Political Mind Special - Surviving Our Catastrophes. Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the COVID-19 Pandemic

A Political Mind Special – Surviving Our Catastrophes. Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Prof Robert Jay Lifton in discussion with David Morgan

Tuesday 23rd April 2024
8:15pm - 9:45pm BST

These discussions will be delivered remotely via Zoom.
Recording available for 1 week

How to Maintain Hope in an Age of Catastrophe

Robert Jay Lifton will be talking about what seventy years of studying both the victims and the perpetrators of horror has taught him about the human will to survive.

Dr Robert Jay Lifton has written over twenty books and edited eight others, including many seminal works in the field such as the National Book Award–winning Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, The Los Angelos Times Book Prize–winning The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, and the National Book Award–nominated Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China; The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation; Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir; and more recently, The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival and Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry. 

He is a founding member of the Nobel Prize–winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and has also been a strong voice in opposing American wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. 

He has been a research psychiatrist and teacher at the Washington School of Psychiatry, Yale University, Harvard University, the City University of New York, and Columbia University. 

He convened the Wellfleet Psychohistory Group in 1966, and organized and hosted its annual meetings at his home on Cape Cod for 50 years until 2015. Over the years participants have included Charles Strozier, Kai Erikson, Peter Brooks, Raul Hilberg, Stuart Hampshire, Norman Mailer, Daniel Ellsberg, Howard Zinn, Jonathan Schell, Norman Birnbaum, Judith Herman, Harvey Cox, Ashis Nandy, James Carroll, and Margret Brenman, among many others. 

Please note: This lecture will be recorded and available for 1 week to all registered participants. This is to allow international attendees to enjoy the event at a more appropriate time in their time zone. After this time, the recording will no longer be available.

REFUND POLICY: Tickets are fully refundable until 14 days before the lecture, after which time no refunds will be issued. For full series bookings, tickets are fully refundable 14 days before the first lecture in the series.

Concession tickets are available, for students, candidates and trainees. Please email outreach@iopa.org.uk if you are unsure if you qualify for a concession ticket.

Views and opinions expressed by speakers are their own and do not represent the views or opinions of the Institute, event organisers or other speakers. We expect delegates to respect the confidentiality of clinical material discussed in our events. The content must not be recorded, conveyed or disseminated in any format and participants must not share access to the event with non-registered participants..