Trauma in the Soviet Union and Beyond

I recently mentioned how much I have learned and continue to learn from Robert Jay Lifton. This short note is a supplement to that, drawing your attention to a book which I have just finished: Beyond Invisible Walls: the Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma, eds. Jacob D. Lindy and R.J. Lifton and  (Routledge, 2001).

This is a unique collection both in its origins and its contents--as well as structure. The book brought together clinicians from the former Soviet Union (though Ukraine is a major absence here), including Russia and Armenia, as well as other Eastern Bloc countries, including Romania (easily the most harrowing chapter in the book) and Eastern Germany. Clinicians discussed not only particular cases and their history, but also the history of psychology and psychiatry in the Soviet context, and how often those disciplines were used and abused for political purposes--e.g., "enemies of the revolution" were bogusly diagnosed as "psychotic" (etc.) and drugged and hospitalized against their will.

The chapters on Romania, Armenia especially, and Russia slightly, all touch briefly on the role that Orthodox Christianity plays and played in

In addition, perhaps the most outstanding feature of the book is that all the cases of individual patients are told by clinicians, and then discussed by others, with the counter-transference being front and centre and often given as much space as the case history. Normally this would be bad clinical practice, but what becomes clear is that even "professionals" like therapists were so badly caught up in and themselves traumatized by the Soviet experience that any attempt at working with patients immediately raised floods of issues in themselves.

Lacking in most cases remotely adequate access to supervision or even to other therapists whom they could trust, these therapists also engaged in the dissociation and splitting so characteristic of traumatized people. Since so much was forbidden in former USSR, inhibiting patients from openly sharing all details, the counter-transference becomes even more important as it raises things the pt. cannot or will not talk about not just individually but collectively. Thus the counter-transference is not just personal to therapist, but expresses something of what Jung famously called the collective unconscious. As a result, as Jacob Lindy’s chapter, “Invisible Walls,” notes, clinicians and survivors both are thrust into the role of understanding the “historical implications” of the trauma under question, and clinicians “find themselves in the role of psychohistorian, for the stories of trauma often contain information about our times that is not otherwise available” (197).

What is clearly available, however, thanks to this book and more recent research, is an awareness--Lindy again--that "in Russia and throughout Eastern Europe, the impact of political trauma has been so pervasive for three generations as to have affected nearly every family” (198). That trauma, though, is vast and still poorly understood, as Lifton notes in his conclusion: Soviet “trauma operates on many levels and its complexities defy our ordinary categories. It lacks the structure and limits of a discrete disaster such as an earthquake….The effects reverberate over years or even decades….What we are discussing here is on the order of a sustained catastrophe that never goes away.”

Part of the challenge Lifton sees in conclusion is that in the West both the clinical categories of PTSD and some semi-literate and popular acceptance of the same, has gained a foothold in last 30 years, but not so in East: “the concept of PTSD as a legitimate medical condition does not match easily with the stoic, suppressive, minimizing adaptations to trauma and loss” Part of my lecture for next June will be to tackle this issue and to suggest that Eastern Christian spiritual, theological, and liturgical resources have much to offer.

To do so, I will be drawing on another book just finished--about which more another time: Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery. The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. This book, rightly, is a landmark and has been translated into multiple languages. It is pellucid in its clarity and cogency, which is not a small thing if you know how many books in the social sciences are so atrociously written. 

Losing Reality and Gaining Zealotry

Robert Jay Lifton is one of those outstanding figures who has managed across the many decades of his richly productive and insightful career to bring together clinical insights with political processes and problems--to say nothing of metaphysical, religious, and theological issues. I previously noted how powerful his memoirs are, and I plan on re-reading them again soon. I'm also making my way through his Nazi Doctors after first picking it up more than twenty years ago.

Next week I will start a book he edited with Jacob Lindy, Beyond Invisible Walls: The Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma. This is part of the research I am doing for a lecture on trauma and Russian Christianity after communism, which I'm giving next June in Velehrad.

Though well into his 90s now, Lifton is not resting on his laurels. Indeed, he just released another book, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry (The New Press, 2019), 240pp.

This book, the publisher says, offers

A definitive account of the psychology of zealotry, from a National Book Award winner and a leading authority on the nature of cults, political absolutism, and mind control.

In this unique and timely volume Robert Jay Lifton, the National Book Award–winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual proposes a radical idea: that the psychological relationship between extremist political movements and fanatical religious cults may be much closer than anyone thought. Exploring the most extreme manifestations of human zealotry, Lifton highlights an array of leaders—from Mao to Hitler to the Japanese apocalyptic cult leader Shōkō Asahara to Donald Trump—who have sought the control of human minds and the ownership of reality.

Lifton has spent decades exploring psychological extremism. His pioneering concept of the “Eight Deadly Sins” of ideological totalism—originally devised to identify “brainwashing” (or “thought reform”) in political movements—has been widely quoted in writings about cults, and embraced by members and former members of religious cults seeking to understand their experiences.

In Losing Reality Lifton makes clear that the apocalyptic impulse—that of destroying the world in order to remake it in purified form—is not limited to religious groups but is prominent in extremist political movements such as Nazism and Chinese Communism, and also in groups surrounding Donald Trump. Lifton applies his concept of “malignant normality” to Trump’s efforts to render his destructive falsehoods a routine part of American life. But Lifton sees the human species as capable of “regaining reality” by means of our “protean” psychological capacities and our ethical and political commitments as “witnessing professionals.”

