ROBERT JAY LIFTON
May 16, 1926 – September 4, 2025
The New Press is deeply saddened to note the passing of psychiatrist, public intellectual, and award-winning author Robert Jay Lifton who died on September 4 at the age of 99.
A pioneer in the field of psychohistory, Dr. Lifton spent his career studying trauma, the psychological causes and effects of war, political violence, thought reform, and cult behavior. Dr. Lifton taught at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New York. He wrote and edited more than two dozen books, including the National Book Award winner Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, and the National Book Award finalist Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans.
The New Press is proud to have published three books by Dr. Lifton. His prescient The Climate Swerve (October 2017), which was longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing, provided a profound, hopeful, and timely call for an emerging new collective consciousness to combat climate change. Lifton’s Losing Reality (October 2019) proposed a radical idea: that the psychological relationship between extremist political movements and fanatical religious cults may be much closer than anyone thought. His final book Surviving Our Catastrophes (September 2023) drew on historical examples of “survivor power” and his life’s work to show readers how we can carry on and live meaningful lives even in the face of the tragic and the absurd.
In the epilogue to the paperback edition of Surviving Our Catastrophes (April 2025), published this spring, Lifton wrote:
“Throughout my work I have emphasized how much we human beings are meaning-hungry creatures. That is radically true for survivors of war, nuclear or conventional, or other extreme trauma. Any such meaning, to be convincing, must be based in factual truth. . . . To cope with all these catastrophes and counter the serial lying, we require every possible means of truth telling. The truth telling itself becomes an expression of activist resistance.”
Lifton was one of the most incisive thinkers of his generation. Throughout his long career Lifton bore witness, listened, and wrote. He once wrote, “For me, to be active in the world means to write about it.” He stared unflinchingly into history’s darkest moments and chronicled it all—shining a light on the undercurrent of human nature and hard truths that need to be faced.
Lifton’s work remains as timely as ever. His books will surely impact readers for generations to come.
Read more about Robert Jay Lifton’s life and career in remembrances in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Democracy Now!, and in a New York Times tribute by M. Gessen.
