Witness to an Extreme Century; A Memoir

New York: Free Press, 2011. First Free Press hardcover Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xv. [1], 428, [4] pages. Illustrations. Index. Pages 'off-white', DJ has slight wear and soiling. Robert Jay Lifton (born May 16, 1926) is an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory. From 1951 to 1953 he served as an Air Force psychiatrist in Japan and Korea, to which he later attributed his interest in war and politics. He has since worked at the Washington School of Psychiatry, Harvard University, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he helped to found the Center for the Study of Human Violence. Several of his books featured mental adaptations that people made in extreme wartime environments: Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans-Neither Victims nor Executioners, and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Derived from a Kirkus review: A memoir by a courageous psychiatrist and National Book Award winner whose life's work has been the study of why fundamentally decent individuals commit evil acts. In 1958, after serving in Japan as a military psychiatrist, Lifton had the opportunity to interview American servicemen captured during the Korean war by the Chinese. This was the subject of his first book and became the catalyst for a shift in his life from his intended career as a Freudian psychoanalyst to becoming what he calls a "psychohistorical researcher". Lifton writes that it was his work with Hiroshima survivors that "was the shock that permanently changed [his] way of relating to the world." It also informed his studies of the participation of German doctors in the extermination of Jews, the My Lai massacre by U.S. troops in Vietnam and the examples of the use of torture by U.S. soldiers against enemy combatants-which exemplify how average people can be led by circumstance to commit atrocities.