Interpreter of Organized Evil

“When I’m very much in demand,” Robert Jay Lifton said, “you know that the world is in trouble.”

It was a joke, of course, but not a joke, for he was standing before an audience of fellow psychiatrists and other therapists who had sought him out as the logical person, indeed, to help them understand what they were now living through.

“He has spent most of his life trying to fathom the unfathomable,” explained Dr. Michael Singer, director of the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute, introducing the 75-year-old Lifton as the man to launch its lecture series Terror and Aftermath: Perspectives on the World Trade Center Tragedy.

Most everyone there knew the details of Lifton’s long interest in atrocities and their survivors: how as a young psychiatrist, in the 1950s, he studied Chinese “Thought Reform,” brainwashing to produce a “psychology of totalism.” He went on to study survivors of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, and Vietnam veterans, and Nazi doctors, and then the Japanese terrorist cult of Aum Shinrikyo, which in 1995 released deadly sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system with the apocalyptic goal of “destroying the world to save it.”

Now the New York therapists were hoping he could explain, “How could this have happened again?” And they were asking not as observers, Singer said, but “now unfortunately, as victims ourselves.”

The group gathered Tuesday night in the auditorium of NYU medical Center, virtually next door to Bellevue Hospital and its chilling “Wall of Prayers,” with the faces of hundreds of people first listed as merely “missing” from the twin towers. Many had been trying to help families of such people, or others who escaped. They were coping, as well, with the new fears of their old patients--and of their own families.

Lifton would, in the course of the evening, offer them insights on the apocalyptic dimension of Osama bin Laden’s movement, and the death anxiety that he sees as he surveys the country, a view into the minds of both perpetrators and targets.

Decades ago, Lipton became part of a group that believed psychological insights could help them better understand historical figures and events. Their leader was Erik Erikson, the Danish painter-turned-analyst who wrote about the stages of life and helped popularize the concept of identity. Erikson also produced books on Martin Luther and Gandhi suggesting how their individual conflicts helped them come up with new ways of thinking, or acting, for millions of others. .

While such “psychohistory” could become reductionist in lesser hands, or even invite parody--Did Hitler become Hitler because he had only one testicle?--Erikson spawned such followers as Robert Coles, with his studies of “Children in Crisis,” and Lifton, who was interested in psychological makeup of entire groups.

Teaching at institutions such as Yale and Harvard, the “Wellfleet Group” would meet to hash out their theories at Lifton’s home on Cape Cod. “We have a long tradition of reflecting on dreadful events,” he says, “in a utopian setting.”

It was there, as well, that he wrote much of his 1999 book on the Japanese cult that killed 11 people in its subway attack, injured several thousand more, and had even bigger plans: to make tons of nerve gas and use crop-dusting helicopters to release it in the major cities of Japan, and perhaps the U.S., setting off world war. In “Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism,” Lifton warned that the events in Japan might signal worse to come.

“Its members can claim the distinction of being the first group in history to combine ultimate fanaticism with ultimate weapons in a project to destroy the world,” he wrote. “The next group of disciples to try might not be quite as small as Aum, or as inept, or as encumbered by its own madness.”

That book did not sell well, however--and Lifton was not delighted with some reviews. It was almost as if he had cried out into a void.

Then came Sept. 11. “I had to go to New York one way or another.”

There were a couple of reasons he had to go. One was that he had written mostly about history. Even his interviews with the Japanese cult members were after the fact, their leader already in prison. What was happening in New York wasn’t history--it was ongoing, and far from finished.

The second reason: He was a New Yorker himself. Lifton grew up in Brooklyn and attended one of the city’s huge high schools, Erasmus Hall, before attending Cornell and New York Medical College. But any New York insularity had ended with his service as an Air Force psychiatrist, stationed in Korea and Japan.

“I really discovered the world from that,” says Lifton, who sometimes made a joke of it after he became a leading protester of the Vietnam War, suggesting in 1974 that the Nobel Prize be awarded to those who resisted serving. He also combined his humor and political views in doodled cartoons, creating conversations between two stick-figure birds, one young, small and naive, the other older, larger and pompous.

Though Lifton first came to public attention while teaching at Harvard, then Yale, from 1956 to 1967, for the past 15 years he had been back in New York, teaching at the City University’s graduate center and at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he headed a Center on Violence and Human Survival.

This summer, however, he sold his apartment on Central Park West and bought a home in Cambridge, Mass., where he will return to Harvard as a senior fellow in the Kennedy School and psychiatry chairman at the medical school.

In New York the media kept calling him, needing a quote or talking head on terrorism, violence or the plight of survivors. But Lifton also wanted to visit ground zero and, he hoped, start speaking to the people whose lives were upended.

He also knew he’d be asked to share what he’d learned over 50 years--and Tuesday’s talk was his first chance to do that in any formal setting, though he quickly cautioned his audience “what I say is really preliminary.” He was still trying to figure it out too.

He went through each of his studies, often not needing to elaborate on its relevance to ongoing events.

