A Night with a Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Last Tuesday I attended an event hosted by the Harvard School where Dr. Robert Jay Lifton was speaking on, "Embracing Evil: The Psychology of Nazi Doctors". He wrote, among his many books, he Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (which won a National Book Award). Dr. Lifton won a Nobel Peace Prize after founding the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. 


Lifton is Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Psychology, The City University of New York, where he was  Director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival.  He held the Foundations’ Fund Research Professorship of Psychiatry at Yale University for more than two decades.


He presented 30 minutes of an amazing documentary which is produced by 2 German producers who wanted to be sure to interview the man behind the book, The Nazi Doctors, in which 80 Nazi doctors were interviewed. Dr. Lifton spoke after the preview about his upcoming memoir, a look back at how he coped with the interviews. I also made some progress on the thesis, a professor in psychiatry at Mass General introduced himself after the talk to help me think through a questions I asked about how to handle cases in which the perpetrator is also the victim. I was very excited when leaving the event, having had the chance to sit on a bench after the talk with Dr. Lifton himself and the professor from Mass General to listen to great minds talk about incredibly difficult issues. After a long day, I was challenged to find the energy to kick into gear at the cocktail hour- but I rallied :) Have yet to follow up on the leads I am making on thesis interviews . . . one at a time!