Description
How to Maintain Hope in an Age of Catastrophe
Robert Jay Lifton will be talking about what seventy years of studying both the victims and the perpetrators of horror has taught him about the human will to survive.
Chaired by David Morgan
Dr Robert Jay Lifton has written over twenty books and edited eight others, including many seminal works in the field such as the National Book Award–winning Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, The Los Angelos Times Book Prize–winning The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, and the National Book Award–nominated Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China; The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation; Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir; and more recently, The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival and Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry.
He is a founding member of the Nobel Prize–winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and has also been a strong voice in opposing American wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
He has been a research psychiatrist and teacher at the Washington School of Psychiatry, Yale University, Harvard University, the City University of New York, and Columbia University.
He convened the Wellfleet Psychohistory Group in 1966, and organized and hosted its annual meetings at his home on Cape Cod for 50 years until 2015. Over the years participants have included Charles Strozier, Kai Erikson, Peter Brooks, Raul Hilberg, Stuart Hampshire, Norman Mailer, Daniel Ellsberg, Howard Zinn, Jonathan Schell, Norman Birnbaum, Judith Herman, Harvey Cox, Ashis Nandy, James Carroll, and Margret Brenman, among many others.
