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Presented by the Institute of International Studies The University of California at Berkeley

Series host: Harry Kreisler

Noted psychiatrist and author Robert J. Lifton has researched Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and now terrorist cults. Through these explorations he probes the profound questions of death and its meaning for life. [10/2001] [Show ID: 6081]

Partial transcript (more may be done later):

November 2, 1999

00:31 Harry Kreisler: Welcome to a Conversation with History. I am Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest is Robert Jay Lifton who is distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry at John Jay College in the graduate center of the City University of New York. For more than forty years as a writer, investigator and psychiatrist he has used the skills of a researcher and the imagination of a healer of the mind to confront some of the most disturbing events of our times. As a witness he analyses how men and women lose and recreate their humanity in extreme situations; Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and now terrorist cults. These are the territory of Robert Jay Lifton’s explorations as he probes the profound questions of death and its meaning for life. Robert Jay Lifton is the author of many important works, including The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, winner of The Los Angeles Times book prize, and Death and Life, winner of a national book award. He also wrote Home from the War, Neither Executioners nor Victims. His latest book is Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. Professor Lifton, welcome to Berkeley.

Robert Jay Lifton: Thank you

HK: You wrote several years back, “We may say that every insight expressed by a healer or an investigator, every use of the eyes of the understanding is a function of his own formative place, of all that goes into his special relationship to history”. Where were you born and raised, to follow up on that?

RJL: I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised there and spent most of my childhood there.

HK: And how did your parents shape your character do you think?

RJL: Well, very importantly my parents were second generation. They were born in America, but barely. Their parents had been born in shtetls [small villages] in Russia and my father in particular was a progressive person; a person who made this way in society by attending the City College of New York. It's kind of interesting I've somehow made my way back to City University which is an outgrowth of the City College. He stood for progressive principles that I think affected me and the people around me and my family were concerned with these issues.

HK: And what books did you read as a young person, that you recall today?

RJL: ... Later, maybe when I got into my early teens, I did become interested very much in history. I read [William] Shirer about the Third Reich and various books about contemporary history. And now in retrospect, you know Freud once said that he spent all of his professional life making his way back to his original interest, which was ancient cultures. Well, I could say that I have spent a good deal of my professional life making my way back to what was at least a very early interest, that of history and the historical process.

HK: And that is something that becomes an important component in your work, as do studies of the mind and of the healing process.

RJL: That’s right. My work, though I didn’t call it this at the very beginning, fits into something we call psycho-history. That can be very mystifying, but what it really means is simply the application of psychological methods to historical questions. And just about all of my studies fit into that category.

...

HK: Were you shocked when you learned of the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II?

RJL: I was enormously shocked, and I think that families like my own who were middle-class had complicated feelings, almost guilty feelings, that we were so privileged in not having undergone any of that ordeal. At the same time, terrified and outraged because it was directed at Jews like ourselves. And the Holocaust was there, it wasn’t talked about a lot in my family as it was happening. Maybe we didn’t want to know it was happening. Later on, soon after the war, I remember seeing pictures that were shocking, and doubly so that people were murdered this way because they were Jewish, as I was.

HK: After your undergraduate work, you chose to go to medical school and you became a psychiatrist.

RJL: That’s right. When I was young I was very unclear about what I wanted to do. I was interested in history; I didn’t know where that would take me. I had a kind of interest in medicine and had read, early on, some books about “healers of the mind,” as they were called. And so I had an early but somewhat vague interest in both medicine and in what was to become, in my mind and in my work, psychiatry. I was rushed through my early education because a lot of it was during the war, and yet I was always a very intense student, interested in my work, and very committed to it. But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school. Sometimes it’s said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category. I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological dimension rather early on.

10:26 HK: And to follow through on your career, before we talk about the actual work you wound up doing, you went into the army and that sort of changed the course of your life in a way. Tell us about that.

RJL: Very much so. When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time during the early 1950s at the time of the Korean War. And I was called up by my draft board and I was sent first to Westover Field in Massachusetts, but then are there was a request somebody be sent overseas and I was the one was selected to be sent overseas, and of course like a red blooded young American lad, I asked to be sent to Paris. They sent me to Japan, then quickly to Korea. It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States, and I've never really thanked them for it because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work. But I did make wonderful discoveries when living in Japan for almost a year and a half, with my wife, in immersing myself in Japanese life. We never lived on the base. We lived in, among Japanese groups and families; formed groups with them, especially a discussion group where we met a lot of young Japanese students later became ambassadors and leading figures in Japanese life. And [we were] really drawn to Japan into the world.

