The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. Robert Jay Lifton. New York:  Basic Books, 1983,  495 pp.

Robert Jay Lifton tunes into life at its extremity, at the point where it appears to break or be overwhelmed, at the point of annihilation. He finds that life mobilizes its most precious resources at the moment of ultimate catastrophe. For just when all connection seems to be broken, potentially saving visions and actions may arise.

He views experiences of transcendence in extremis not merely as “compensations” or “wish-fulfillments,” but as constitutive of what makes us fully human. In crises, we reach more deeply into and beyond ourselves. We finally reconnect. We establish a sense of continuity which embraces whatever discontinuities we are called upon to realize. We are more intensely alive for living through catastrophe.

Today, crises are not simply the cutting edge. They constitute our everyday reality. Indeed, everyday reality and the cutting edge are one. We must come to realize that at the center of our beings we are sustained and challenged by a sense of death and resurrection, discontinuity and continuity, annihilation and transcendence. Our theories of death and life must incessantly evolve in meeting our most basic realities and images.

“We live on images” states the first sentence of the book. Images we must face today are catastrophic. But death anxiety has always been part of the human condition. And one way or another, images of continuity beyond death have been part and parcel of threatening situations. Which is more fundamental, deeper, real: the break or the connection? They seem to be interlocked, perhaps co-constitutive. Lifton asserts that only by not numbing ourselves to our death anxiety, by allowing ourselves to participate in the evolution of images expressing our most deeply felt realities, can a frame of reference emerge which does justice for our times. His book is one such attempt.

I feel I have read this all before, many times. Man is a symbolizing being who thirsts for and lives on meaning. Meaning is threatened, undone, and reestablishe