Lifton weaves together some of his finest work with extensive new commentary to provide vital understanding of our struggle with mental predators. Losing Reality is a book not only of stunning scholarship, but also of huge relevance for these troubled times.

Raphael Lemkin and the Origins of "Genocide"

I noted its appearance in 2013, but only recently had a chance to read it myself. It is an odd book in some ways, reflecting an odd life too abruptly ended after enduring what I could only regard has terribly shabby treatment. That life is portrayed in this book: Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, Donna-Lee Frieze, ed., (Yale UP, 2013), 328pp.

It seems to be the fate of some men that their enormously important contributions to intellectual history and human civilization are not recognized until after their deaths, when our ability to repay debts to them is obviated. Such was the case with Lemkin, to whom Eastern Christians--notably beginning with the Armenians in 1915, but including also Assyrian Christians (also in 1915), Ukrainians (1932-33 in the Holodomor), and others--owe a very great deal indeed. Beginning with the Armenians, they and other Eastern Christians have been on the front-lines of some of the worst mass atrocities of the last century. But it was only in the aftermath of the Holocaust that the term "genocide" was coined, and the story of how that came to be is told in part by the man who came up with that term in this newly published autobiography:

About this book we are told:

Among the greatest intellectual heroes of modern times, Raphael Lemkin lived an extraordinary life of struggle and hardship, yet altered international law and redefined the world’s understanding of group rights. He invented the concept and word “genocide” and propelled the idea into international legal status. An uncommonly creative pioneer in ethical thought, he twice was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.   Although Lemkin died alone and in poverty, he left behind a model for a life of activism, a legacy of major contributions to international law, and—not least—an unpublished autobiography. Presented here for the first time is his own account of his life, from his boyhood on a small farm in Poland with his Jewish parents, to his perilous escape from Nazi Europe, through his arrival in the United States and rise to influence as an academic, thinker, and revered lawyer of international criminal law.

About this book, Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, author perhaps most famously of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide (whose own autobiography I discussed here) has this to say:

We have studied much about the mentality of those who perpetrate genocide but know little about that of the man who named the crime and did most to combat it. Raphael Lemkin was one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century. In this stirring memoir Lemkin tells us how he combined his experiences as a Polish-Jewish survivor of the Nazis, a legal scholar, and a passionate defender of human rights to articulate a concept that has been all too crucial in our time. Doing that required him to undergo a profound extension of his personal identity that could enable him to apply his ethical imagination to the entire human species. Donna-Lee Frieze has performed a remarkable scholarly task in rescuing a manuscript that might otherwise have been lost, and in meticulously preparing it for a wide reading audience. We encounter a man who, whatever his vulnerabilities and defeats, persists doggedly, courageously, and at considerable personal cost, in a lifelong mission to give international legal status to resisting the most extreme expression of human evil. The entire story is strangely hopeful.

And Peter Balakian, author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response has this to say:

Totally Unofficial is a unique and compelling memoir of the twentieth century. Lemkin’s blend of narrative strategies gives voice, shape, and scope to his remarkable life and large achievement—an achievement that has come to define something essential about our age and the urgency of human rights. In writing about his tireless lifelong efforts to make genocide a crime in international law, Lemkin shows us a rich and textured world, from his flight from Nazi occupied Poland, through northern Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan to the United States, and then to corridors of international political process in Paris, Geneva, and at the U.N. This is essential reading. Donna Frieze has done a remarkable job unearthing it from the archives and bringing it to the world.

This Ghastly Age

I took the train to Washington, DC last week to give a paper on Orthodox-Muslim relations at the fifth annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), a splendid new organization bringing fresh and overdue attention to critical questions often overlooked by too many academics and others today. It was founded in 2007 thanks in significant part to the doyen of Islam scholars in North America, Bernard Lewis (whose memoirs I noted in the summer). (ASMEA, incidentally, is very committed to exploring further the questions, historic and current, of encounters between Islam and Eastern Christianity. Scholars interested in putting a panel together on this theme for next year's conference should contact me.)

It was a long train ride (though quite lovely in parts, seeing the autumnal colors in the rolling hills of West Virginia), and that enabled me to read in one go an eloquent and winsome set of memoirs from Robert Jay Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir (2011). Lifton, a longstanding professor of psychiatry at Yale, has done pioneering work in the fields of social psychology and what he came to call "psychohistory." I discovered Lifton fifteen years ago through his most (justly) famous work The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide. Lifton wrote another work that also is of use to Eastern Christians (especially in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus) trying to understand what they lived through under communist persecution and oppression: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China. 

Lifton is a unique personality, and not only because of his important and original work in the aforementioned areas and others (including a study of the survivors of the Hiroshima bombing). What shines through his memoirs is an elegant humanism and graciousness of spirit made all the more impressive by the fact that he examined people and events of ineffable horror. His interviews alone with the Nazi doctors would probably have been too much to handle for other people, but not Lifton. His capacity to look at evil (a term he unapologetically adopts, even if he explicitly eschews its theological or metaphysical overtones) and not succumb to despair is remarkable in one who describes himself as a Jewish atheist. That unflinching recognition of evil is bound up with an equally admirable refusal to demonize people, and an acutely uncomfortable awareness that goodness is mixed with evil in almost every instance. (He does not quote him, but there are clear echos here of Solzhenitsyn's famous aphorism that the line between good and evil runs right through every human heart.) Lifton, originally descended from Russian Jews, is a remarkable example of an academic who was also an activist (especially around the Vietnam War), and a prolific writer of many books in a variety of areas. Now in his late 80s, this may well be his last book, but we will continue to profit from his research and insights for decades to come.