"Terrorism and War:
Struggles with Apocalyptic Violence"

Robert Jay Lifton

Psychologist, Harvard Medical School

Tuesday, April 8, 2003, 4:00 PM, Rehm Library in Smith Hall

A Deitchman Family Lecture in Religion and Modernity, sponsored by the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.

Robert Jay Lifton is Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance. Until recently he was Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, The City University of New York. He had previously held the Foundations' Fund Research Professorship of Psychiatry at Yale University for more than two decades. He has been particularly interested in the relationship between individual psychology and historical change, and in problems surrounding the extreme historical situations of our era.

From mid-1995, he has been conducting psychological research on the problem of apocalyptic violence, focusing on Aum Shinrikyo, the extremist Japanese cult which released poison gas in Tokyo subways. His book Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism was published by Metropolitan Books in October 1999.

From September 11, 2001, he has been studying Islamist apocalyptic violence and American responses to 9/11, including their own apocalyptic tendencies.

His writings on Nazi doctors (their killing in the name of healing) and the problem of genocide; nuclear weapons and their impact on death symbolism; Hiroshima survivors; Chinese thought reform and the Chinese Cultural Revolution; psychological trends in contemporary men and women; and the Vietnam War experience and Vietnam veterans have appeared in a variety of professional and popular journals.

Recent books include Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (Putnam and Avon Books, 1995) (with Greg Mitchell), which explores the impact of Hiroshima on our own country; The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (Basic Books, 1993), The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (with Eric Markusen), (Basic Books, 1990); The Future of Immortality: And Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (Basic Books, 1987) ; The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 1986), and Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (University of North Carolina Press, 1991).