Robert Jay Lifton is a psychiatrist and author of books that probe the connection between his discipline and the study of history. I was introduced to his writing through Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961), a ground-breaking work on "brainwashing" in Communist China. Lifton's memoir focuses on that work and his subsequent studies of Hiroshima, Vietnam veterans, Nazi doctors, and the murderous Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo.
The chapter [Chapter 22 of Thought Reform] was a form of psychological analysis, but I realize now that it was also a statement of personal credo. It was my way of extending the work into the universal frame and at the same time taking an ethical stand toward totalism and its indicators. (p. 68)
Those of us who have worked in the anti-cult field and who have used Chapter 22 in our work owe a great deal to Lifton. I myself used this chapter in each of the interventions and counseling sessions I participated in, involving a total of about fifty clients in various stages of disengagement from their respective cults. This is more than any other single source material.
Lifton has written about Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system, killing thirteen people and injuring many more. He has also written shorter pieces about domestic cults, including an article on the Reverend Jim Jones of the People's Temple that was published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Lifton, however, has yet to do a full-length study of contemporary, homegrown European or North American cults.
In the present work, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir (2011), Lifton seems to suggest by way of his choice of subject matter that in the post-World War II era, Americans and Western Europeans are less likely than others to become psychological abusers. The antiquated and badly formed, but superficially reassuring, argument that he and others have put forward is that full-blown home-grown thought reform as it was seen in revolutionary China is only rarely found in the liberal, democratic West.
This assertion is an important part of a self-serving narrative of the differences between East and West that Westerners like to hear and repeat. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth, given the massive proliferation of cults both religious and secular in the West in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
Furthermore, we're expected to believe that the issues worth discussing relative to destructive cults are few and narrowly defined. We engage in petty academic arguments about how precisely to define a cult. We discuss how to strike a balance between actions taken to stop or slow the implementation of the totalitarian program on the one hand and, on the other, how to maintain and advance the universal freedoms of religion, expression, and association. Note the importance in this way of reasoning of drawing a clear line between the cults and the rest of us, and on insisting that they are somehow different from us.
Margaret Singer, the well-liked and loved anti-cult activist and lecturer in psychology at the University of California, was one of only a handful of professionals contemporary to Lifton who worked in the anti-cult field. Lifton suggests that Singer's fierce opposition to cults was the result of their relentless harassment of her, not of her revulsion to their unconscionable treatment of her clients.
Cultic behavior during the 1970s touched off waves of social hysteria, containing as it did primal struggles between parents and their children, and fanaticism that could lead to fatal violence in the name of absolute virtue. Whatever my concerns about totalism, I did not want to be consumed by that hysteria to a degree that would interfere with my work on Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and later, Nazi doctors. (p. 383)
Lifton suggests that the anti-cult movement is little more than a "primal" fight between parents and their rebellious offspring. This is an old and corrupt technique in debate. You accuse your adversary of being emotional or of being driven by unthinking instincts. This puts you in a superior position of calm reasoning and objectivity. Such a suggestion, however, trivializes a phenomenon that has torn apart tens of thousands of families. That's why it's called totalitarianism — it seeks out, occupies, and destroys all aspects of one's life, be they rational or irrational.
One might try to understand Lifton's thinking as an unfortunate product of the professional training he received in the pre-cult mid-twentieth century. It was then believed that much if not all interpersonal and, by extension, societal conflict was traceable to parenting issues. Such ideas may have once made sense in the polite parlors of the relatively stable European, and later, American capitals. It was Lifton himself, however, who insisted on broadening such discussions to include powerful and pervasive social and historical factors. (p. 29)
I agree that it's usually helpful and often necessary to involve parents in the deinduction process. In the end, however, siblings, friends, and peers often prove even more important than parents to an adult survivor's program of recovery. Deprogramming is never solely about fixing the parent-child relationship, and the participation of parents in the process, while important, is rarely the decisive psychological factor.
All of these criticisms must be seen, however, against the backdrop of Lifton's regular attendance over the years at anti-cult conferences, his willingness to testify on the subject of undue influence at the Patty Hearst trial, and his generosity in taking the time to speak before many constituent groups.
The reasons for his reluctance to step into the exit counseling fray are undoubtedly many. Not the least is that hands-on anti-cult work, while rewarding, is messy, dangerous, and not for the faint of heart. The reason Lifton gives, however, is that as a member of an anti-Vietnam War study group — which he perceived as fringe, but which is probably better described as a mainstream group of liberal academics — any call for government monitoring of groups would have had a negative impact on his ability to express his ideas through his own group.
