You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Between 1970 and 1972, Lifton and a few other psychiatrists and psychologists who had affiliated themselves with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War conducted weekly two-hour group sessions during which the veterans addressed themselves to the problems they attributed to their experiences in Vietnam. Thirty-five veterans participated intensively, a third of these for a year or more. Lifton has based his book on this experience, on a series of ten interviews with a G. I. who had been at My Lai and had not fired a gun, and on his participation in the political movement opposing the Vietnam War.
Analysts will find of most interest Lifton's suggestions regarding the structural and affective consequences of superego modification in the majority of Americans who went there. The ego ideal of masculine Hero as Warrior (epitomized by the image of John Wayne) became a distorted, numbed 'socialized warrior'. The guilt of conscience was numbed, Lifton feels, except when numbed guilt (and also shame) became transformed into animating guilt and shame that supplied a stimulus for political action: 'At any time during the life cycle a focus on animating guilt means less numbing, less in the way of repetitious self-condemnation, and more in the way of feeling, constructively critical self-evaluation, autonomy, and change' (p. 129).
One might assume that the jettisoning of the difficult Hero as Warrior ego ideal, or even the hypothetical 'socialized warrior' with its burden of repression ('numbing'), might afford economies for the individual resulting in more capacity for realistic self-appreciation, love, and work. That it seemingly does not—that the veterans in Lifton's group suffer from a less-than-satisfactory, drifting, jobless life style with many interpersonal problems that Lifton sadly notes from time to time—raises some questions. Was the ideal really jettisoned or was it not possessed in the first place? Die the antiwar hero posture provide insufficient expiation for