The other thing that happened was my last military assignment – this was in the air force; I had enlisted in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the air force so I was never in any kind of violent combat. Robert Jay Lifton Read Quote
Sometimes it’s said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category. Robert Jay Lifton Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Robert Jay Lifton Read Quote
Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother’s parents were very steeped in. Robert Jay Lifton Read Quote
I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war. Robert Jay Lifton Read Quote
