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.

In his later work Lifton has focused on defining the type of change to which totalism is opposed for which he coined the term the protean self. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners Simon & Schuster (New York City) 1973. (With Eric Chivian Susanna Chivian and John E.

He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory. Robert Jay Lifton (born May 16 1926) is an American psychiatrist and author chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of war and political violence and for his theory of thought reform.