Lifton, Robert Jay (1926– )

US psychiatrist and author. His main interest throughout his career was to understand and write about how disturbing historical events and processes affect the individual. His best-known writings are in the form of psychohistories, as in Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1968). The way we experience and think about death, our possibilities for the future, and our very place in the world, he argued, has been irrevocably changed by the bombing of Hiroshima.

Lifton was born in New York City. He taught at Yale University (from 1961) and was director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College in New York City (from1985). His other books include Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans – Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986).