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Confronting what has really occurred in Vietnam during the past decade compels one to confront the ethical absurdity of our social order. It is a confrontation that few of us have been able to allow ourselves. If experienced and integrated, it invites a personal transformation that severs one from many of the personal, professional, and sociopolitical moorings that sustain, but too often simply pacify, us. Such transformations characteristically lead people to live by religious-mystical devotion, the aesthetic dimension, schizophrenic withdrawal, or political and professional radicalism. Following this pathway to radical commitment, in recent years we have witnessed a burgeoning Radical Mental Health Movement. The Movement has offered both an ideological critique of what is and participating advocacy of professional counter-forms.
But the Movement has been impoverished in its theoretical contributions and intellectual discipline. A few, notably Laing and Szasz, are exceptions; but with both, highly significant perceptions are too often carried to a meaningless extreme and self-oblitaration. Robert Jay Lifton stands rather alone—a psychiatrist who is committed to radical change in America and who actively implements his convictions in his “healing” work. Beyond this, he is generating a theoretical system for comprehending the collective adaptive and maladaptive behaviors of men and women in this century of immersion in killing and psychohistorical dislocation and flux.
Home from the War is the fruit of two years of Lifton's participation in “Rap Groups” of anti-war Vietnam veterans and openly anti-war professionals. His central thesis is that Vietnam veterans exist in marked contrast to the image of the Hero-as-Warrior, who, throughout history connected with and reinforced the humanizing currents of his society, and transcended the specific acts of killing in a way that provided a new existential vision. These veterans found themselves trapped in an experience in which