TRURO — Robert Jay Lifton, the eminent psychiatrist, author, and anti-nuclear activist, died on Sept. 4, 2025 at the Truro home he had shared for more than a decade with his partner, Nancy Rosenblum. He was 99.
For 50 years, Dr. Lifton presided at an annual meeting of scholars and advocates at his house on Ocean View Drive in Wellfleet. Known at first as the Wellfleet Psychohistory Group and later simply as the Wellfleet Group, the gathering considered the links between psychology, politics, and the forces of history.
Beginning in 1966, that circle of intellectual and literary luminaries crowded annually around a large table in Lifton’s study overlooking the Atlantic. It included figures like Erik Erikson, Margaret Mead, David Riesman, Daniel Ellsberg, Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Norman Mailer, and Todd Gitlin. In more than a dozen important books, Lifton himself confronted the great questions of the era — from war, peace, and the rise of terrorism to the climate crisis and the triumph of political nihilism with the coming of Donald Trump.
The Wellfleet Group, with its bravely ecumenical reach, brought to life its leader’s own intellectual depth and magnanimous spirit, and it added a permanent luster to the town’s own name.
Robert Jay Lifton was born on May 16, 1926 in Brooklyn to Harold and Ciel Roth Lifton, who were both children of immigrants from shtetls in what is now Belarus. Despite the 1957 betrayal by Brooklyn’s baseball team in moving to Los Angeles, Robert remained a diehard Dodgers fan until the day of his death. But growing up in hardscrabble Crown Heights shaped him. His father sold appliances, and as young Robert watched the financial struggles of a man who had worked for Harold Lifton’s business at the start of the Great Depression, he was drawn into a life-shaping relationship.
His father’s friend was Yip Harburg, who reinvented himself as a songwriter and in 1932 penned the lyrics to “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” At a time when unemployment in the U.S. reached 25 percent, that expression of sorrow and pity became the eloquent anthem of the decade-long national trauma. Lifton, by his own account, grew up with the words of that song as a permanent reminder of the actualities of economic injustice: “Once I built a railroad, I made it run/ Made it race against time/ Once I built a railroad, now it’s done/ Brother, can you spare a dime?”
Harburg’s new career took off, and he went on to write classic lyrics for songs like “Over the Rainbow” and “Paper Moon,” but he was blacklisted for his political beliefs in the 1950s. By then, Robert was a doctor, an Air Force veteran, and on the threshold of a distinguished psychiatric career at Yale and Harvard. But he veered away from the usual tracks leading into academia and psychoanalysis, instead devoting his medical training, research skills, and gifts as a writer to a lifelong pursuit of truth in service to peace and justice.
Robert Jay Lifton was a self-described “witnessing professional” — a doctor, if you will, for all that ails us. An empathetic listener, an original interpreter, an ace writer, what follows is a partial list of the astounding contributions he made in a career of more than 70 years.
As an Air Force psychiatrist stationed in Korea in the early 1950s, he interviewed released American POWs who’d survived Chinese prison camps, which began a lifelong preoccupation with what he called “survivor meaning” and “the survivor mission.” That produced the 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China.
He was one of the first to give expression to the experience of survivors of the Hiroshima bombing (the “hibakusha” or “explosion-affected persons”). That reckoning ignited his lifelong opposition to nuclear weapons. (He helped form International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.) In his book Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, which won the National Book Award in 1969, he wrote, “We are all survivors of Hiroshima and, in our imaginations, of a future nuclear holocaust.”
Lifton steadfastly opposed the Vietnam War, but he was among the first to call attention to the actual experiences of the American soldiers who found themselves fighting it. His advocacy on behalf of veterans contributed to the recognition of what came to be called post-traumatic stress syndrome — a reckoning reflected in his 1973 book Home From the War: Vietnam Veterans — Neither Victims Nor Executioners.
The Nazi Holocaust laid bare, in Hannah Arendt’s term, “the banality of evil,” but the shocking capacity of even the most privileged and well-educated humans to commit horrendous crimes was never more clearly demonstrated than by Lifton’s exploration, published in 1986, of Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. In The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life, originally published in 1979, he had already anticipated the theme of death’s grip of the fate of humans. Pairing the Holocaust with the annihilation of Hiroshima, he found that the human capacity for absolute evil was matched by the new human capacity for absolute destruction.
In 1999, Lifton prepared readers for the 21st century’s upsurge in the era-shaping nihilism of murderous terrorist groups with Destroying the World to Save it: Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism, his exploration of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. That preoccupation led to his 2003 exploration of how the apocalyptic mindset had infected powerful political figures in the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11: Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World.
If Lifton’s career led him again and again to look into the abyss of humanity’s capacity for evil, that was because his purpose was always, as he himself explained, to see beyond that abyss. After such reckonings, there could be nothing glib or shallow about his conclusions, which were always most remarkable for focusing on the conviction that hope is always an option. His 2017 book The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival concluded that the climate crisis, for all that it portended, could yet be the occasion for a creative and unifying new vision of human possibility. He was 91 by then, but he wasn’t finished.
In 2023, he published his distilled magnum opus, Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal From Hiroshima to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Summarizing all that he had learned from survivors of so many kinds, that book, written in shadows cast by the MAGA movement, carried his uplifting conviction to a new level. Despite the accumulation of unprecedented threats, hope remains, wrote Lifton.
The book ends with these words: “What we speak of as future renewal is inseparable from present engagement. That engagement is built on survival energies and involves witnessing professionals, political leaders, and ordinary citizens.” Surviving Our Catastrophes, a recapitulation of wisdom, conviction, and resolve, is a monument to Robert Jay Lifton’s never-to-be-surpassed work and life.
For 58 years beginning in 1952, that work and life revolved around Robert’s wife, Betty Jean (Kirschner) Lifton, an author and influential advocate for open adoption. She died in 2010. Robert was sustained by their children and their families: daughter Natasha Lifton and husband Dan Itzkovitz and their children, Lila Lifton and Dmitri Itzkovitz; and son Ken Lifton and wife Michelle Lifton and their children, Jessica Lifton and Kimberly Lifton. The last chapter of his amazing story Robert wrote in Truro with his partner, political theorist and writer Nancy Rosenblum.
A memorial service is being planned by the family for this fall.
Robert gave his last interview a month before his death to a reporter for the Independent, Anna Salvatore, published in the issue of Aug. 14. In it, he said that he loved Wellfleet “from the moment I stepped on its holy ground.” He also said, “Freud was wrong, in my view, about something. He said our only happiness is that of childhood, and I don’t believe that’s true. I believe that we can have happiness in being absorbed by a certain capacity of the mind. The experience of transcendence is available to all of us and is far from only a childhood feeling.”
No one has done more to connect the dots of what threatens human survival than Robert Jay Lifton, nor has anyone done more to point the way to survival meaning, survival mission, and survival itself. As he never forgot his cherished Dodgers, Robert never forgot where he came from or who he was. Again and again, out of the treasure chest of his huge heart, he spared a dime for all of us.
