Robert Jay Lifton Psychologist Quotations

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.

Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.

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.

That is, we are bombarded by all kinds of images and influences and we have to fend some of them off if we're 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.

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.

My father in particular was a progressive person, a person who made his way in this society by attending the City College of New York.

And so I had an early but somewhat vague interest in both medicine and in what was to become, in my mind and in my work, psychiatry.