And the other thing that happened was that my last military assignment, this was the Air Force I had enlisted in, in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the Air Force, so I was never in any kind of violent combat. My last assignment I was sent back to Korea to interview, along with other Air Force and Army psychiatrists, GIs returning from North Korea where they had been in Chinese Communist custody and put through a process that we later came to call thought reform, which is a direct translation of what they call the process, and that interested me in this process. It was also called brainwashing in more casual way. And so my wife and I had decided to take a trip around the world after I was discharged from the military. We only reached our second stop, which was Hong Kong where I began to hear stories of people subjected to a more intense version of this process. I managed to arrange to get some research support and stay in Hong Kong for another year and a half interviewing people coming out of China, both Westerners and Chinese and that was my first real research study on thought reform or so called brainwashing.

HK: Now to talk about your research, we can actually work on several planes here, but throughout your work you're looking at the psychological tendencies common to all mankind. You give special emphasis to those within a particular cultural tradition, and then finally those stimulated by contemporary historical forces. So it is an interesting mixture of culture, of history and the psychology of the individual.

RJL: Well, what I found was when I started my first study, and then my subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of the duress where I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event as it impact on them, or as they helped to create it, say survivors of Hiroshima were in a sense caught up in a historical process. As you study them, who were they? How did you get your sense of who they were? And I began to think through, influenced by various anthropologists, some of whom I got to know like Margaret Mead [1901-1978] who was very supportive of my work, her work and Ruth Benedict's [1887-1948] work and then later on Eric Erikson's [1902-1994] work in psychoanalysis. And so I came to what was obvious to me a tripartite idea: they were creatures of the immediate historical process that had brought me to them, and at the same time a cultural tradition and long cultural history which made them the kind of people they were in many ways, they were human beings. In that sense had universal psycho-biological struggles. And that's been a rough kind of model for ways of looking at people in different cultures that I have studied because I've looked people in Japan, from China and the Chinese experience, in Germany, in the United States and this kind of approach applies in all cases.

HK: And in these cases that you have looked at, whether Vietnam veterans Hiroshima survivors, Nazi doctors and now terrorist cults, it’s really individuals in extreme circumstances.

RJL: That’s right.

HK: And why that focus, do you think?

RJL: You know it's hard to… It will be easier to say, well that's very important for us to know and that's why did it, but that's not the way it happens. It happens in a much more erratic way, and you find yourself doing certain things. I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting, this thought reform process in the military and I saw chance to study it unencumbered by any military limitations, and I did that, and I thought that work was interesting from me and useful to the world. And then my second main study came after I had spent quite a lot of time in Japan studying Japanese youth, and I just decided to make a trip to Hiroshima, with my wife was with me, to look into what happened in that city.

HK: And this would be about what year?

RJL: It was 1962. And I did that. It isn’t that I became say anti-nuclear because I learned what had happened in Hiroshima. It was kind of the reverse. I had been at Harvard for a number of years, and I became a close friend of David Riesman [1909-2002], the great sociologist, who was the first American faculty person to be an advisor to an anti-nuclear group and we formed a little newsletter, that he mostly did, talking about the American shelter building craze and some of the absurdities of strategic declarations about fighting and winning a nuclear war.

HK: Better red that dead [Wikipedia: “Better red than dead” and “better dead than red” were dueling Cold War slogans which first gained currency in the United States during the late 1950s, amid debates about anti-communism and nuclear disarmament.]

RJL: All that. Well one of the favorite moral questions of that time was, if you saw your neighbor coming to your shelter where he might use up some of the valuable oxygen there, should you shoot him. And I thought that there is something wrong with that society if that is one of the main moral questions. Anyhow, it was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went in Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody really studied it. That was a real insight of its own. People resisted it, and also the Japanese were so overwhelmed by it they… Some came to help, but was hard to study it in that kind of atmosphere.

