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Robert Jay Lifton is one of the leading intellectuals of our age. A research psychiatrist, he has creatively added to psychoanalytic knowledge of the world and of the self. He has defined whole new fields of inquiry as his restless mind has ranged since the 1950s across cultures and settings seemingly diverse and cut off from one another.
The intellectual spine of Lifton's oeuvre is the five interview studies he conducted over half a century. His first major study (1961) was of people subjected to what he called “ideological thought reform,” loosely then and ever since called “brainwashing,” after the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. This book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, includes the famous chapter 22 that defines in detail his understanding of the eight dimensions of ideological totalism (milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, the cult of confession, the “sacred science,” loading the language, doctrine over person, and, most ominously, the dispensing of existence). In the cultic world of the 1970s, and ever since to a lesser degree, those escaping totalistic environments carried copies of that chapter on their person as a kind of talisman against further contagion.
Lifton was in Asia again in 1962 as he almost accidentally came to the idea of conducting psychological interviews with the survivors of Hiroshima. To his astonishment at the time, no one, after seventeen years, had conducted psychological interviews with the survivors of the first use of an atomic bomb, on August 6, 1945. He took on this task of inquiring into the deeper meanings of Hiroshima and the beginning of the nuclear age with the fervor of what Avishai Margalit (2004) has called the “moral witness.” Lifton's structured set of empirical interviews resulted in Death in Life in 1968, which won the National Book Award the following year.