Yes, I have been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.- Robert Jay Lifton
When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.
What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it.
The other thing that happened was my last military assignment - this was in the air force; I had enlisted in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the air force so I was never in any kind of violent combat.
That is, we are bombarded by all kinds of images and influences and we have to fend some of them off if we are to take in any of them, or to carry through just our ordinary day's work, or really deepen whatever we have to do or say.
Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.
One reason that I embarked on a study of Nazi doctors was that in this personal journey, I had the feeling increasingly that I did want to do a Holocaust study and that increasingly I wanted it to be of perpetrators, which I thought was more needed.
It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.
It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I have never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.
I am a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.
I struggled with each of these studies and I was uncertain about what they meant, and often confused, and then I tried to put together what I was seeing.
I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological dimension rather early on.
I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.
I do not have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.
I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting - this thought reform process - in the military.
