A pioneer in the field of psychohistory, 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 Veterans.

Other books by Dr. Lifton include 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. 

Together with his mentor, Erik Erikson, 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. 

Lifton was married to the writer and adoption reformer Betty Jean Lifton from 1952 until her death in 2010. He has two children, Kenneth Lifton and Natasha Lifton, and four grandchildren.  

Born on May 16, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, Lifton enrolled at Cornell University at the age of 16 and graduated from New York Medical College in 1948. He interned at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn in 1948-49, and had his psychiatric residency at the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn from 1949-51. From 1951 to 1953 Lifton served as an Air Force Psychiatrist in Massachusetts, Japan, and Korea. 

Lifton’s avocation is that of a creating humorous bird cartoons, and has published two volumes, Birds and Psychobirds.

He lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and New York City. His partner is Nancy L. Rosenblum, Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government emerita at Harvard University.