Robert Jay Lifton, MD: Lifting Us Up From Our Human Abyss

In Memoriam

Robert Jay Lifton, MD

To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.

—Robert Jay Lifton, from Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China

Whatever I had planned for my column today has to be bumped until Monday. I just found out that the renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, MD, died yesterday. He received the kind of long and extensive life review he deserves in the August 4 New York Times article by Douglas Martin: “Robert Jay Lifton, Psychiatrist Drawn to Humanity’s Horrors, Dies at 99.” Given the short time this morning to write my usual eulogy of psychiatrists, I’ll leave many of the details and summary of his career to the Times article and other eulogies and will pull up some of my own personal experiences with him.

I was most fortunate to start medical school at Yale in 1967 when Bob was still on the faculty. I was witness to how he helped quell any potential riots on campus during the trial of the Black Panther Bobby Seale. He also got put into jail for public protesting the Vietnam War. I started to then learn that a psychiatrist could apply their knowledge and skills to real life societal problems beyond individual patient care.

The next highlight—if we can use such a term for horrors of humans—came with his landmark 1986 book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, covering the role of physicians in the most extreme antisemitism of the Nazi genocide of Jews and others. Being Jewish himself, as I am, it must have taken the utmost personal courage and ability to focus on the task at hand, to be able to professionally interview physician after physician who had succumbed to the Nazi demands of compliance. No wonder he discovered the process of mental doubling, being able to mentally dissociate destructive behavior in one situation from loving in another, for example in being both a concentration camp commandant and coming home with loving behavior to family.

From this and other social psychiatric research, it came clear that physicians were vulnerable to give up their medical ethics to put other values first, in this case the government and themselves. In more modern times, we also witnessed some of that same succumbing of vulnerability in the Society Union in the 1960s and ’70s, and now even in the physician support of for-profit managed care in the United States where profits trump quality of care, as I described in my 1997 book The Ethical Way: Challenges & Solutions for Managed Behavioral Healthcare.

As time went on, I tried to hear him speak whenever and wherever I could. My most personal opportunity to do that came when he was so appropriately selected for the first annual Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry on May 7, 2012, not long after the publication of his memoir, “Witness to an Extreme Century;” I reviewed that book for Psychiatric Times on December 11, 2011. I was nervously honored to help introduce him for the award. What I most recall is finding out that ,when he was at home on Sunday mornings, he routinely made creamy scrambled eggs for his family, a favorite of mine also. If anything showed his everyday humanity, that was it. I hope I paid off some of my career debt to him when I received the same award, now called the Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award, in 2024.

No surprise that as time went on he became an activist in addressing the dangers of climate change, as summarized in his 2017 book The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival. I had become a climate activist too and, of course, learned from him once again along the dangerous way.

As psychiatrists, and what I often share with the public, too, is that we by necessity have to pay more attention to the vulnerabilities of human nature for psychiatric disorders, as well as for the destructive behavior and thoughts we are capable of. Most people and leaders of societal institutions would rather ignore that side of humanity. As a consequence, we are often left out of community and governmental opportunities to provide psychological insights to challenging and harmful situations.

There are many lessons that Bob has left for us in his writings and behavior that can help us deal with what I have called our social psychopathologies, including cultish control over our freedom of mind that we can witness right now in the United States and elsewhere in the world. His ongoing research not only explained the worst that we humans and physicians are capable of, but thereby what we are morally required and capable to work on to lift us out of our self-imposed dangers.

His life was a blessing.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.