Author: Robert Jay Lifton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9781416597186
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
On a fateful day in the spring of 1954 Robert Jay Lifton, a young American psychiatrist just discharged from service in the Korean War, decided to stay in Hong Kong rather than return home—changing his life plans entirely—so that he could continue work that had enthralled him, interviewing people subjected to Chinese thought reform. He had plunged into uncharted territory in probing the far reaches of the human psyche, as he would repeatedly in the years ahead, and his Hong Kong research provided the first understanding of the insidious process that came to be known as brainwashing. From that day in Hong Kong forward, Lifton has probed into some of the darkest episodes of human history, bearing his unique form of psychological witness to the sources and consequences of collective violence and trauma, as well as to our astonishing capacity for resilience. In this long-awaited memoir, Lifton charts the adventurous and constantly surprising course of his fascinating life journey, a journey that took him from what a friend of his called a “Jewish Huck Finn childhood” in Brooklyn to friendships with many of the most influential intellectuals, writers, and artists of our time—from Erik Erikson, David Riesman, and Margaret Mead, to Howard Zinn and Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kunitz, Kenzaburo Oe, and Norman Mailer. In his remarkable study of Hiroshima survivors, he explored the human consequences of nuclear weapons, and then went on to uncover dangerous forms of attraction to their power in the spiritual disease he calls nuclearism. During riveting face-to-face interviews with Nazi doctors, he illuminated the reversal of healing and killing in ordinary physicians who had been socialized to Nazi evil. With Vietnam veterans he helped create unprecedented “rap groups” in which much was revealed about what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, helping veterans draw upon their experience for valuable, even prophetic, insights about atrocity and war. As a pioneer in psychohistory, Lifton’s encounters with the consequences of cruelty and destructiveness led him to become a passionate social activist, lending a powerful voice of conscience to the suppressed truths of the Vietnam War and the dangers of nuclear weapons. Written with the warmth of spirit—along with the humor and sense of absurdity—that have made Lifton a beloved friend and teacher to so many, Witness to an Extreme Century is a moving and deeply thought-provoking story of one man’s extraordinary commitment to looking into the abyss of evil in order to help us move beyond it.
Author: Gretchen Garner
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801871672
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
In documenting this transformation in American photography, Disappearing Witness forcefully rethinks the history of photography itself.
Author: Robert Jay Lifton
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620973480
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
Longlisted for the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing "Well worth the read. . . . [A] prescient handoff to the next generation of scholars." —The Washington Post From "one of the world’s foremost thinkers" (Bill Moyers), a profound, hopeful, and timely call for an emerging new collective consciousness to combat climate change Over his long career as witness to an extreme twentieth century, National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, Lifton writes, "presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind," what he describes as the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward climate sanity. Thanks to the power of corporate-funded climate denialists and the fact that "with its slower, incremental sequence, [climate change] lends itself less to the apocalyptic drama," a large swathe of humanity has numbed themselves to the reality of climate change. Yet Lifton draws a message of hope from the Paris climate meeting of 2015 where representatives of virtually all nations joined in the recognition that we are a single species in deep trouble. Here, Lifton suggests in this lucid and moving book that recalls Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell, was evidence of how we might call upon the human mind—"our greatest evolutionary asset"—to translate a growing species awareness—or "climate swerve"—into action to sustain our habitat and civilization.
Author: Carolyn Forché
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393347664
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 672
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Book Description
A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.
Author: Eric Kaufmann
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847651941
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families. Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox may achieve majority status over their liberal counterparts by mid-century. Islamist Muslims have won the culture war in much of the Muslim world, and their success provides a glimpse of what awaits the Christian West and Israel. Based on a wealth of demographic research, considering questions of multiculturalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises - and what this means for the future of western modernity.
Author: Richard Wheeler
Publisher: Stackpole Books
ISBN: 0811741567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
From the events that led to the clash at Gettysburg in July 1863 to the retreat of Robert E. Lee's defeated Confederates, Richard Wheeler uses the words of participants--both Northern and Southern--to bring one of the Civil War's bloodiest, most pivotal battles to life.
