First appeared in the Boston Globe.
Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an
Age of Fragmentation (Basic Books, $25.00, 262 pgs)
Over the course of his long and influential career as a
writer and student of the human psyche, Robert Jay Lifton has avoided detours,
sidetracks and secondary phenomenon. He has proceeded unerringly toward the
central lesions of the age — brainwashing, Vietnam, the nuclear threat, and
“darkest of all,” by his own accounting, the mentality of Nazi doctors.