That is, one cannot call for the monitoring of groups without putting one's own group affiliation at risk. Lifton minimizes the differences between an anti-war discussion or letter-writing campaign and a full-blown leader-worshipping cult. It's ironic that this thinking comes from the man who spelled out in fine and memorable detail the qualitative and quantitative differences between the two environments. It was Lifton who gave us a concise description and definition of destructive groups and a clear method for evaluating them for their potential toxicity.
Lifton said that he didn't want to become distracted from his own work, specifically mentioning the Nazi doctors. I hope that this isn't a form of Holocaust-washing or the playing of a trump cultural or historical card in a game he would otherwise lose.
It's sometimes said that the first speaker to invoke Hitler loses the argument. I would submit, however, that in careful hands the Holocaust can indeed be an instructive point of reference for our understanding of extremist groups and pseudo-religious fanaticism. To this end I would remind Lifton of the statement by Samuel Pisar, a survivor of Auschwitz: "All totalitarian systems are basically the same ugly beast." (Of Blood and Hope, 1980, p. 64) Nazism wasn't the only totalitarian ideology that forced itself with devastating and long-lasting consequences upon eastern and central Europe in the middle decades of the last century.
That is, there's something about toxic and murderous groups and ideologies that transcends time, place, and scale.
I hope we've learned from the Nazi, Stalinist, and Maoist periods to heed the warning signs, and that any attack on human freedom and dignity anywhere is an attack everywhere. No one's rights can be protected until we protect everyone's rights.
It's almost as if what Lifton had learned from his research in Hong Kong could be set aside as he moved on to different projects. This kind of narrow and self-defeating intellectual siloization of knowledge and experience stands in contrast with the successful efforts of anti-cult workers to understand the destructive cult phenomenon more broadly in its own cultural, cross-cultural, and historical contexts.
While it may be possible for academics to isolate or compartmentalize their experiences without losing professional standing, we ex-members of cults have no such luxury. For one thing, we aren't recognized as the professionals that we are. Being a survivor or working with them doesn't necessarily bestow one with a title or a paycheck. For better or worse, our cult experiences will always be an important part of who we are. Some of us have been granted the good fortune to be able to fall away from our once worshipped orthodoxies and again enter the real world.
Try as one may, however, no one can obliterate their past. As someone once said, the past isn't even past. Indeed, only a magically all-powerful thought reform environment would deign to fundamentally remake it.
The academic who believes that bad things happen out there (in Lifton's case, Asia) and not in here (America), and that bad deeds are perpetrated by remote others rather than by oneself or those who live in one's immediate environment, may suffer at worst a disciplinary or programmatic death while interviewing the survivors of home-grown totalism. We cult survivors, on the other hand, have already suffered a literal near-death of the body. It's important to recognize the difference. While the figurative dying-to-self that's required of the cultic true believer may well be a precursor to their literal death, the two aren't the same. That we the walking wounded have lived long enough to claim the title of survivor proves the point.
Far from deadening the senses, a cult experience can intensify one's sensitivity not only to destruction and death but also to renewal and life. Although survivors are often met with little more than a passing curiosity, it's undeniable that they hold a special place in our minds and imaginations. We allow them to be ordinary in many ways, but we're also forced to admit that they know something the rest of us don't. They've been places the rest of us have never been and seen things most of us would prefer never to see. At some level they're fundamentally different from us.
Lifton invokes what amounts to academic executive privilege, the notion that as a detached researcher, he has no need to confront the totalist tendencies within himself, within his peer or social group, or even at large in his own country. A constructive engagement of these important issues remains the most difficult unfinished work for all sides in this debate.
One of the strengths of Thought Reform is that it was published well before most contemporary cults were founded. Notwithstanding my criticisms above, the author's choice not to take much of a public stand against contemporary American cults can be seen counter-intuitively as another strength. Perhaps there is some method to Lifton's choice to remain largely removed from the often superficial, day-to-day, he-said-she-said of what passes for a debate on the nature of closed totalitarian systems in an open, democratic society.
Despite its author's wishes, Thought Reform has taken on a life of its own. Anyone who publishes takes this risk. The work has gone out into the world and accomplished tasks its parent didn't envision and can't control.
If Chapter 22 is now Lifton's adult child, then why shouldn't there be a good, old-fashioned Freudian food fight between them?
Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, 1968
Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism, 1999
Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans — Neither Victims nor Executioners, 1973
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, 1986
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, 1961, reprinted 1989