert-jay-lifton-dead.html.
