Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist who shed light on the darkest chapters in modern history including Chinese brainwashing, Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, has died aged 99.
His later investigations into war crimes and the experiences of Vietnam veterans in the early 1970s led him to formulate his theory of the “atrocity-producing situation” in which he believed ordinary people could commit acts of such extraordinary cruelty as the My Lai massacre.
His book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide was based on interviews with both perpetrators and victims. He argued the Nazi doctors committed their crimes using a process of personality “doubling”, whereby the moral medical practitioner was psychologically divided from the immoral “killing self”. The book drew criticism from those who felt Lifton’s approach was too forgiving. Lifton responded that humanity best serves the future when it confronts its own potential for evil rather than dismissing it as “unexaminable”.
The research for Nazi Doctors took an emotional toll, and he had frequent nightmares in which he or his family were imprisoned in camps. On hearing this, a friend and Auschwitz survivor remarked: “Good, now you can do the study.” It remained an important lesson for Lifton. “One has to offer the self to the suffering in some degree,” he said.
He was born 16 May 1926, no birth time, in New York, a week after |David Attenborough and three weeks after Queen Elizabeth 11, so he shared their stalwartly enduring Fixed chart. In his case his Taurus Sun exactly conjunct Algol was opposition Saturn square Neptune opposition Jupiter.
His Pluto exactly conjunct Sirius (the brightest star in the sky) was in a courageous and determined trine to Mars in Pisces with Mercury sextile Mars which fits with writing about the darkest of subjects.
See previous post on Algol: Greg Wise – an Algol that breeds empathy 24th March 2024 by Marjorie
‘Despite Algol’s malevolent reputation for destruction it has another purpose which is to force us to face suffering and horror and not brush it aside.’
The post Robert Jay Lifton – Algol at its best first appeared on Astroinform with Marjorie Orr – Star4cast.
