Lifton is perhaps best known as the author of “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima,” published in 1967, which received a National Book Award.
During the Korean War, Lifton served as a psychiatrist in the Air Force, where his duties included interviewing returning American P.O.W.’s subjected to psychological manipulation by their captors — what the Chinese called “thought reform” and the United States denounced as “brainwashing.” Discharged in 1954, he undertook his first research project in Hong Kong, where he interviewed Chinese refugees who had undergone Maoist mind conditioning in Communist prisons. All his subsequent research was devoted to “trying to make use of my background as a clinician to identify psychological experiences of people caught up in historical storms.” He has been particularly interested in the phenomenon of “psychic numbing,” the way some people can be oblivious to the sufferings of others. This, Lifton says, facilitates the commission and acceptance of atrocities. At bottom, “Witness to an Extreme Century” is a book about scholarship and activism, and the links between the two.
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