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Ever since his encounter with the survivors of Hiroshima, Lifton has devoted himself to explaining the themes of death and their impact upon life. Back in the early sixties, as we were preparing for his participation in our workshop on survivors of the Holocaust and on post-traumatic states, he told me that he intended to elaborate a "whole psychology" based upon "the encounter with death." This he has done. At the end of Death in Life1 he reiterated that in his opinion unlimited technological violence and absurd death have become more pressing for modern man than the Freudian focus on sexuality and moralism. In The Life of the Self2 he formulated the paradigms of death and the continuity of life as terms of a theory of symbolic immortality, evolving a death imagery, and applied it to psychopathology. Now, in The Broken Connection Lifton has proceeded to flesh out his conceptions of the effect of the encounter and consciousness of death upon the experience of living.
In the process of trying to work out some psychopathological conceptions, Lifton has surprised himself in returning to reconsider Freud's ideas, which he had dismissed lightly in earlier works. The deliberations of this book frequently revolve around a critique of Freud's and Erikson's psychopathological formulations. The result is that much of what he has to contribute from his journeys into the nether world can be quite compatible with the thinking of a modern American psychoanalyst. Not that Lifton does not have his disagreements and that he does not reject some psychoanalytic conceptions; the contributions he makes, however, can be added to the