Just then I had received an appointment to Yale and I was able, I'm eternally grateful to Dr. Fritz Redlich [1910-2004] who was the chair of the department then, when I wrote to him saying, look I was to come to Yale now but I've discovered this situation at Hiroshima that nobody had studied and I really want to stay here and study it. And almost by return mail he wrote back saying, okay I’ve arranged for a modest research grant and you can stay there. And I stayed there for six months did the work. That was my second study and I had the sense that I had done one which had been especially intense, in that sense of extreme historical situation, and I could do this as well. I knew something about Japan. I was concerned about these questions, I had a little experience and so I felt I could do it. I wasn’t without doubt. But I thought I could do it, so one builds a sense of self that one is the kind of person who just might be able to do this kind of work and that's how happened, with a lot of anxiety along the way about whether I could carry it through, or sometimes in response to others who thought it seemed a little crazy for a psychiatrist to be out there doing such things, but nonetheless one develops a sense of oneself, or one’s own identity, as one who can and wants to do that kind of work.

19:31

...

HK: In the book on the Vietnam veterans you talk about confronting these realities, reordering the images within your own mind, and then seeking a renewal of both the self and the institutions around you.

RJL: Yes. I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war. And I found that a lot of these young men, they were all men in the groups that I worked with, and some other professionals, they had been used to the idea that when your country calls you to the colors you go. They were patriotic. And they had a kind of macho feeling that war was a kind of testing ground for manhood. And also, the idea that in many cases they’d literally sat on their father’s knee, he’d been a veteran of World War II and told them about the glorious victory, and they wanted their moment, with war glorified sometimes in that way. But when they experienced their first deads, sometimes that they had brought about in the Vietcong or the enemy, or else saw a buddy shot up next to them, but were in some way involved in a death encounter, their comfort in all of this was shattered. And in many cases they simply could no longer justify their being there. And they felt everything there seemed strange and bizarre and, for many of them, wrong.

30:00 There was something wrong or dirty about that war. And there were many atrocities that they witnessed or participated in. So an encounter with death could threaten one’s entire belief system and then one had to struggle with what one learned, what images came from that encounter, reorder them, put them back into some kind of structure that one could use, which is a whole restructuring process of the self. And then there could be a process of renewal. And that’s what a number of the Vietnam veterans whom I and others worked with in so-called rap groups and individual exchanges were struggling to do.

HK: You write somewhere, “any experience of survival, whether of large disaster, intimate personal loss, or more indirectly, severe mental illness, involves a psychic journey to the edge of the world of being. The formulative effort is the survivor’s means of return.”

RJL: Yes, I’ve been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work. And, you know, when we talk about all of this in retrospect it all sounds very logical as though one just wafted through it. It’s not that way at all in the way that it happened. I struggled with each of these studies and I was uncertain about what they meant, and often confused, and then I tried to put together what I was seeing. And the survivor has been a very important leitmotif all through them. The survivor is really double-edged, and that’s what I was saying that you just quoted. Survivors can go one of two ways, or usually both ways: one is, having touched death, they can close down and remain numbed and really be incapacitated by what they’ve been through. Or they can confront, in some degree, what they have experienced and derive a certain amount of insight and even wisdom from it that informs their lives. I think that great achievements have occurred in relation to survival, including spiritual and religious moments. And so there’s another dimension of the survivor. In work that’s both very early and very recent on the Protean self, I try to evolve a kind of concept of the self that can move from survival or from a death encounter into various kinds of imagery, absorbing many different images and forms, and taking in even seemingly contrary dimensions. But the general idea is that one can use a death encounter and re-create oneself in relation to it. I’ve seen this happen in various people whom I’ve interviewed. The Vietnam veterans were very striking in this way because, as we ran these rap groups, we could see them undergoing changes, and they were changes about their views of the war and war-making and about macho and maleness, and about their ideas about life itself. It doesn’t mean they were changing entirely, some things of course remained the same. But very important aspects of themselves were changing within months, or even weeks, not years. Some over years as well. So this was very important for me to grasp and it influenced everything I did subsequently.

34:00 HK: Now your next major book, which we have here, was on the Nazi doctors and medical killing and the psychology of genocide. In the introduction to that book you tell of a rabbi who came up to you at a lecture and said, “Hiroshima is your path as a Jew to the Holocaust.” In retrospect, was he right?