The “thought reform” practiced by the Communist Chinese was an illustration of how individuals could be taken over by a cause, pulled into an “all-or-nothing commitment, a polarization of good and evil.” His theories in this area were an extension of Erikson’s observations of how adolescents, in particular, were prone to fanaticism. Finding it hard to form an identity, they opted for one that was rigid, with no fluidity, handed them by a strong leader. That was Lifton’s “psychology of totalism.”

His subsequent studies showed how such a phenomenon could serve the causes of violence--not always committed by strangers.

From Vietnam veterans, especially antiwar veterans, he observed “destroying to save ... you had to destroy a village to save it.” He also saw, as others have before, how ordinary people could find themselves committing atrocities.

From the Nazi doctors, he “came upon the idea of ‘killing to heal,”’ the notion that certain people have to be killed in order to heal the dominant group.

In the Japanese cult, he saw both apocalyptic motivation and desire to take “ownership of death.” The group also engaged in “altruistic murder, in which members felt they bestowed benefits ... a higher form of immortality” on those who killed, that “because the world was so defiled, other than themselves, that this all had to be done.”

Lifton worries that Americans do not understand this apocalyptic dimension of such destructive movements--and that of Osama bin Laden, whom he sees operating on two levels: with easily graspable political grievances, such as about America’s support of Israel or its presence in Saudi Arabia; yet also speaking of cleansing the world of the Great Satan, America, and of Muslims who do not fit in his ideal.

“He talks about those who are defiled, who are nonbelievers ... and they must all be destroyed on behalf of creating a perfect Islamic vision of the world, that is the destruction in the service of spiritual renewal.

“I think people misunderstand Bin Laden when they leave out that dimension, which is amorphous, and without boundaries ... and cannot be encapsulated by specific political goals,” Lifton continued. “There is a mystical dimension of Bin Laden, who envisions Saladin”--the Islamic hero of the Crusades--”coming out of the clouds ... So Bin Laden then has told us about the apocalyptic projects and sometimes we haven’t wanted to hear it.”

He noted that Americans may be skeptical of such pious pronunciations when they learn that the hijackers went to strip clubs or malls. “I’m not certain, but it sounds to me like a form of what I call ‘Doubling,”’ he said, “the formation of a functionally second self, so it is true that some of them could drink and make merry and go bowling, and do things that ordinary Americans did . . . so removed from the suicidal martyr’s mission . . . It’s the kind of double life that spies can often live.”

In understanding the impact on Americans, he turns to the survivors of Hiroshima. Though the devastation there was far greater, “we heard people [in New York] describe the feeling that it seemed like a nuclear attack, like a nuclear bomb had gone off. It struck him that the term used, “ground zero,” was “a nuclear weapons term.”

“In my experience, survivors immediately experience a sense of anxiety, or a death-haunted image [stemming from] the death immersion or the death encounter ... which can last for a very long time. And the country is now infused with death anxiety ... most visceral in those at the heart of the disaster but extending out to the whole country and bound up in fear of repetition of disaster ... fear of new terrorism.”

He’s been made aware of such fears in a personal way. His two children both have shared their fears for the future of their own young daughters.

So he is worried, first about them, and the knowledge that this fear is a real one, given “the realistic possibly of further terrorism.” But he fears the American response, too. For while “survivor anger is understandable, quite human,” he does not believe that anger should drive policy. Though speculating that it will be impossible to ever satisfy the apocalyptic groups, he still hopes for some “minimally violent means of achieving some form of justice ... and not accelerate the world’s violence.”

While agreeing that “we should do everything we can to bring the perpetrators to justice,” he cautions that such groups can spur a response that accepts their “totalistic” vision of the struggle--as with the initial naming of the American counter-effort as “Operation Infinite Justice.”

When it was time for questions, the shrinks asked briefly about helping patients in therapy. But mostly they spoke like any Americans, passionately debating the politics of the moment.

One questioner wanted to point out the legitimate complaints about America that might have spurred the attack. “Is the U.S. taking more than its share of the world?” he asked.

“A man like Bin Laden can have very real grievances as well as an apocalyptic vision,” Lifton responded. “If you dropped a cruise missile [on him], you wouldn’t stop Islamic terrorism.”

Another question: After half a century of studying such phenomena, what about the past month took him by surprise?

“I insisted in [the 1999] book that this could exist here,” Lifton said. “Nevertheless, I was shocked. I wasn’t free from this invulnerability ... and of course I was totally surprised by the method,” the use of planes as battering rams.

“We’re all in the middle of something that we can’t fully grasp or evaluate. We’re unable to extricate ourselves sufficiently to take much distance from it. I have been trying to connect it with other extreme events I’ve studied. But having said that, we realize we’re not free of this. It contains us, it threatens us. And we’re all making inner decisions about what we do with it. I’m thinking constantly about it--and making notes.”

He and a colleague at the Center on Human Violence, Charles B. Strozier, have already begun the $130,000 research project to interview in depth, and over time, people who directly observed the unfolding drama.

Lifton predicted he would be back in New York a lot.

There’s one thing he hasn’t had time for.

“I haven’t done a single cartoon since Sept. 11,” he said.