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In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.

Robert Jay Lifton

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Robert Jay Lifton
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 16
Historian
Peace Activist
Psychiatrist
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
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Responsible
Doubling
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Live
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More quotes by Robert Jay Lifton

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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.
Robert Jay Lifton
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As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.
Robert Jay Lifton
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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.
Robert Jay Lifton
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David Frankfurter's valuable, well-written study takes us to the far reaches of demonology. In documenting the harm done by labeling others evil, he poses a challenge to those of us who believe, however regretfully, in the necessity of the concept.
Robert Jay Lifton
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And I was troubled by the heavy-handed prose of so much psychoanalytic writing, which seemed drowned in its own concepts.
Robert Jay Lifton
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The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its participants. Revolving around it are issues most decisive to thought reform's outcome.
Robert Jay Lifton
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Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.
Robert Jay Lifton
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With the nuclear threat we know that if sufficient weapons are used, human civilization - all of humankind - could be extinguished literally by nuclear winter. So we have to see ourselves as part of the ultimate human group, just as we have to do with global warming.
Robert Jay Lifton
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And I managed to arrange to get some research support and to stay in Hong Kong for another year and a half, interviewing people coming out of China, both Westerners and Chinese. And that was my first real research study on thought reform or so-called brainwashing.
Robert Jay Lifton
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Sometimes its said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.
Robert Jay Lifton
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But when I went to Hiroshima and began to study or just listen to people's descriptions of their work, it was quite clear they were talking about death all the time, about people dying all around them, about their own fear of death.
Robert Jay Lifton
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But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.
Robert Jay Lifton
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Trump has a mind that in many ways is always under duress, because he's always seeking to be accepted, loved. He sees himself as constantly victimized by others and by the society, from which he sees himself as fighting back. So there's always an intensity to his destructive behavior that could contribute to his false beliefs.
Robert Jay Lifton
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I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.
Robert Jay Lifton
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The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
Robert Jay Lifton
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There is a movement of more people recognizing global warming as a danger, recognizing the human contribution to global warming, recognizing the necessity for doing something about it. So there's a trend in that direction, and that trend is consistent with what a climate swerve - which is, as we're both saying, a mindset.
Robert Jay Lifton
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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.
Robert Jay Lifton
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I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.
Robert Jay Lifton
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It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.
Robert Jay Lifton
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I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.
Robert Jay Lifton