RJL: Well he was a friend as well as a rabbi, and it wasn’t at a lecture. He actually visited me in my home. And in a way, I think if it happened at a lecture it might not have made the impact on me that it would as a friend sitting next to me at a table just as we are sitting here. I had a very complicated feeling. I was annoyed by it because, as I wrote, it seemed pontifical – even for a rabbi, who is supposed to, I guess, pontificate. But I didn’t entirely disbelieve it either, and actually I came to see that the combination of my being a Jew and the Holocaust and its influence on my life very early on affected my way of responding to nuclear weapons and the Hiroshima experience. These are very different events, but they’re both massively destructive and deeply dangerous to humankind, and really to the continuity of all human life. So in that sense they blend. And I came to think he was more than a little correct in what he said, and the fact is that after I did the Hiroshima work, and especially after the work on Vietnam, where the men I interviewed or worked with in the rap groups were both perpetrators and victims. That was the idea. They were really responsible, or some other GIs, for atrocities in Vietnam in a war that should never have happened, as they felt and I felt. But at the same time they were victims in that they were sent there ignorantly and they suffered, and had all kinds of psychological aftereffects from it. And they taught me a lot about the capacity for change. From that process one could see really new kinds of self taking shape. So later on I wrote about the Protean self, even though I’d written my first essay on the Protean self way back in the late sixties, maybe published in the early seventies, which I derived from my early work on Japan. But I wasn’t ready to write the whole book until I’d thought it through much more. And that I published in, I think it was 1993. A long time later.

...

43:55 HK: And your newest book is about Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese terrorist cult that set about to gather an infrastructure that in the end was ready to call for destroying the world in order to save it. You say, "No individual self is inherently evil, in the Nazi book [The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide] under certain conditions virtually any self is capable of becoming all these things.” Is it fair to say that what you find particularly disturbing in looking at this terrorist group, is you see a lot of the same themes about purification, destruction and apocalypse in order to save the world, but in this case it is no longer the state that is behind the scenes, as was the case behind the Nazi doctors, as was the case with the atomic weapons establishment, but rather cult groups that acquire access to biological and nuclear weapons.

RJL: Yes, in the case of Aum Shinrikyo they weren’t at the beginning by any means clearly a terrorist group. They were one of the Japanese so-called religions, and there are an extraordinary number of new religions ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially with a new rush, what they call the rush hour of the gods, after World War 2 and then again intensely after 1970. So young people, and not so young people, were drawn to Aum Shinrikyo because it gave them strong religious satisfactions and Asahara Shoko, the guru of Aum Shinrikyo was a very talented religious teacher and a very gifted teacher of yoga as well as a self-promoting con man. One can be all these things in the same sense of self. To some extent some of these disciples who underwent these mystical experiences, with the help of all sorts of meditation practices including sustained rapid breathing which brings about a sort of de-oxygenation and lends one really vulnerable to high states and mystical experiences, they became very attached to the guru and to this kind of religious practice and they could in a sense turn the other cheek or numb themselves to evidence of violence within the cult that they didn’t want to see because they were so drawn to the cultic experience. And it that sense they could form both an ‘Aum self’ which was thriving in Aum and a ‘non-Aum self’ or ‘anti-Aum self’ which had doubts and even antagonisms but which had to be suppressed because such doubts within that guru dominated cult were taboo. But certainly these young people were not inherently evil any more than the Nazi doctors were inherently evil. They were socialized in one way or another into a group that became evil. And the young people in Aum didn’t even know that Asahara was stockpiling these chemical, and with the help of his trusted high disciples, biological and chemical weapons – and attempting to obtain nuclear weapons.

47:40 HK: In all of these works you do extensive interviewing – with the Hiroshima survivors, with the Nazi doctors, with the cult members. Tell us a little about the complexity of that process. On the one hand you have to imagine yourself in their situation, and on the other hand you have to distance yourself from it to understand it.

RJL: Well the first thing that I would say that I found, I mean I was trained in interviewing in my psychiatric residency and it's a kind of modified psychoanalytic interviewing in which you evoke the life experiences of the person you are talking to. So for me early on in my work, the interview was a very central kind of instrument, if that's the word. But as I've used it over the years I think it's a beautiful instrument, and I think that it is underused. It can be used by almost any kind of researcher. That can be in the humanities as well as in social science or in any kind of investigation. And I found that I wanted to modify it very much, because after all these weren’t people who came to me for help, in my sense of having been trained as a clinician, rather I went to them seeking some knowledge of their experience really.

