Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and psychohistorian who wrote acclaimed books on war, violence, and the emotional cost of humankind’s capacity for inhumanity, died Thursday at his Truro home. His son-in-law, Daniel Itzkovitz, confirmed Dr. Lifton’s death. He was 99.
Dr. Lifton’s best-known book, “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima” (1968), won the National Book Award. As author or editor, he wrote or contributed to another 30. Even at his advanced age, Dr. Lifton remained intellectually active and politically engaged. In June, The New York Times published a letter from him critical of Donald Trump.
No armchair theorist, Dr. Lifton conducted more than 70 interviews for “Death in Life.” For “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” (1986), he interviewed more than two dozen SS physicians and others, as well as numerous survivors of the death camps.
The title of Dr. Lifton’s memoirs was “Witness to an Extreme Century” (2011). Bearing witness to the psychic consequences of extreme events was his life’s work.
In addition to Hiroshima and the Holocaust, Dr. Lifton wrote books about Chinese thought reform (more commonly referred to as “brainwashing”), Mao Zedong, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the difficulties faced by Vietnam veterans, terrorism, the psychic effects of the prospect of nuclear war, the violent Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, and capital punishment. The title of his final book, “Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the COVID-19 Pandemic” (2023) gives a sense of the sweep of his concerns.
A founding member of the Nobel Prize–awarded International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Dr. Lifton variously taught at the Washington School of Psychiatry, Yale, Harvard, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Columbia.
Among concepts developed by Dr. Lifton were “malignant normality,” describing how evil behavior can come to be accepted or normalized; “psychic numbness,” for the way people cope with trauma, suffering, and threats on an overwhelming scale; “doubling,” for the human capacity to compartmentalize evil behavior within otherwise-unexceptionable daily life; and the “protean self,” describing the human capacity for change and resilience in the face of a threatening external world.
Dr. Lifton’s abiding subject was the collision between the self and larger, darker political realities. Although he preferred the term “historically minded psychiatrist” to psychohistorian, he was a cofounder of the Wellfleet Psychohistory Group.
Dr. Lifton described the psychohistorian “as a clinician [seeking] to identify psychological experiences of people caught up in historical storms.”
The other founders of the group were the psychiatrist and biographer Erik Erikson, a mentor of Dr. Lifton’s, and the MIT historian Bruce Mazlish. The annual group meeting started in 1966, drawing a wide range of participants, including Robert Coles, Daniel Ellsberg, Howard Zinn, and Norman Mailer.
That same year Dr. Lifton and his wife moved to the Cape. Betty Jean Lifton, an author and prominent advocate for open adoption, died in 2010.
Dr. Lifton attributed part of the group’s longevity (the final meeting was in 2015) to its location. “Once you come here, the place gets a hold on you,” he told a Globe reporter in 2014. “There’s something about the ocean and the dunes that lends our discussions a cosmic dimension.”
Robert Jay Lifton was born in Brooklyn on May 16, 1926. His father, Harold A. Lifton, was a businessman. His mother was Ciel (Roth) Lifton. In his autobiography, he described a “Jewish Huck Finn childhood,” playing stickball in the streets and sneaking into ball games at Ebbets Field.
A precocious student, Dr. Lifton won a scholarship to Cornell University at 16 and earned his medical degree from New York Medical College in 1948. After his internship and residency, he served as a psychiatrist with the Air Force from 1951 to 1953.
Dr. Lifton was stationed in Korea and Japan, directly exposing him to war and its aftermath. He credited that experience with influencing his interest in conflict and violence. In Korea, he treated former prisoners who’d been “brainwashed” by their Communist captors. That led to his first book, “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China” (1961).
After the publication of “Death in Life,” Dr. Lifton became active in opposing the Vietnam War. His involvement with returning veterans inspired his book “Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans — Neither Victims nor Executioners” (1973), and led to him and a colleague, Leonard Neff, successfully advocating for post-traumatic stress disorder being added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Dr. Lifton’s focus on daunting subjects earned him the nickname “Dr. Hiroshima” from his Yale students. “I was a bit like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner,” he wrote in his autobiography, “a compulsive witness to horror who insisted that any stranger he met hear out his tale.” He noted that his daughter, Natasha, once asked him, “‘Dad, have you ever considered taking up more cheerful subjects?”
In fact, Dr. Lifton had a hobby, cartooning. He published two books of his work, showing birds in conversation. His drawing line was somewhat reminiscent of James Thurber’s. While the cartoons were humorous, they were not far removed from his professional concerns. “Are you alive?” one bird asks another. The answer is a question: “How do you tell?”
In an email Thursday, Natasha Lifton noted that her father “was a passionate Dodgers and Knicks fan his entire life. He never missed watching a game, and his grandson would often join him.
“He loved to watch the sun rise and set with his partner, Nancy, in their home in Truro.”
Asked if there was a particular book or achievement Dr. Lifton took the most satisfaction in, Natasha Lifton wrote, “while he took great pride in his accomplishments as a writer and an activist, during the last few years of his life my father’s appreciation and love for his family intensified.”
In addition to his daughter, of Cambridge, Dr. Lifton leaves his partner, Nancy Rosenblum; a son, Ken, of Wilmington; and four grandchildren.
A date for a memorial service has yet to be determined.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.