Few scholars have reshaped our understanding of trauma the way Robert Jay Lifton has. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1926, Lifton attended Cornell University and New York Medical College before turning his attention to humanity’s darkest chapters as a psychiatrist and author. His interviews with Hiroshima survivors, Vietnam War veterans, and Nazi doctors informed his research on the psychological structure of totalitarianism.
In 1966, Lifton co-founded the Wellfleet Psychohistory Group with the German-American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Their annual gatherings in his Wellfleet home brought together scholars, writers, and activists to discuss two interrelated questions: how do large-scale events and ideologies affect the human mind, and how do people’s inner lives, in turn, shape history?
In his memoir Witness to an Extreme Century (2011), Lifton observed that the group’s meetings combined “scholarship and committed dialogue with activism” for more than 50 years.
The Independent spoke with Lifton, now 99, at the North Truro home he shares with his partner, political theorist Nancy Rosenblum. This interview has been edited for length.
Q: From a young age, you seem to have been intent on producing unusual work. Why?
Robert Jay Lifton: The world beckoned to me. I have found myself responding to extreme situations, as they’re called, and have become immersed in studying and confronting them. And although they’re of very different kinds and parts of the world, there’s a sort of interconnection to all of them. These shaped my function as what I call a psychiatrist in the world.
It’s easier to understand these connections in retrospect, but when did they become apparent to you?
RJL: When I was a young psychiatrist in Hong Kong, I interviewed people coming out of China who told me strange stories of their undergoing what’s called “thought reform.” That was a decisive moment in my life. That was the beginning, and others followed. I found it was not difficult to convince people — the chairman of the Yale Department of Psychiatry, for instance — of the importance of my second study, that of Hiroshima.
You wrote in Explorations in Psychohistory (1974) that interviews combining “humane spontaneity and professional discipline” are idiosyncratic and always less than ideal. What would be better?
RJL: As any psychiatrist or psychoanalyst knows, the best way to learn what a person thinks and feels is to speak to him or her, but you have to do more than that. In these historical settings, you have to know something about what they have been doing. You can’t take, for instance, a Nazi doctor at face value; you have to find out more about the situation. It’s not only a matter of the historical context — though it is that. It’s that history is inside of oneself at every moment.
What does it mean to recognize history in oneself?
RJL: When I was doing my study of Nazi doctors, I was friendly with Elie Wiesel, the famous survivor. One time, when I dropped in to see him, I said, “Elie, I’ve just initiated this study, and I’m having dreams of being behind barbed wire. Sometimes, my wife and children are there as well.” And he looked at me and said, “Good. Now you can do this study.” The history had to get inside of me, even as a researcher, in order for the study to have any depth. In that case, I had to gain the history of Auschwitz I didn’t have.
Your Wellfleet Psychohistory Group brought together architects, historians, analysts, novelists, sociologists, and other critical thinkers broadly concerned with humanism. Why did they come?
RJL: It was mostly attractive to people because it was an environment that gave them more freedom than that of the academic world, more freedom to speak out than in most places where one professionally lives. We would then keep sufficient structure in order to be able to talk to each other in some detail, but sufficient openness to be always questioning and to raise issues that were difficult to raise elsewhere.
Also, I would say, impossible to deny, was the interaction of scholarship and activism. According to much German influence and tradition, scholarship and activism are absolutely separate, and ne’er the twain shall meet. I take the opposite view: you need scholarship in order to locate the areas of activism, and you need activism in order for scholarship to have meaning and consequences. Scholarship and activism have always been central to me and to just about all the people who have come to the Wellfleet group over the 50 years that it existed. It all keeps reverberating in me.
How does it continue to reverberate in you?
RJL: We have a little group, which we have humorously called “The Remnant,” of about 12 people, and we meet bimonthly. They all are enthusiastic Wellfleetians, meaning they have been to the meetings.
I’m writing a book about the Wellfleet meetings: my creating them with Erikson, how it all developed, and some of the testimony or at least impressions people had in coming to Wellfleet and joining the meetings. That book is well underway, but it’s not yet finished at all.
You wrote that “the ambience of our first few Wellfleet meetings reflected our initial illusion, which it did not take us long to give up, that of creating an academic discipline of ‘psychohistory.’ ” Why was this an illusion?
RJL: People have different views on this. Some people who have been interested in these subjects say we do have a particular discipline called psychohistory. I feel it’s a little dangerous when you start putting two words together and hyphenating them. It’s yes, psychology and history, but psychohistory? Well, maybe. I’m skeptical even of what I’m doing in that sense, at least as anything like a fixed process.
There are two going theories in psychohistory. Erik Erikson’s was the great man, or great woman, theory. I took on a different theory and said, you don’t always know yet who the great man or woman is, and besides, you may not have access, so it’s shared themes. A group of people particularly active in creating history or being affected by history can then be studied, as I studied American Vietnam veterans or Nazi doctors or Chinese thought reform.
But Erikson, even when we disagreed like this, continues to hold an enormous influence on me, because he was so thoughtful and his mind was so different from others.
You’ve written about Wellfleet in almost mystical terms, saying that you’re “mesmerized” by it and that here “we seem to be better people, and everything seems more possible.” How is that so?
RJL: I started coming to Wellfleet in the late ’50s, and I’d been coming for almost 10 years by the time we started the meetings. I loved it from the moment I stepped on its holy ground. My pattern was to go out into the world, bring it back, pile up the folders of my findings, and put them together into an article, or more likely a book. I had a wonderful study where we had the meetings — I called it “the mother of all studies.”
There’s something to do with the place and what Erikson calls the work habit: you know, people do odd things, they crush pencils or they hang things up or tear things down. They work under certain conditions, and that’s their manifestation of the work habit. Mine became centered in that study as a combination of personal love of the place. Look right out here. You can see the whole peninsula as it swings into Provincetown. That’s where we are.
You develop a certain relationship, and none of our relationships to places or people is fully rational. It’s related to deep feelings, so that the purely rational never sustains anything but has to be tempered by, combined with, some such deep personal feelings, I believe.
That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t be rational; we’re creatures of the Enlightenment. It does mean that Enlightenment rationality is deepened by our inclination to be part of something larger than ourselves and for that to happen with some intensity.
The deep feelings are not exactly indescribable. Here, 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.