Author: Judith L. Alpert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317401689
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Trauma is one of the hottest contemporary topics within psychoanalysis, whilst many psychoanalysts are increasingly interested in applying their skills outside the traditional setting of the consulting room, especially in response to disasters, wars and serious social issues. Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community seeks to correct the misconceptions of what analysts do and how they do it and debunk the stereotype of psychoanalysts stuck in their offices plying their wares on the worried well. Bringing together a group of eminent contributors, this volume considers how psychoanalysis may best be expanded to help in social and community settings, to understand these wider issues from a psychoanalytic perspective, and provide clear clinical guidance and clinical examples of how best to work in a wide variety of non-traditional ways. The innovative work featured includes taking testimony, in-situ interviewing, documentary film-making, social activism, ethnic and political conflict mediation, on-site workshops as well as direct clinical interventions. The reader is taken from the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the Vietnam War to the Balkan Wars and Palestinian-Israeli conflict, from the political violence of the disappeared in Argentina to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, and from chronic conditions of poverty in India to racism in the post-Jim Crow South. Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and anyone studying on the increasing number of trauma courses being given today in universities. Lay readers with an interest in the traumatic fallout as a result of chronic conditions or the myriad disasters that occur globally will find this book illuminating. For the non-specialist mental health professional, including non-analytic psychotherapists, social workers and others who work in the community, this book offers concrete advice on dealing with intervention issues such as entry and integration, as well as on management of multiple and complex trauma in a non-clinical setting.
Author: Adam Montgomery
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 077354996X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Canadian soldiers returning home have always been changed by war and peacekeeping, frequently in harmful but unseen ways. The Invisible Injured explores the Canadian military’s continuous battle with psychological trauma from 1914 to 2014 to show that while public understanding and sympathy toward affected soldiers has increased, myths and stigmas have remained. Whether diagnosed with shell shock, battle exhaustion, or post-traumatic stress disorder, Canadian troops were at the mercy of a military culture that promoted stoic and manly behaviour while shunning weakness and vulnerability. Those who admitted to mental difficulties were often ostracized, released from the military, and denied a pension. Through interviews with veterans and close examination of accounts and records on the First World War, the Second World War, and post-Cold War peacekeeping missions, Adam Montgomery outlines the intimate links between the military, psychiatrists, politicians, and the Canadian public. He demonstrates that Canadians’ views of trauma developed alongside the nation’s changing role on the international stage – from warrior nation to peacekeeper. While Canadians took pride in their military’s accomplishments around the globe, soldiers who came back haunted by their experiences were often ignored. Utilizing a wide range of historical sources and a frank approach, The Invisible Injured is the first book-length history of trauma in the Canadian military over the past century. It is a timely and provocative study that points to past mistakes and outlines new ideas of courage and determination.
Author: Nadia Abu El-Haj
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788738446
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Americans have long been asked to support the troops and care for veterans’ psychological wounds. Who, though, does this injunction serve? As acclaimed scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj argues here, in the American public’s imagination, the traumatized soldier stands in for destructive wars abroad, with decisive ramifications in the post-9/11 era. Across the political spectrum the language of soldier trauma is used to discuss American warfare, producing a narrative in which traumatized soldiers are the only acknowledged casualties of war, while those killed by American firepower are largely sidelined and forgotten. In this wide-ranging and fascinating study of the meshing of medicine, science, and politics, Abu El-Haj explores the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder and the history of its medical diagnosis. While antiwar Vietnam War veterans sought to address their psychological pain even as they maintained full awareness of their guilt and responsibility for perpetrating atrocities on the killing fields of Vietnam, by the 1980s, a peculiar convergence of feminist activism against sexual violence and Reagan’s right-wing “war on crime” transformed the idea of PTSD into a condition of victimhood. In so doing, the meaning of Vietnam veterans’ trauma would also shift, moving away from a political space of reckoning with guilt and complicity to one that cast them as blameless victims of a hostile public upon their return home. This is how, in the post-9/11 era of the Wars on Terror, the injunction to “support our troops,” came to both sustain US militarism and also shields American civilians from the reality of wars fought ostensibly in their name. In this compelling and crucial account, Nadia Abu El-Haj challenges us to think anew about the devastations of the post-9/11 era.
Author: Gary D. Jaworski
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666936812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
Erving Goffman and the Cold War presents a provocative new reading of the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. Instead of viewing him as a “marginal man” or academic outsider, Gary D. Jaworski explores Goffman as a social theorist of the Cold War. Goffman was deeply connected to both the ethos of his time and to a range of cold warriors and their critics, such as Edward A. Shils, Thomas C. Schelling, and the researchers on “brainwashing” associated with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, among others. Chapters on loyalty, betrayal, secrecy, strategy, interrogation, provocation, and aggression concretely illustrate these connections. Erving Goffman and the Cold War shows that Goffman was much more than a microsociologist of mundane life; he was a perceptive analyst of the Cold War America.