So I try to make it more of a dialogue, of a give-and-take in which they can ask me questions about my life, and at the same time I was probing what they were telling me. And I think it requires a kind of a double level in which one is constantly a human being in a dialogue and is not immune from very human questions as you might if you're distancing yourself as a doctor who's on a level above the patient you're talking to. But at the same time you are bringing to bear, I try to bring to bear, my professional knowledge, my psychological knowledge in order to grasp what they’re telling me. I describe in my book on Hiroshima how in the first days of those interviews I was stunned and overwhelmed by the stories they were telling me. And I thought, yes, this is a worthwhile study but can I really do it? And then I noticed that after a few days, or a week of doing this study, I found myself less affected and more able to think about the categories of response that I was hearing.

50:22 And that I came to call selective professional numbing, and I needed at least that to be able to do the work at all. But I realized it was kind of a danger because it's usually overweighted, in a lot of professional practice, on the numbing side rather than the exaggerated feeling [side], but either one can prevent one from undertaking these studies. But the interview has to be above all a kind of human exchange, and I think I learned more over time from practice and found that people derive a great deal of value and take to interviews when they're on this level of give and take. Because it is a chance for them to examine their own lives. And that was even true of former Aum Shinrikyo members who had the first have my trust as they were working their way out of this cult, in a way, psychologically. But they told me, in most cases, they derived a certain kind of value from it because they could explore what they had been through in ways they hadn’t otherwise been able to do.

HK: We have time, unfortunately, for only one more question. I want to ask you about what lessons we might draw from your extraordinary body of work, about on the one hand man’s capacity to survive, and on the other man and woman’s capacity to survive, but also man and woman’s capacity to do evil.

51.55 RJL: Well, you know, my work is full of the study or recording of evil. It seems to be all too frequent, all too readily called forth, and people all too readily socialize to it, or are able to adapt to evil. At the same time I have also seen the other side of it – survivors able to bring knowledge from their ordeal; recreate themselves, with the help of others and with the help of love around them. So I am careful not to insist upon a single kind of lesson from all this. I would say, for me, and I consider myself neither an optimist nor pessimist, but to simply confront and make my way through these dreadful events is an act of hope. And in recording some of what people were able to do, in spite of their exposure to them, also an act of hope. So I consider myself still a hopeful person. And I think all of us have to work to combat these events and take steps to prevent their recurrence in some kind of spirit of hope. That is what I try to convey to my students and others who might share these matters.

HK: And I would throw at you a quote from your own writings, “one looks into the abyss in order to see beyond it.”

RJL: Yes, that's very much the spirit of my work. You look into the abyss but you don't want to be stuck there otherwise your imagination is deadened and defeated by the very event you are studying. So you want to look into it in order to see beyond it. If you don't look into it you're your ostrich like, if you get stuck there you're incapacitated, so you want to look beyond it to other human possibilities.

HK: Dr. Lifton, thank you very much. I’ve never had the feeling in one of these interviews that I would like to go on for another hour or two, but in this particular case, as in others, I can’t do anything about it, but thank you very much for sharing with us this story of your intellectual journey.

RJL: Thank you very much.

_____________________________________

Robert Jay Lifton’s 8 Criteria against which any environment may be judged:  1. Milieu Control – The control of information and communication.  2. Mystical Manipulation – The manipulation of experiences that appear spontaneous but in fact were planned and orchestrated.  3. The Demand for Purity – The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection.  4. The Cult of Confession – Sins, as defined by the group, are to be confessed either to a personal monitor or publicly to the group.  5. The Sacred Science – The group’s doctrine or ideology is considered to be the ultimate Truth, beyond all questioning or dispute.  6. Loading the Language – The group interprets or uses words and phrases in new ways so that often the outside world does not understand.  7. Doctrine over person – The member’s personal experiences are subordinated to the sacred science and any contrary experiences must be denied or reinterpreted to fit the ideology of the group.  8. The Dispensing of existence – The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not.

_____________________________________ Ex-Moonie Says Cults Make “1984” a Reality

#Robert Jay Lifton #Hiroshima #Aum Shinrikyo #shoko asahara #Harry Kreisler #University of California at Berkeley #Nazi doctors

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