"What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it"
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Lifton’s sentence has the wary, methodical humility of a clinician who knows his raw material is other people’s suffering. The key move is his quiet admission of selection: “I chose to study them.” It’s a small phrase that surfaces the power relationship at the heart of trauma research. These aren’t abstract “subjects”; they’re people already marked by “duress,” made legible to history through catastrophe. Lifton is acknowledging that the archive of modern psychology is often an archive of extreme experience.
The context matters: Lifton’s career is built around Hiroshima survivors, Vietnam veterans, former prisoners of war, and victims of coercive “thought reform.” In each case, the individual is not only impacted by a historical event but can be implicated in producing it - soldiers, political actors, functionaries, even perpetrators. That dual framing (“as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it”) is the line’s moral engine. It refuses the comforting binary of innocent victim versus distant system, insisting that history runs through ordinary psyches in both directions.
Subtext: Lifton is defending a particular kind of psychology - not laboratory-clean, but historically entangled. He’s also hinting at his signature idea that trauma is not just damage; it’s a lens that reveals how societies manufacture violence and how people adapt, comply, resist, or break. The sentence reads like an origin story for an ethics: if you’re going to study human beings at their most exposed, you’d better be honest about why you’re looking, and what your looking might cost.
The context matters: Lifton’s career is built around Hiroshima survivors, Vietnam veterans, former prisoners of war, and victims of coercive “thought reform.” In each case, the individual is not only impacted by a historical event but can be implicated in producing it - soldiers, political actors, functionaries, even perpetrators. That dual framing (“as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it”) is the line’s moral engine. It refuses the comforting binary of innocent victim versus distant system, insisting that history runs through ordinary psyches in both directions.
Subtext: Lifton is defending a particular kind of psychology - not laboratory-clean, but historically entangled. He’s also hinting at his signature idea that trauma is not just damage; it’s a lens that reveals how societies manufacture violence and how people adapt, comply, resist, or break. The sentence reads like an origin story for an ethics: if you’re going to study human beings at their most exposed, you’d better be honest about why you’re looking, and what your looking might cost.
Quote Details
| Topic | Tough Times |
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