Robert J. Lifton's experience with survivors of holocausts has led him to expand the metaphor of survivorship so radically that it begins to appear, as Lifton himself suggests, like a new psychology: “It is an image-model of the human being as a perpetual ‘survivor’—first of birth itself, and then of the ‘holocausts’ large and small, personal and collective, that define much of existence.”

The individual is faced with the profound question of how to survive the inevitability of his own death. The desire to transcend mortality by biological procreation, by producing works that influence posterity, by attachment to spiritual views that deny the finitude of death, by melding with the oneness of nature, or by