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Free Press
June 2011
On Sale: June 14, 2011
448 pages
ISBN: 1416590765
EAN: 9781416590767
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
On a fateful day in the spring of 1954 Robert Jay Lifton, a
young American psychiatrist just discharged from service in
the Korean War, decided to stay in Hong Kong rather than
return home—changing his life plans entirely—so that he
could continue work that had enthralled him, interviewing
people subjected to Chinese thought reform. He had plunged
into uncharted territory in probing the far reaches of the
human psyche, as he would repeatedly in the years ahead, and
his Hong Kong research provided the first understanding of
the insidious process that came to be known as brainwashing. From that day in Hong Kong forward, Lifton has probed into
some of the darkest episodes of human history, bearing his
unique form of psychological witness to the sources and
consequences of collective violence and trauma, as well as
to our astonishing capacity for resilience. In this long-awaited memoir, Lifton charts the adventurous
and constantly surprising course of his fascinating life
journey, a journey that took him from what a friend of his
called a “Jewish Huck Finn childhood” in Brooklyn to
friendships with many of the most influential intellectuals,
writers, and artists of our time—from Erik Erikson, David
Riesman, and Margaret Mead, to Howard Zinn and Kurt
Vonnegut, Stanley Kunitz, Kenzaburo Oe, and Norman Mailer. In his remarkable study of Hiroshima survivors, he explored
the human consequences of nuclear weapons, and then went on
to uncover dangerous forms of attraction to their power in
the spiritual disease he calls nuclearism. During riveting
face-to-face interviews with Nazi doctors, he illuminated
the reversal of healing and killing in ordinary physicians
who had been socialized to Nazi evil. With Vietnam veterans
he helped create unprecedented “rap groups” in which much
was revealed about what we now call post-traumatic stress
disorder, helping veterans draw upon their experience for
valuable, even prophetic, insights about atrocity and war.
As a pioneer in psychohistory, Lifton’s encounters with the
consequences of cruelty and destructiveness led him to
become a passionate social activist, lending a powerful
voice of conscience to the suppressed truths of the Vietnam
War and the dangers of nuclear weapons. Written with the warmth of spirit—along with the humor and
sense of absurdity—that have made Lifton a beloved friend
and teacher to so many, Witness to an Extreme Century is a
moving and deeply thought-provoking story of one man’s
extraordinary commitment to looking into the abyss of evil
in order to help us move beyond it.
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