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.

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.