The analyst as witness, historian and activist: A conversation with Robert Jay Lifton

Renowned psychiatrist and social activist Robert Jay Lifton considers his life and career in a conversation with two psychoanalysts. Looking back on the major early influences on his psychoanalytically informed ideas and research methods, Lifton talks about his analytic training, his later involvement with the Wellfleet group, most particularly Erik Erikson, and his experience as a psychiatrist in Japan and China in the post–World War II period of “American triumphalism.” Lifton discusses some of his major concepts in relation to a psychoanalytic perspective, including his notions of “ideological totalism” and “survivor guilt and mission,” and the power that ideology and group pressures have in a particular historical context to transform individual identity and psychology.